His parents were Danish, hers Swedish. By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities. Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year. He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week. He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it. We'd sit in his yard and listen. Some were short, some took a half hour. They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places. They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections. Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.
My sister is a visual storyteller. It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder. She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize. I suspect my Dad was a big influence. He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions. He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple. Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad.
A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range). He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:
Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:
“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”
Raducanu added this:
“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”
Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing. Epstein goes into depth in both of his books. Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs. These people have built the tools they need to think creatively. They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.
I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again. I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12. I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life. Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices. The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular). One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.
I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects. Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work. They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth. There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia. Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.
Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects. Many of you have your own diverse lists. My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports. Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you! It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later. You find yourself becoming more creative with age. Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres. Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or... the list goes on and on...
Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.
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