Follow one path long enough and you’ll become an expert, but you’ll also become incredibly boring.
That’s the counter intuitive conclusion I came to this week while I was digging into my email swipe file.
All the people I’ve followed for years have more than just “The One Thing” that they talk about, and they become much more interesting.
It also makes them better at their One Thing.
My last little side-quest is an example. I did a stand-up comedy course at a local pub, with a terrifying debut performance in front of about 50 people at the end.
I had no intention of this making my writing any better, I really just signed up because I was feeling in a rut and wanted to do something scary, but more sociable than sky-diving.
It’s definitely helped me come up with more “creative” ideas (really just smashing a couple of other ideas together.). It had an unexpected bonus that I met a bunch of people with similar weird ways of looking at the world.
Turns out the headline act lives in my village so now I’m officially second funniest man in Thames Ditton.
Every time I’ve tried learning something new or travelling somewhere off the beaten path I’ve found something that makes my day-to-day better.
I know from working with a few rapid learning and memory experts that the brain lives off these connections and that if you don’t bring in enough new stimulus, the brain stops growing.
I’m kind of fascinated by skill acquisition, and why some people have it and some don’t.
If you’re interested in this at all, I really recommend Time Ferris’ The Four Hour Chef. On the face of it, it’s about learning to cook, but scratch below the surface and it’s about how to acquire skills quickly by asking the right questions of the top players in any field.
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen some of my stumbling attempts to learn to code something other than WordPress sites. Most of it has nothing to do with work, but I’ve already built a couple of tools that I could put to work to build email lists.
Hopefully I’ll share one next week if it’s ready.
Until then, what are you learning that’s not part of your “day job” and how are you learning it?
