The Life-Changing Value of Multi-Disciplinary Learning

How looking at the world through a wide lens instead of a narrow one makes us better people.

For a long time, I was dogmatic about my beliefs, and whenever somebody questioned or attacked a belief I held, I saw it as a personal attack and got defensive.

But in my early to mid-30s, having spent several years in the entrepreneurship space, and having spent much of that time reading about all sorts of myriad topics that could help me get ahead — business, technology, philosophy, psychology and so on — I found myself truly relating to Socrates’ maxim that “To know, is to know that you know nothing”.

I also had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of thought leaders across different domains on my podcast, Future Squared, which helped me cultivate a multi-disciplinary world view.

The fact that I would have an award-winning economist on one week, espousing a certain world view, and then have an award-winning psychologist on the next week, espousing a view that contradicted what the economist said, made me more in tune with the fact that nobody knows for sure what is right. We are ultimately operating in a complex world and trying only to understand what is most right based on the evidence at our disposal.