Learning For the Sake of Learning
The weirdest things get me excited lately.
Jake handed me an article about a Harvard student who started a hedge fund out of his dorm room in 1987. I put off reading the article because the subject matter is something I hear about often and care about rarely.
Today at lunch I finally picked up the article and it took all of five lines to hook me in. The article talked about how the student took it upon himself to learn what he needed to and without any education in the field, he created what's today one of the more profitable hedge funds out there. I have never been a big money person and I even had many moral conflicts with working at an investment bank but this article made me want to start my own hedge fund.
Once I stepped back from the shock of being excited about the preposterous idea of my starting a money-related business, I realized that what got me so animated was reading about someone learning. Learning about math, the finance business and statistics.
It appears I am addicted to learning.
Recently, I told a family friend that I love to learn and the subject matter doesn't truly matter. Pottery excites me and so does physics. She told me that learning for the sake of learning wasn't the best choice and that I had to learn with a goal. She said, it doesn't matter what you choose but you should take pottery classes because you want to learn to make pots not because anything will do.
I thought about her comment for a long time. In all honesty, I don't think I sign up for a class just because it's a class. And I don't like to learn just anything. While there are maybe tons of languages I'd still like to study, I have no intention of learning Hindi, for example. In the right setting, I'm sure I might get to like the idea of learning Hindi and even choose it, but in my current environment, there are enough other languages which peek my interest that I won't choose Hindi any time soon.
Same goes for musical instruments. When I decided to learn one last year, just any instrument wouldn't do; it had to be the saxophone. I had two alternatives but I chose the sax because it was my first love.
I don't just take classes for the sake of learning. I just like learning about a very wide variety of subjects. It excites me to know about art history. It also excites me to know about physics. Statistics. Literature. Psychology. Politics. Math. Just because my interests are wide-ranged doesn't mean I learn because I want to learn just anything.
I guess it comes down to depth versus breadth. For me, that's been the age-old problem. Do I pick one love and learn all I can about it or do I explore all but only to a basic level?
I don't know the answer. Do you?
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