Being a generalist certainly makes cocktail parties more interesting. Being a little good at everything makes you more employable as well, you don't get locked into 1 niche. The T-shaped person is the ideal. You should be great at 1 thing and decent at many other things, but always keep the T-shape. Keep an identity to center your varied experiences around. It will keep the main thing and the auxiliary things interesting in tandem.
Specialists are much more interesting to talk to than generalists because I find that usually "generalist" means "someone who knows everything at a surface level", whereas specialists tend to have deep domain knowledge.
It takes a long time to get truly skilled in something. What we call an expert is really what a reasonably intelligent person can be expected to learn about a single topic within a lifetime. The gains in one area compound on themself. Given that these gains compound, you can't learn 2 things half as well. So the T-shape represents the constraint that you only have a shot at becoming an expert at 1 thing. Spend 80% of your time on that and 20% on the rest.
The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) also implies that you only need to read a handful of books on a single subject to know more about it than most people. The knowledge gains become marginal unless you focus most of your time on it. So the things that you find interesting that aren't your main thing, just "learn the ropes" and move on back to your area of expertise. That's the most efficient traversal of the Sum of Human Knowledge: Familiarize yourself with the lay of the land, then focus most of your energy on some place that hasn't been mapped yet.
> you only need to read a handful of books on a single subject to know more about it than most people.
It's easier than that! Just reading (in full) the Wikipedia article about something you probably makes you more knowledgeable than 90% of the general population. Reading a whole book about it -- maybe 99%.
