I want to add to the previous post, Focus, after getting a formative piece of wisdom from my brilliant friend and mentor. He is originally from Nigeria and has a powerful life story that he humbly hides behind an utterly selfless and kind demeanor. He's a Harvard-educated M.D. and Ph.D. neurosurgeon turned neuroradiologist in SF. His intentional advice and unintentional guidance have helped me to enhance my way of thinking, extend my mind, and further embrace my innate curiosity. This particular piece of advice directly relates to my cognitive dissonance I reflected on in the Focus post.
He gave me Homo Deus, a book I'm currently reading which is the sequel to my favorite book, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Inside the cover, he wrote a note:
"Kori, Maintain a passion for learning...someday you may come to realize that all knowledge is one."
I later asked him what he meant by "all knowledge is one" and he answered in the following beautifully worded and insightful prose:
"Reflect on that question ten years hence…
Networking is a fundamental operating principle of the human brain. All knowledge within the brain is based on networking. Thus, any one piece of information can be potentially linked with any other. Indeed, the unconscious brain operates on this principle all the time, and creativity can merely be thought of as the formation of novel original linkages.
Thus, rather than training oneself in narrow specialties, one should therefore train oneself to think in different ways about knowledge and how it should be used.
Philosophers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas observed centuries ago that knowledge is a unity with everything potentially connected with everything else..."
So maybe my unrelenting thirst for knowledge and trying new things truly is better than focusing on one specialty or skill. If you think of it in relation to the way our brains work, I'm adding novel connections that I didn't have and strengthening ones that I do have - growing new branches and thickening old branches. My mentor's point is that having a more diverse network of linkages allows for easier lightbulb moments and bursts of creativity.