One of the things I have been thinking about lately has been that the education that I have undergone has been very restricting. There are whole worlds that have been left completely untouched. These are the worlds of history, philosophy, psychology, biology, economics, and the like. Even as I have become a specialist in the areas of technology that I work in, I feel at times that as the years go on, one needs to be more a generalist, putting together a latticework of mental models, as Mohnish Pabrai so eloquently paraphrased Charlie Munger.
So, I picked up a book by Will Durant on “The Greatest Ideas and Minds of All Time” (was recommended by Chetan Parikh) and started reading it. It was as if I had entered another world. While I know of the names mentioned, I know almost nothing about them. Durant has a reading list of 100 books, suggesting a time investment of an hour daily for the next 4 years.
In a world where thinking and knowledge is so important, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps the education we undertook was very narrow in scope. It was taken my 20 years to realise it. Luckily, I have plenty of time ahead to correct it.
