At Anavi Learning, it has been our constant endeavor to broaden the mind-space of our youth through multi-disciplinary reading and learning. We started a fortnightly newsletter, AnaVision (https://univadmithelp.com/newsletters) and have been developing a self-mentoring model (https://mentoring.univadmithelp.com) with this predominant thought. This was inspired by Charlie Munger’s “latticework of mental models” approach – you need to find and understand the core principles from many disciplines to make better decisions in all spheres of life. According to him, if you learn all the big ideas and how they interrelate, better and more rational thinking will naturally follow.

In fact, some fascinating examples of such multi-disciplinary thinking leading to great creativity and world-changing products include Steve Jobs ensuring that the Mac came with multiple fonts and typefaces because he had taken a calligraphy class in college, and Claude Shannon (father of the modern Information Age) combining philosophy with electrical engineering to transmit any information electronically. Research has also found that Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to have interests outside of their domain.

A new book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, takes this idea forward by providing excellent examples from many domains. As the title itself suggests, the crux of the book is that it takes a wide swathe of experiences and practices to remain on top of any domain for a long-time. Those meandering away and slowly finding their way back to the domain that they ultimately shine in, have generally shown more creativity making their reign on the top longer and more productive. While not taking away from the specialists, there are some domains like chess, golf, bridge, poker, playing music, accounting, surgery, firefighting, etc. where the environments are “kind” – patterns emerge and are more likely to repeat themselves, that specialists really have a head-start over generalists. But new experiments have shown that using machines with the computing power to discover these patterns effortlessly, allows generalists to better specialists in these environments too. The bottom-line – develop a multi-modal thinking process to survive in the new connected and automated world.

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