Think Like da Vinci
There’s that joke about graduate school where one learns more and more about less and less until eventually the student knows everything about nothing.
Now consider the principles of Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, as he attributes much of his career success to the development of a “talent stack” i.e. the strategic layering of skills that may not be world-class individually, but together create a rare and marketable combination e.g. someone with moderate coding, public speaking, and design skills might be far more effective in product management than any expert in one field alone.
In essence, the benefits of talent stack integration include enhanced career flexibility and development of a unique personal brand that allow for broader problem-solving and creative solutions. It may also be the key to making one generally more interesting.
No one needs to have told that to Leonardo da Vinci, probably history’s ultimate renaissance man and the focus of our discussion piece (click: Renaissance Worker). Da Vinci mastered the synthesis between unrelated domains: he studied optics to paint better eyes; dissected hearts to understand emotional expression; watched birds to design machines. The very qualities that might today deem him to have been suffering from an ADHD affliction – his reported failure to complete most projects, easy distraction by some new field of study, and even his vast smorgasbord of interests – may now be seen as the genius of compound knowledge.
The challenge today lies in siloed expertise. Hey, you’re an engineer. Or a musician. Or accountant. Or an artist. Or doctor. Stay in your lane. Concentrate on getting better at what you’re already good at, says the marketplace. Specialization is the key, that grad school phenomenon.
The looming prospect of artificial intelligence only heightens the limitation of such a linear approach. AI has already demonstrated its potential to supplant virtually any stand-alone discipline, certainly any task that is or could be mediated in the digital world, even music and art.
What’s left as uniquely human might be da Vinci’s genius, the synthesis among unrelated domains. We may speculate on what they might be, how long they will last, and how best to prepare for the likely reckoning. One vocation that comes immediately to mind is architecture, the ultimate blend of aesthetics and engineering. Even there, one can only speculate on AI’s eventual encroachment on form and function.
Perhaps embrace that graduate program called life, whether that be the Highland community or elsewhere, as you round out the sharp edges of an otherwise linear mindset.
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