Steve Jobs famously wanted to hire people that weren't just good programmers but people with serious and passionate side hobbies and pursuits (music, art, poetr

Steve Jobs famously wanted to hire people that weren't just good programmers but people with serious and passionate side hobbies and pursuits (music, art, poetry etc.) Have a broader awareness of things, of other arts, of history, of other crafts must make you better in the area of your core competence in some way I must imagine. For a computer programmer at Apple who is going to be designing a macbook, it's probably better that he have some inkling of what that machine's enduser would be doing with it. Is he going to be making music? Spending a lot of time watching political videos on youtube? Having insight into people, into other crafts will let him make a better machine. Skills transfer across domains all around, sometimes wholesale and other times in small subtle ways. I was always stunned, for example, in reading Einstein's essays on subjects others than physics. His writings on politics, music, religion etc. reveal a man of tender awareness and care. Would he have gone on to develop the theory of relativity if he had not read works of Immanuel Kant? Leonardo da Vinci, Donald Knuth, Archimedes, the examples are aplenty for accomplished figures who had their hand in many jars.