I follow a few people on Substack, and by chance, I came across this the other day, from The Career Archetypes by Joel Uili:

It stopped me in my tracks. It so perfectly describes me. It makes me feel better about my seemingly random and all over the place résumé. I spent my 20s travelling and learning, but not focused on anything like a linear career path. The last 20 years of my life have been a smorgasbord of variety.

This description makes me feel less wrong when I meet people who can’t follow my trains of thought, or keep up with the connections I’m able to make between seemingly disparate ideas in conversation. 

Innately I am a person with varied interests, I just find so many things interesting, and I have always used that variety and range to fuel and inform other things. I believe in staying curious about the world. Also, I get intellectually bored and need to be learning and growing to stay interested. When I’m interested, I retain things.

I've been called a “wizard of knowledge” because of this range. I am far more modest about this, truly, but you want me on your side in a trivia game.

A little while ago, I read a great book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. It delves deep into the reasons why it’s important not to fixate too much on depth of knowledge and let our interests guide our breadth. 

We live in a world that for some reason prizes specialization, when even the research and what we know about a whole host of topics—from education and learning, to research and development itself—indicates that specialization can be detrimental to creation and innovation. Not a single field in the world is exempt from needing to access creativity, and we are aware that creativity doesn’t come from stagnation, it comes from variety and from the accidents that happen when we engage and interact with different things, people, ideas, places.

You take a walk, something out of your normal route, and come across a plant or creature that you’ve never seen before, and it stimulates your imagination. Or it makes you think of something very different. You see a film or read an article and come across a book that you seek out, which introduces you to an idea you've never encountered…and all of that eventually comes around again.

These collisions and abilities to combine different things are important. Sometimes it’s not necessary to get too deep into something, sometimes it’s okay just wading in the shallows and looking at the things floating around your feet.