Develop Diverse Interests for Career Success

In your work life, you may have come across colleagues, customers or vendors who seem to know their domain extremely well but are at a loss for words when you try to approach a topic from a different angle.

We live in the age of super- specialization and it is a given that by the time our careers are over, we would have developed deep expertise in only few areas that would have served our career well. But would we have better served our expertise with a healthy dose of Perspective? Probably not

Perspective is a view point on any subject/situation/person. You can approach that subject from multiple angles and each angle gives you a perspective. The more angles you can find to look at a subject or situation or person in your work life, the more rounded will be your perspective.

Here are 5 interests that can potentially help you build better perspective in your work

Theatre/Film - plots, sub-plots, characters, situations. Theatre & film are full of them. By relating what you see on stage or film to your work or your chosen subject matter, you can find new ways of tackling subjects, situations and people

Music - the intricacies of musical and lyrical design represent complex thoughts and opinions of their creators. An M.S. Subbulakshmi rendition of Suprabhatam in the morning can help soothe your frayed nerves before a meeting or Bob Dylan's musical sermons can rejuvenate a tired mind into a fresh stream of thought

Literature - With so much literary wealth available to us in many different languages, it isn't difficult to compare your company's battle with an aggressive competitor to Chief Brody's battle with the shark in Peter Benchley's 'Jaws' or a self-sacrificing colleague who does more for others than for herself, to Mr.Micawber in Dickens 'David Copperfield'

Psychology/Sociology/Anthropology - studying the functioning of the mind and the behavior of a person and social groups is very important in understanding human behavior in a corporate setting or the relative adoption of one technology vs. the other or quite simply learning how to collaborate in a team

Art/Design - art and design paradigms such as expressionism, naturalism, abstract etc all reveal deeper insights into the mind of the artist and the social/scientific/religious mores of the times and can help you approach changes in your area of work

Building unrelated interests is a must-have for one to develop a deeper perspective on their chosen area of expertise