My friend David Cummins, an analyst at JL McGregor in Shanghai, just sent me these two excellent quotes.
"Some people believe the modern Renaissance Man is an investment banker who likes to ride horses on his weekends off or take a wine tasting course. That’s not a Renaissance Man, that’s a guy with a hobby. A Renaissance man is someone that can see trends and patterns and is able to integrate what he already knows. A Renaissance Man is curious and interested in different things. You have to be willing to ‘waste time’ on things that are not directly related to your work because you are curious. But then you are able to, sometimes unconsciously, integrate them back into what you do."
"The art of moving between, or switching, fields through different jobs, projects, or hobbies can be an effective way to generate unplanned unique insights. Seek some occupational diversification."
Bingo!
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Who originated these quotes, they are brilliant, would like to use them some time.
btw I will be visiting Beijing and Shanghai in December, any people involved with Open Source I should meet?
mikko
When people tell me I am trying to do too many things at the same time, I quote Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. 🙂
Awesome quotes. Thanks, Ben.
I’m living in Shanghai and English language books are hard to come by. I actually found a few last weekend and pulled those qutoes from:
The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersections of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures
by Frans Johansson.
It was a pretty good read. Johansson focuses a lot on encouraging people to fuse cultures, ideas, experiences and interests together to create new innovative fields. It is an interesting concept that many people are touching on these days.