When Exposing Yourself To New Interesting Things, Make It Closely Related To Your Core Skills
by max ~ August 24th, 2009. Filed under: Career, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Learning, Success.Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria.
The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new things that are interesting.
You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.
It becomes one of your core skills by being developing it enough to put you in the top 25% of people.
Personal Example:
Why do I watch so many TEDTalks then?
I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge. And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.
Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.