Intellectual breadth
I've started to reread Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author was writing about us having intellectual breadth but not depth, in essence the river runs wide, but not deep. It feels like it's worse today than ever. There's more and more to know, or at least so it seems, and a never ending stream of information.
My line of work is IT, and that never stops changing, there's always more to learn. I've found that the only way to cope is to focus on the strictly relevant information, and simply keep the rest as notes. I've also been experimenting with mind mapping software, with some success.
I've also found you can go a long way by just getting your basics right, without lots of complication. For example with computer security, it's a very big and complex field, but a bit of attention to your basic setup and a few basic do's and dont's and you're quite well placed without needing a huge breadth of learning. Much easier!
3 comments:
Ah, good book! I enjoyed it when I read it, I even went on to read the sequel, called "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals".. which also had some great ideas in.
It is true that we can skim the surface, float from one thing to the next and never get any depth. I'm one of those people, I dabble in something, then move on to new things. It's obvious that, for example, in a limited amount of time, you could taste a bit of each martial art, or stick with one and become very adept.
However, the beauty of it is, there's often overlap, and there's circular learning that takes place. Learning one martial art might suddenly help you to realize something about another. And this is true of anything. I'm this way with nibbling at the spiritual buffet, going from one religion/perspective to the next, all the while learning deeper insights, where one explains something else and deepens my understanding.
The key, of course, is to go with what you enjoy and find interesting, and what will give you the greatest foundation and the greatest usefulness to time-expended ratio.
As you've hinted at there, it's ok to become an expert at something if that's what you want to devote yourself to, but it'll always be to the exclusion of other things.
I found a liberal-arts education gives me a completely different perspective on generalized and specialized learning. Being a generalist is looked down on for the most part, in just about any field, but consider one like literature, and the difference between someone who is well- but not deeply-read, and someone who focuaes almost entirely on one author/genre/period, becomeing an expert in that area. Neither is bad in and of itself, but I know which one I would rather have had teach me something like "Introduction to Literature" way back when!
I feel that in the beginning a generalist approach works well, but as I've grown older, especially in IT, I've found that it's easier to just focus on getting the basics right and not trying to know everything, there's too much to know.
"One head does not consume all knowledge" - Maasai proverb.
Then again, I haven't had a day off since last year, maybe I just need a holiday!
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