This week, someone gave me this proverbial Confucius advice in relation to a social media strategy: 'The man who chases two rabbits catches neither.' It's advice I have heard and given a lot in my personal and professional life: focus, pick one thing, don't scatter your energy if you want to achieve a goal.
Later, I started thinking about this proverb in a broader sense. Historically, this made a lot of sense, because it turned out often to be true, given the time, effort, and mastery required to achieve a goal.
Our fascination with modern and historical polymaths -- Musk, Jobs, da Vinci, Franklin -- reinforces this belief. Being at the top 1% of anything, let alone in multiple disciplines, is billion-dollar-winning-lottery-ticket unlikely.
But now, because of AI, outputs like research, models, and even creative arts that used to take time and deep skill can now be compressed into seconds and minutes. The constraint that made the two-rabbit problem real is changing. Whether the proverb still holds -- and in what domains -- is a genuinely open question.