Always follow your passions. One day — you won’t ever be able to predict when — what you learn by doing so will be exactly what you need most

One of the commonest — but least sensible — questions people pose about anything you simply enjoy doing is: “What use is it?” The implication is clear: if you aren’t spending your “free” time in some worthy or serious pursuit, you’re likely wasting it. It’s another aspect of the puritanism that pervades so much workplace thinking. Everything has to be useful. Doing anything “just for fun” cannot be the mark of a “winner.”

This is badly wide of the mark. Serendipity is not only an essential input to creative thinking, it often serves up unexpected benefits elsewhere. There’s no way of knowing in advance precisely how — and whether — anything you learn or become interested in will benefit you. Yet sometimes you find yourself needing idea or technique and there it is; right from an area of interest or learning you undertook years ago with no thought it would ever be useful.

Learning, skills, and expertise are never wasted

I’ve proved that to myself many times. I am always finding past learning helpful — even things from areas that seem of no practical benefit to my working life.

Their commonest use is to spark creative thoughts and possibilities. Indeed, there’s a good argument almost the whole of creativity is linking ideas that haven’t been linked that way before.

When people say they’re “out of ideas” or they’ve “got a creative block,” what they mean is their minds have run out of fuel. Learning supplies that fuel. The richer your experiences, the more creative and useful the links you’ll be able to make between them; and the more likely you’ll be able to find the insight you need in some future tight spot.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an irrelevant skill

I’m a birder: a bird-watcher. Pretty useless, eh? Not at all. Let me prove it to you.

Birders use a term called “GISS.” It stands for “general impression, size, and shape.” I believe it was coined in World War II to explain the approach pilots learned to take to distinguish between enemy aircraft and friendly ones. You only got a split second to decide whether to attack or get out of the way — fast.

Nowadays, birders use “GISS” as a primary tool to identify a flying bird from a single glimpse. It works because you develop experience in what common birds look like. You might imagine that expert birders would get bored with seeing common birds. Not a bit of it. The better they are at gaining a “feel” for the “general impression, size, and shape” of the commonest birds around, the easier it will be to recognize in an instant when the bird isn’t a common one.

The more birding you do, the better you become at using “GISS.” True experts astonish novices by casually glancing at a distant bird and saying “Broad-winged Hawk” (or, where I live, “Harris’s Hawk”) in a bored voice. It’s not BS. They’ll be right 99.9% of the time. Why does it matter? Using “GISS” helps you focus on unusual birds and “filter them out” from the common ones all around them.

What have I been able to link this to in my business life?

Using “GISS” allows birders to put their attention where it matters. They don’t get distracted by common birds and miss the rarity among them. That’s a great trick for managers too: using your experience to “filter out” unimportant data and snap right to the one or two things that are unusual and worthy of attention.

How do you develop such a skill? You do it as birders do: by spending time looking slowly and carefully at common issues until you can recognize them at the merest glance. Good birders never say watching any birds is a waste of time. They do it partly from their love of birds and partly to tune their capacity to spot rarities by “GISS.”

By knowing about “GISS” I’ve also been able to understand you don’t need to know all about a situation in detail to see it for what it is and start work right away to deal with it. A quick glance at its “GISS” is often enough.

How much use would that have been in dealing, say, with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Suppose government agencies had taken a quick look, grasped the essentials of the problem, and started on a relevant relief effort well before knowing all the details. Maybe thousands of people could have been saved days and weeks of misery, followed by years of living in trailers.

There are other links as well — more than you could ever guess at the time

Birding has taught me the importance of context (”habitat” in birding terms). Understanding habitat lets you know where to look for birds. Experienced birders see more than novices mostly because they know where to look. Novices stare about themselves wildly and claim they can’t see a single bird. Experts only look where birds are most likely to be.

It also helps you identify a species. If you think you see a Cactus Wren in New Jersey, think again. They are never found there. If you think you see — as I did last year — a Groove-billed Ani in Arizona, check very carefully. Only six or seven have been found there since records began. I did check, and took photographs, so I knew I could prove what was highly unlikely in that context.

Expert birders know to rely on peripheral vision, because it’s great at picking up movement over a large area. In the same way, experienced managers know where to look to understand what’s truly important in their business — and use the broad span of peripheral management vision to alert themselves immediately to any changes needing attention.

Always follow your passions. Learn all you can about anything that interests you. Never mind if it’s “useful” or “relevant.” It’s all relevant. If you’re passionate about cats, or cars, or canyons, learn all you can about them. If you love hiking, learn all you can about the sport and the places you hike through. Keep adding to your learning. One day — you won’t be able to predict when, so don’t worry about it — it’ll be exactly what you need the most.

[tag]learning,career development,business skills,management skills,expertise,spotting problems in advance,career advancement,management know-how,serendipity,becoming an expert,creativity,success[/tags]