So try and live life and partake in all its fascets

Set your life up so that every day is an adventure.

love this quote

He obviously drew on varied experiences and interests but I'd say there's some irony in the fact we know of Heinlein because of his specialist career writing science fiction, he wasn't throwing in technical manuals, guides to horse husbandry or poetry anthologies

Heinlein was also in the US navy

I think you'll find most of us would do poorly at planning an invasion. The list seems bizarre and arbitrary.

With that particular example, he might have been thinking not so much of modern society with its division of labor but of Stone Age tribes. Or, for that matter, many of the indigenous peoples who used to live in what is now the United States.

That quote always felt way too extreme for me, like it's saying I should prioritize knowing how to repair a small engine I might never own or butcher a hog when I don't even eat meat, over skills I actually expect to need in the near future.

Everyone should probably have more skills than they do now, including some that aren't currently needed for most people, but I don't want to throw away specialization entirely, or nobody will be able to build satellites and cell phones, and people really will need to set bones without medical aid.

Some things are just really far outside of what a person expects to need, and everyone should probably pick a few of those, but I'm perfectly happy not knowing how a parser generator works or how to use a lathe I don't have space for. There's just too many skills to learn them all.

Then again, a rare few seem to be able to make real progress in a specialist field while also knowing a bunch of awesome skills and doing ninjutsu, but most people say "Yeah, that's why I have a job, to pay people to do that" sometimes and are fine with it.

But I go to events and do physical repair work, if I had to sit in an office of just all code all the time, maybe I'd have extreme views too, I've met a few people who were almost sad to watch, because they didn't seem to exist outside of code.

Tolstoi said something about this. Now he was talking about Jesus’ doctrine of “turning the other cheek“, and not to judge, I believe. And he says that that’s a very extremist position to take.

But he compares it with a man trying to swim across a river that has a very strong current. If that man wants to land at a particular spot on the other side, he needs to aim at a spot much further upstream. Only by aiming much further upstream does he least have a chance of reaching his spot.

Note that it also would not suffice to chose “pretend” that you’re aiming for the point further upstream. You actually do have to swim in that direction with all you’ve got. Otherwise you are going to be landing far downstream from where you intended to.

I think that Heinlein quote here is trying to do the same thing.

I like this analogy a lot, and hadn’t thought of it that way.

To me the quote also meant that knowing disparate things could lead to useful knowledge to the individual, even if they didn’t think so before.

A programmer learning how to fix an engine, despite not being interested in cars, may give them insights into how systems work that can be applied in their programming work

I’m not even sure he thought of it as a utilitarian thing. The answer to OP’s question might depend on whether you’re trying to solve for maximum monetary profit / social influence or for inner contentment. I think the Heinlein quote addresses the latter question. I mean, Bill Gates probably never cooked a meal in his life (I believe he said so somewhere).

I didn't think of that! Do average people commonly feel an inner disquiet over the fact they lack skills, or is the quote saying that learning skills will help with the vague mental unwellness people might have but don't know why?

For the most part I've always known, or at least thought Ive known, Why I'm Miserable, and the only skills that have a part in it are math and driving a car, and a few highly specialist things I wish I'd learned, like going into industrial controls.

I do know people who are uncomfortable being a specialist that couldn't function without industrial society as we know it, but the quote seems to paint it as a universal thing.