The world is your toolbox. At least, that’s what I read this morning when I checked my daily horoscope on Co-Star. Co-Star is an astrology app with algorithmically generated horoscopes that you can read daily to find out what the stars have written for you on any given day. It was insane to me that this message was my horoscope because I had recently had this epiphany.
Learning is a way to endlessly improve your toolbox as a human. The commitment to enriching yourself with knowledge and practicing skills doesn’t have to be something you only do in school environments, it can be a lifelong commitment. It was hard for me to recognize what I wanted to pursue as a profession, especially with so many options out there. In school, you are taught that you will need to become specialized in something. Doctors specialize in the human body, engineers specialize in building things, and lawyers specialize in the law. I had always genuinely been interested in every subject, so to pinpoint a single career path to go for was a daunting task for me. I didn’t want to pursue something that I wasn’t going to enjoy, but at the same time, I didn’t want to pursue something that I would later regret.
However, developing skills in different fields is still beneficial even if it isn’t your specialty. For example, a few days ago I was lecturing a friend about my recent obsession with evolution. I had been researching about the connection between survival instincts and chronic inflammation, obsessively binge-watching YouTube videos and reading articles and magazines about it. What I gathered from it was that the reason I constantly feel like I’m in fight or flight mode is that my brain processes every stressor as a potential danger, basically processing the calculus midterm I have next week that I’m stressing out over the same way it would process a grizzly bear. My friend asked me why I’m not a Biology major. He just thought I had to be crazy to be interested in learning about something that I’m not directly studying.
Knowledge is power, and a lack of knowledge is also a lack of power. The way I see it, learning and understanding different topics and fields of study can help you understand the world around you better and how to navigate through it. In the same way we read books to understand something better, the same can be applied to researching anything. Since we have knowledge at our fingertips, we might as well make use of it.
The world is your toolbox: learn as many languages as possible, master cooking Italian cuisine, learn the art of samba dancing. There is so much to find and discover, it might even become something you find a way to monetize and profit from.