Most interesting people in history knew this fact

Being impressive, interesting to talk with and an intelligent person had always been one of my biggest goals. Over the years I tried many different approaches to accomplish this task. Some of them were well resulted but too difficult to manage overtime, others poorly resulted from the beginning... But, I believe we found the sweet spot and therefore we are in first step on the highway to forward our goal.

Inspired by Linkedin's learning week and Ted's talk I started to make myself a hobby to finish one course in Lynda.com and watch 2 Ted's talk every week. It is important to maintain that the courses that I took, and the talks I watched were picked up in a different way you might guess - I took everything except things in my comfort zone. To be honest, I try to study things as far as possible from my comfort zone.

After a single month, I know a lot of interesting facts from Ted's talks and gain some new technical skills from Lynda, but thus semi-random knowledge was kind of useless in my daily life. For example, I wasn't able to merge into conversation Suzanne Simard's great Ted's talk about "How trees talk to each other" - you probably guess why. Therefore, an action had to take place to make my new hobby more felicitous!

Talking with friends and colleges about my new ideas produced the fruit of some old-new understanding about the professionals social - skill; which today model became clear to me: Let's get back to 1000BC, an average woman who knows everything that she ought to know for making her job done - survive. As time goes on, society gets involved and everyone has a position in society - some were villagers, others were soldiers and some kings and priests; each position cause the owner to have some set of skill when the number of skills increases. Today, we have so many types of jobs, so much knowledge and skills that a single person just cannot master them all. As a result, today, most of the people master a single profession and very small set of skills.

If we return back to our story, the solution became clearer. The most interesting people in history weren't the best in their field of expertise but had many fields of semi-expertly. Therefore, the solution must be to master several areas of knowledge and several sets of skills! But the new question is: "what are the best areas to master for me?".

Well, based on the Time's "The 100 most significant figures in history" and their biography it seems like the intuitive answer is the right one... Be very good at what you do and then spread to related fields . If you like to improve this method even more, you should combine the opposite type of skills to the last learned ones in your studying plane.

To clarify the method, an example will be handy. Let's say you are a mathematician, so you probably good at Math and statistics. Related subjects to pure math are Physics and Computer Science. Both will make the mathematician study something out of his comfort zone. An opposite subject could be Psychology or Political.

In my opinion, one way to become a better professional is not super-master a single subject or skill but semi-master several related and opposite sets of subjects and skills and master your favorite one.