I’ve spent much of my life doing that. My interests have taken me into engineering, law, entertainment, art, business, and a good many subjects that never became professions. Some of those pursuits eventually connected in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Others remained interests, and I enjoyed them just as much.
What concerns me is how easily we lose that willingness to explore once we become established in our work.
When Experience Starts Limiting Curiosity
The longer you work in a profession, the better you become at deciding what deserves your attention. Experience teaches you where to concentrate, which information matters, and what you can safely ignore. Without those filters, you could spend your entire day chasing things that have little to do with the work you need to accomplish.
I depend on those filters as much as anyone. The problem begins when they start making decisions they were never intended to make.
You come across an unfamiliar subject and dismiss it because it doesn’t relate to your job. Someone suggests a class, but you can’t imagine when you’d use what it teaches. A book catches your interest, yet you put it aside because you already have a stack of professional reading waiting for you.
Each decision makes sense on its own. Taken together, however, they can gradually narrow what you’re willing to learn.
Before long, you’re reading the same kinds of material, talking to people who approach problems much as you do, and reinforcing the knowledge that made you successful in the first place.
There’s nothing wrong with becoming an expert. I certainly want the people advising me to know their business. But expertise shouldn’t become a reason to stop being interested in everything else.
I’ve noticed that some of the most useful connections I’ve made came from subjects I pursued without any professional objective. Had I insisted on knowing their practical value before learning them, I would have missed quite a bit.
What Painting and Performance Taught Me
Painting is a good example. When I’m working on a portrait, I spend a great deal of time studying how the different parts relate to one another. A small change in tone can affect the way an entire face appears. A feature that looks correct on its own may be wrong when I consider it alongside everything else.
You can spend hours getting the details right and still end up with a portrait that doesn’t work. Eventually, you have to stop examining individual features and look at the whole picture.
I’ve found myself doing much the same thing when working through complicated decisions. The facts may be correct, the individual recommendations may make sense, and each person involved may understand their responsibilities. Yet something still doesn’t fit. Looking at the relationships among those pieces often tells me more than another examination of each one.
I didn’t learn to paint because I wanted to improve my legal or advisory work. I paint because I enjoy painting. The connection came later.
Entertainment gave me another education I never expected to use in quite so many places. When you’re performing, you learn quickly that what you intend to communicate and what an audience actually receives can be two very different things.
You have to watch people.
Pay attention to their reactions, their timing, and what they do when they aren’t saying anything. After years on stage, those habits became part of how I listen and observe.
They’ve served me well in courtrooms, negotiations, and conversations with executives. I wasn’t studying leadership when I developed them. I was trying to become a better performer.
I wouldn’t suggest that painting makes someone qualified to practice law or that performing on stage prepares anyone to run a company. Those jobs demand their own expertise. But the habits you develop in one part of your life can help you recognize something important in another.
You may not even realize you’re carrying them with you until a problem gives you a reason to use them.
That becomes especially useful when you’re working with people who see a problem from different professional backgrounds. The engineer sees what will work, the lawyer sees the risk, and the person running operations sees what it will take to get the job done. All three may be right, yet a decision can still go wrong because no one considered how those answers affect one another. When you’re curious about work beyond your own specialty, you’re better able to notice what’s missing between those perspectives and bring the pieces together before the decision is made.
Learning Without Demanding a Return
There’s a tendency to evaluate learning by what it will help us accomplish. We take courses to advance our careers, read books to improve our work, and attend programs because we expect to leave with something useful.
I understand that approach. Time matters, and professional development should produce results. But I don’t think every interest needs to justify itself on those terms.
Sometimes you should learn something simply because it interests you.
In Hold the Horizon™, I describe a practice called Learn at the Edges. It encourages us to keep learning beyond the boundaries of our regular work and to connect what we discover with what we already know.
The process is straightforward: read, relate, apply, teach. Take in an idea, consider where it might connect, try it when appropriate, and share what you’ve learned.
I don’t mean that every book needs to produce a business lesson or that every hobby deserves a place in your leadership philosophy. That would take much of the pleasure out of learning.
What matters is remaining open to connections when they appear.
An idea from an unfamiliar field may cause you to question an assumption you’ve made for years. Learning a new skill might expose a weakness in the way you approach an old problem. Someone with an entirely different background may help you recognize something you’ve overlooked.
Of course, borrowing an idea doesn’t automatically make it a good one. You still have to test it against the circumstances and the people who understand the work. But you can’t consider an approach you’ve never encountered.
That’s where curiosity begins to have practical value, even when practical value wasn’t the reason you pursued it.
Give Yourself Something New to Work With
I don’t think we need another elaborate personal development plan to become more curious. Most of us already have subjects we’ve wanted to explore and activities we’ve considered trying. We’ve simply become very good at explaining why we don’t have the time.
Maybe there’s a book you’ve been meaning to read that has nothing to do with your profession. Perhaps you’ve wanted to learn an instrument, study history, paint, work with your hands, or understand how something works.
You don’t have to know where any of it will lead.
When I look back at the different things I’ve learned, I can see connections that weren’t apparent when I started. I also see plenty of interests that never produced a professional advantage. I don’t regret those, either.
What I would regret is having passed them by because somebody convinced me they weren’t useful.
The typing course is a small example, but it reminds me of something I’ve come to believe about learning. We are often poor judges of which knowledge will matter to us later. We make those judgments based on the work we know today, even though our responsibilities, circumstances, and problems will change.
That’s a good reason to be careful about what we dismiss.
The next time you find yourself interested in something outside your usual work, pay attention to the reason you’re talking yourself out of it. If the only objection is that you can’t see how it will be useful, you may be asking the wrong question.
Some of the most useful things I’ve learned never came with a reason I could put into a professional development plan. Had I demanded one, I would have walked right past them.