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RE: The Importance of Knowing a Little Bit About Everything

in #knowledge7 years ago (edited)

Very true. In a presentation I gave just over a year ago about "21-century skills", I had multi disciplinarity as one of them. And for a couple of reasons. Many people seem to think that in the age of the internet you don't need to know facts, but instead only need understanding as you can always look facts up. However, I think that since innovation often boils down to combining existing sets of knowledge in a new and unique way, this can only be achieved through being multidisciplinary. You can't imagine new solutions, or synergies, from a field you're not familiar with. So although you may not master everything, you can still be literate about almost everything.

Anyways, for roughly 6 years I've had a simple rule to spend 30 minutes every day learning something new, on a topic where I have no prior knowledge. (It usually boils down to watching a random TED-talk followed by some google searches on parts of it I found interesting). Just to keep my ability to learn and re-learn alive.

As one of my favourite quotes goes:

I have an article on this subject in the loop myself. Hope to have it up sometime next week.