I kept reading, listening, talking myself about agility, flexibility, especially lately. Agility in learning means the need to be flexible, to learn a lot, obtaining a diverse set of abilities, sometimes in contradiction with one another, but also the capacity to unlearn some habits, behaviors, and learning others.
All of those make me visualize the person in the future as a mosaic. A colorful mosaic, built from different bits of knowledge, a variety of abilities, some in contradiction with each other. The most beautiful mosaic, the most balanced from the point of view of its color, style, individuality, could be the most appreciated, if we look from afar.
However, let’s not fool ourselves: on one hand, it is important to be more skillful, more adaptable, to know more from different fields. At the same time, it is essential to be very good, specialists in something. We cannot be everything for everyone, that would mean to be nothing for anyone at the same time. We cannot endlessly roll, like a stone in the water. For the rock to gather moss, to belong to one space, it is necessary to sit in one place. For us to become good in a field, to attain excellence, it is necessary to concentrate on something, to study, to go deeper into the subject.
The idea of flirting with everything, of developing as many abilities as we can, of doing everything and being, apparently, good at everything, hides the risk of superficiality. I would take a trivial example, from my company’s field:
Would you trust a trainer that pretends to know how to talk about everything? If they are not older than 50, do not have real experience in different fields, did not lead teams, I would have serious doubts. Of course, experience makes us capable of having conversations about a multitude of domains, however, this does not make us masters of a field.
The “dilettantes from before” mentioned by Alexandru Paleologu were people who had pretty good knowledge from a variety of fields, so that, in society, they could talk about art, history, politics, mythology, philosophy or others. The fact that we know that Modigliani existed does not automatically make us capable of a conversation where we would drop such a cultural reference. It is good to become like the dilettantes from before, at the same time maintaining a solid level of depth in 2-3 areas.Therefore, I propose we think about a few questions:
What new things have we learnt lately?
What topics could we have a conversation about, with ease?
What are we good at?
What do we regret not doing until now and what do we want to do?
What are our fears? That’s where some areas could lie, to be explored in the future, and developed.