When I lived in Japan, I had a conversation with an Austrian friend who has lived in Japan for 40 years. The conversation started when I walked into his house and said, “hey, you have a reishi mushroom! Did you find it around here?” Guido, my friend, said, “Oh, you mean the ganoderma? What did you call it?” Ganoderma is what a more serious mycologist refers to that mushroom. Reishi is one of the common names, apparently. I am no mycologist but I like mushrooms and have picked up a few tidbits of knowledge over the years.
The conversation that ensued was not about mushrooms. It was about having a wide range of interests and knowledge. More specifically, it was about the decline of people who know a substantial amount about a lot of things.
The two of us have spent many hours talking about random things. He confided that these types of conversations with his Japanese friends were few and far between. I suspect that this is common across cultures.
His comment points to a broader trend. That trend is the tendency (maybe the need) to specialize. Many people lament that this specialization is leading to the downfall of education as students and teachers are forced to specialize in testing and not in thinking. Others fear that the same problem is evident in health care as each specialist works more and more within their narrow band of knowledge and fails to see the connections to the broader health picture. The influx of one issue politicians, unwilling to think in broad terms, is my personal pet peeve. Specialists are everywhere. That’s a good thing and maybe a less than ideal thing as well.
All of us were generalists at one time. Kids are the ultimate generalists. They are interested in everything. Whatever they come across, they want to know it completely. They touch, taste, put in an ear, drool on, vomit all over, and if a boy, break everything. The result is they really know the world around them.
This boundless curiosity and energy wanes over time. Eventually, each choice to focus more diligently on one thing at the expense of another adds up and we wake up one day and realize (or don’t realize) that we used to be a lot more well rounded.
Or, we realize that we still have the heart of a generalist but that our knowledge is out of date.
It is a natural progression. As we get on with our careers and lives, we have less time to roam wildly in search of knowledge. The opportunities to taste inanimate objects and put them inner ears become fewer and fewer. Eventually, family responsibilities, career, energy levels, money and whatever else force us to pick our battles and our pursuits.
It’s a battle I have noticed that I need to pay attention to more and more every year.
One of the things that is part of my yearly routine is try to pick something new to dig deeply into for the year. Some things, health and wellness, for instance, are things I never stop learning about. Other areas I have let slide. My knowledge of the stock market is one of those. For an entire year I read books about different ideas to evaluate stocks and how much to allocate to what areas and on and on and on. At some point I reached a level where I was comfortable and I stopped learning. I can still have conversations about stocks and investing but this year I realized that I am ready for an update. Knowledge that isn’t kept up to date becomes like stale, moldy bread. Yes, it is still bread but it is going to do you much good. It might even be bad for you.
My term for having my general knowledge base up to date is “cutting edge generalist.” We become this type of person when we keep up with at least some of what’s new in diverse in our fields of general interest. We need more cutting edge generalists, even even among the specialists. Maybe, especially among specialists.
Until a certain level of education, schools and life turn out generalists. That is a great thing. Being exposed to a broad range of knowledge and experiences shows us how vast and potentially awesome life is. It’s not so awesome that we start letting some of the general knowledge become outdated. When that happens, we become “generally outdated” and nobody wants to talk to us at parties and we begin to believe the weather app on our phones is a brilliant topic for conversation.
Does that mean that mean that we have to spend all our free time studying and being ignorant of the weather forecast? Not necessarily. Studying is an option. So is spending time with people who are a step or to two or ten more up to date or have thought more deeply on a topic. Watching a documentary, taking a class or subscribing to a cool magazine about the topic works too. The world is full of quality edutainment.
Even going to the magazine store (if you can still find one) and thumbing through magazines and perusing the new books available can do the job. There is always the library. Podcasts and blogs are an awesome way to keep up and maybe even expand into new areas. The people who create these blogs and podcasts are often on the cutting edge of what they do and it is their passion to learn it and present it to us, the aspiring cutting edge generalists, in language that we can understand. Take advantage of it.
Be a generalist and be the best kind, cutting edge. It’s good for you and good for others. It’s good for the world too. I challenge you to do something to keep up to speed, or get back up to speed, in an area of interest. Don’t make it hard to do. Just do it and enjoy it.
The conversation that ensued was not about mushrooms. It was about having a wide range of interests and knowledge. More specifically, it was about the decline of people who know a substantial amount about a lot of things.
The two of us have spent many hours talking about random things. He confided that these types of conversations with his Japanese friends were few and far between. I suspect that this is common across cultures.
His comment points to a broader trend. That trend is the tendency (maybe the need) to specialize. Many people lament that this specialization is leading to the downfall of education as students and teachers are forced to specialize in testing and not in thinking. Others fear that the same problem is evident in health care as each specialist works more and more within their narrow band of knowledge and fails to see the connections to the broader health picture. The influx of one issue politicians, unwilling to think in broad terms, is my personal pet peeve. Specialists are everywhere. That’s a good thing and maybe a less than ideal thing as well.
All of us were generalists at one time. Kids are the ultimate generalists. They are interested in everything. Whatever they come across, they want to know it completely. They touch, taste, put in an ear, drool on, vomit all over, and if a boy, break everything. The result is they really know the world around them.
This boundless curiosity and energy wanes over time. Eventually, each choice to focus more diligently on one thing at the expense of another adds up and we wake up one day and realize (or don’t realize) that we used to be a lot more well rounded.
Or, we realize that we still have the heart of a generalist but that our knowledge is out of date.
It is a natural progression. As we get on with our careers and lives, we have less time to roam wildly in search of knowledge. The opportunities to taste inanimate objects and put them inner ears become fewer and fewer. Eventually, family responsibilities, career, energy levels, money and whatever else force us to pick our battles and our pursuits.
It’s a battle I have noticed that I need to pay attention to more and more every year.
One of the things that is part of my yearly routine is try to pick something new to dig deeply into for the year. Some things, health and wellness, for instance, are things I never stop learning about. Other areas I have let slide. My knowledge of the stock market is one of those. For an entire year I read books about different ideas to evaluate stocks and how much to allocate to what areas and on and on and on. At some point I reached a level where I was comfortable and I stopped learning. I can still have conversations about stocks and investing but this year I realized that I am ready for an update. Knowledge that isn’t kept up to date becomes like stale, moldy bread. Yes, it is still bread but it is going to do you much good. It might even be bad for you.
My term for having my general knowledge base up to date is “cutting edge generalist.” We become this type of person when we keep up with at least some of what’s new in diverse in our fields of general interest. We need more cutting edge generalists, even even among the specialists. Maybe, especially among specialists.
Until a certain level of education, schools and life turn out generalists. That is a great thing. Being exposed to a broad range of knowledge and experiences shows us how vast and potentially awesome life is. It’s not so awesome that we start letting some of the general knowledge become outdated. When that happens, we become “generally outdated” and nobody wants to talk to us at parties and we begin to believe the weather app on our phones is a brilliant topic for conversation.
Does that mean that mean that we have to spend all our free time studying and being ignorant of the weather forecast? Not necessarily. Studying is an option. So is spending time with people who are a step or to two or ten more up to date or have thought more deeply on a topic. Watching a documentary, taking a class or subscribing to a cool magazine about the topic works too. The world is full of quality edutainment.
Even going to the magazine store (if you can still find one) and thumbing through magazines and perusing the new books available can do the job. There is always the library. Podcasts and blogs are an awesome way to keep up and maybe even expand into new areas. The people who create these blogs and podcasts are often on the cutting edge of what they do and it is their passion to learn it and present it to us, the aspiring cutting edge generalists, in language that we can understand. Take advantage of it.
Be a generalist and be the best kind, cutting edge. It’s good for you and good for others. It’s good for the world too. I challenge you to do something to keep up to speed, or get back up to speed, in an area of interest. Don’t make it hard to do. Just do it and enjoy it.
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