The Beauty of Experiences and Experimentation

Looking back at my education journey, I realised that I have been gradually specialising in a subject. Back when I was in secondary school, I was learning a wide variety of subjects: math, language, art, cooking, project learning, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, history, and even Chinese culture. However, when I entered high school, my subjects narrowed down to just math, language, project learning, physics, geography and chemistry. The number of subjects I was exposed went from 11 to 7 subjects.

And in university, it will be narrowed to just one: Computer Science.

I am not against specialisation as I do understand that it reaps great benefit at both a micro and macro level. As an individual, focusing on a single craft enables me to learn the subject in greater depth since my attention and time will not be divided and spent on many different subjects. At a macro level, specialisation allows for division of labour, boosting efficiency and productivity since we can save time by learning less.

Can you imagine the time wasted if every single human being has to know how to mine the materials for a smartphone, deconstruct them, assemble them and lastly code the software behind it just to use it?

However, I do feel that in today’s world, there is a tendency to focus too much on speciliazing on your skills which does lead to an unintended consequence. While it is important to spend most of your time and effort working on your craft, it may be even more beneficial if you spend some of that time elsewhere exploring and experimenting with things unrelated to your field.

And I think there are huge benefits to exploring and experimenting with new things.

And the main one being inspiration.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Steve Jobs

And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Experiencing and experimenting with new things create the dots for you to connect. If you are doing many things that are related to your field, you are not creating new dots. And it is the connecting of the dots that gives rise to the inspiration, the idea or the “spark”.

But it is not easy.

There is always this notion of “I’m just wasting time doing things that are irrelevant from my field”. There is a tendency to view things practically and pragmatically.

I’m guilty of that as well. Since I am going to study Computer Science in University, I spent most of my free time learning about programming languages and understanding computational thinking. I felt that that was the most logical thing to do.

Why would you spend your time doing something else like being a Barista where it is totally irrelevant to your future University major? It won’t help you progress in life. It is not relevant to you.

But as Steve Jobs said during his 2005 Stanford commencement address:

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Trust your heart more. Trust it even when your head tells you that the decision is not practical and not beneficial. Say yes to new experiences and trust that they will connect in the future.

Of course, try things that you have an interest in. Try the activities that are in the green area as seen in the graph. Instead of always going for things that are relevant to you, try experimenting with activities that you have passion in but may not be directly relevant to what you are doing in life. At the very least, enjoy the process of experimenting and exploring.

I tried this approach. I tried by going for the things that are irrelevant but things that I have passion for. Hence, I worked as a Part-Time Barista for 3 months at Starbucks Singapore.

I enjoyed my time as a Part-Time Barista. Maybe the dots did connect or maybe it was just a coincidence, but being a Barista in Starbucks gave me the inspiration to start my Youtube journey as it gave me the content to share with others.

Trust the dots. Happy experimenting!

—

Previously published on medium

***