Serendipity is not only an essential input to creative thinking, it often serves up unexpected benefits elsewhere. There’s no way of knowing in advance precisely how — and whether — anything you learn or become interested in will benefit you. Yet sometimes you find yourself needing idea or technique and there it is; right from an area of interest or learning you undertook years ago with no thought it would ever be useful.
And I especially like this part:
Learn all you can about anything that interests you. Never mind if it’s “useful” or “relevant.” It’s all relevant. If you’re passionate about cats, or cars, or canyons, learn all you can about them. If you love hiking, learn all you can about the sport and the places you hike through. Keep adding to your learning. One day — you won’t be able to predict when, so don’t worry about it — it’ll be exactly what you need the most.
(The whole article is worth reading, I just figured I'd share a few quotes here, as someone who has gotten a ton of unexpected benefit from simply being fascinated with things).
5 comments:
That's a great point. Reminds me a little of my father, who has a high level education in a specific field dealing with literary theory, but has a kaleidescope of skills that ranges from electric wiring to cataloging museum exhibits to interviewing to webmaster to designing props to teaching. And in every one of his jobs he's found a way to employ virtually all those skills in some fashion or another at least once (his employers love him).
It actually helps reassure me that my childhood wasn't entirely without purpose. ^__~
I do agree about learning everything you can about what interests you. I do that all the time. I get totally obsessed with something and read everything I can and totally exhaust it and then move on. Sometimes it seems like a waste but them later something happens and I realize I learned it for a reason. I see this in my daughter as well which is why I want to provide her with everything I can that has to do with any current interest she has.
Eh, I disagree. Although it's good to know about a wide range of areas, some knowledge is truly more useful and relevant than other knowledge. Saying "all skills are equally relevant, do whatever you want", is sort of a cop out. Pragmatically, it's best to study what you like because *you'd be bored if you didn't*. But if studying anything was equally interesting, then clearly some skills would be more relevant than others.
Anissimov: The skills you use to learn or study something are often repeated from field to field--one often uses reading skills, problem solving skills, etc. (I sound like a 7th grade math book XP blech!) again and again regardless of what field has captured your interest. The easier it is for that field to expand into other genres (ie computer games, rhetoric, whatever it happens to be) the more skills you are likely to develop in your pursuit of whatever interest it is.
For example, my brother absolutely loves those (admittedly, rather trashy) japanese TV animes like Pokemon or Yu-gioh!, and plays the games, watches the stories, reads the mangas, you name it. He's planning on studying Japanese, and beyond that he has developed reasonably good logical skills through all the time he spends playing the card games.
A rather low-level example, but a demonstrative one none the less.
Michael A: I think you missed the point of the article completely. The author was not saying "do whatever you want" in the sense of "just follow your hedonistic whims in all areas of life" -- he was simply noting that the path to achieving longer-term goals isn't always perfectly linear, and that sometimes you can end up learning things you didn't necessarily expect to learn in the process of following your interests.
Additionally, he (the author of the linked article) was trying not to propose a Total Philosophy Of Life(TM), just to make a suggestion about a particular area of life where people might want to sit up and take note of their assumptions. And there are a lot of people who tend to assume that the means to achieving particular goals are far more limited than they actually are.
I agree that when you're dealing with a more objective, physical, mechanical goal (like, "Predict the rotational angle of the moon relative to your own geographical location on Earth 2.3 months from now" or "Build a prosthetic leg suitable for an elephant"), it is frequently necessary to restrict your methods for achieving this goal within fairly narrow parameters. E.g., spending a lot of time reading IMDB biographies of your favorite actors isn't likely to shed much light on lunar position calculation or the construction of prosthetic elephant legs -- and I doubt anyone could reasonably argue otherwise.
However, when your goal is more general -- perhaps along the lines of, "I want to access activities and pursuits that both challenge me and make me happy", or "I want to become a better artist", or "I want to help others", or "I want to gain skills that I can use at a future job" -- there's a lot more room for serendipity and the playful exploration of life that tends to invite it.
Since the author quoted above writes regularly on topics pertaining to such things as work/life balance, productivity, employee/employer communication, etc., it's pretty likely that he's referring to the second type of goal noted above. He even provides a personal example of how his birdwatching hobby ended up teaching him lessons about context and situation-appraisal that he was able to employ in the business world.
Maybe I should do a post listing a whole bunch of things I've learned in the context of "fun" that have ended up being useful subsequently; perhaps that would make the relevance of the quoted article more apparent. Obviously in my cursory quoting of the article I failed to include enough in the way of disclaimers about not taking its advice to the absolute extreme in which even spending 10 years lying stoned on the couch eating Doritos and reading Britney Spears Digest would be considered a "valuable learning experience". I have a bad habit of assuming that other people will automatically mentally edit out the same extreme scenarios that I do, and I really ought to have learned my lesson by now.
(Also: What kakalina said. She seems to have gotten the main point of the article in the same sense that I did.)
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