Time and time again, I find myself amidst highly qualified individuals. Take the previous weekend for example. We were hanging out at a cafe after lunch. Present there were a panel highly trained individuals whose combine knowledge would span the disciplines of psychology, dietetics, mechanics, geoscience, econometrics, and multimedia (and that’s just counting the formal paper certificate stuff).
What puzzles me is how little we get to converse about the very things that we invest most of our waking hours working on.
After asking around for a bit, it came down to an infinite number of variations circling around two main themes:
- I don’t think it’s interesting.
- I don’t think anyone else is interested.
Responding to 1, I’d suggest that one would seriously need to reconsider the career that one has chosen. It’s one thing to attempt to objectively gauge the interesting-ness of a particular line of work; it is a completely different matter for one to give five seventh’s of ones adult life to something that bears no interest even to its beholder.
As for theme number 2, very few of us have cultivated the skills required to engaging domains of knowledge beyond what we are accustomed to, myself included. In other words, it is not your fault, but you could try cultivating an interest in what others are working on.
I don’t know how such a skill would be cultivated, I sure wasn’t taught any of this in all my years in the education system, but I’m going to learn to be interested, and I’m going to try and seize every chance to celebrate the abundance of expertise around me.