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Hehe, I have a son like that too, he'll be 13 this year and I'm happy to say there has been a small increase in intellectual curiosity in the last six months or

Hehe, I have a son like that too, he'll be 13 this year and I'm happy to say there has been a small increase in intellectual curiosity in the last six months or so. OTOH I also have a daughter who'll soon be 10 and she has the opposite problem, she's curious about everything (for instance she self-studies Japanese because she loves robots and sushi and wants to go to Japan and just the other day she learned the location of all 50 US states, just because, and we're not even Americans) but it also means she never really dives deeply into anything. So intellectual curiosity is good but it's not enough. These days I try to teach her grit, so she will stick to something even when it becomes a bit boring... Anyway, with my son I've found that when I include him and let him help with things I do around the house, like carpentering, he's much more interested than if I try something more "artificial" for lack of a better word. It's as he wants to do "real" things, because nothing beats a computer game when it comes to not being real.

lsaferite 6y ago
Be ecstatic with the curiosity and self-learning. Those are the skills that have served me well in life. Having a wide range of interests and never being a master in one is fine. The ability to teach herself a wide range of topics will open many doors.
- davee5 6y ago
  More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent. Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency. Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.
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lsaferite 6y ago

Be ecstatic with the curiosity and self-learning. Those are the skills that have served me well in life. Having a wide range of interests and never being a master in one is fine. The ability to teach herself a wide range of topics will open many doors.

davee5 6y ago
More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent. Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency. Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.
- deleted 6y ago
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