It just suddenly dawned on me that the world of finance is so broad and vast that it's impossible to know everything in it. From valuation to trading to economics, math, fractal patterns, statistics, programming etc.
It feels terribly overwhelming and being a perfectionist I can't seem to embrace the fact that I don't know everything there is to know about finance and my job. Any similar thoughts?
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I feel similarly in regards to the "too overwhelming for a perfectionist" thing haha. But that could be the case with anything - medicine, law, engineering - and on top of that new things are being added in all the time. Don't really care for the stats/programming aspects of finance, but I guess the thing to do is just find one thing you like/are good at and excel in that particular area while having a solid, albeit more general understanding of the rest.
to be successful you don't have to be a jack of all trades, but a master of one.
I'm happy for you that you have made that realization. There is a misconception by many outsiders that those involved finance must/should know ALL of finance while there are those involved in finance that pretend they know ALL of finance. The former is naive and the latter is a liar. From years of training and experience as well as attempts to learn new theoretical and practitioner research, I have knowledge across a very broad range of finance topics (e.g., theoretical finance, applied finance, quant finance, programming, investments, corporate finance, and asset pricing), but I NEVER claim that I know anywhere close to all of finance.
Finance is a relatively young field (compare this with other fields like math and even economics). Too many new things come up. Sadly, many of these new ideas are garbage (also a function of cheap computing power and data mining) but without knowledge of old finance stuff you cannot determine which of the new developments are useful and which are not.
As you move up the ladder, knowing what questions to ask is more important than knowing the answers.
Indeed, how does one choose what to focus on when he doesn't know enough to make a decision.
Chicken and egg problem imo. Tough call
Don't start investing, your head will explode
Investing game learning curve is fucking steep. I only recently don't feel like a fucking idiot when analyzing companies.
Where do I start bro? I feel like an idiot already.
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