Why I Like to Keep Diverse Interests (Writing and Otherwise)

The ThinkerWhen I was young, I remember learning about an idea known as a “Renaissance Man.” This kind of person, I was told, didn’t just specialize in one particular area, but was educated in a lot of different areas, including the arts, sciences, and other places.

I don’t know that I consciously sought to be this kind of person, but it reflects a lot of how my life has turned out. My formal undergraduate college education focused on American history — and my graduate work on secondary social studies education — but I’ve also developed interests in other areas, too. I recently decided to sit down and brainstorm some of the areas I’ve either studied up on or written about (or both) in my adult life. Here’s some of what I came up with:

The list doesn’t include research I’ve done before buying a product, like car reliability or the most effective wireless activity tracker, although I’ve done those things, too. It also doesn’t include all the random things a person soaks up at museums, or those YouTube videos a person watches when they’re trying to figure out how to replace the inside handle of a car door or how to snake a kitchen sink drain pipe.

Like most people, I’m stronger in some areas than others, but I’ve always enjoyed cultivating being able to have at least a basic understanding of a wide swath of topics. There are a lot of practical reasons why, not the least of them being that life often throws things at you, and it’s good to be ready. Even if you have authoritative specialists to lean on — and those people are very valuable — it’s a lot easier to understand what they tell you if you come at it with your own baseline of knowledge.

Another practical reason for cultivating a wide range of interests: it significantly expands your social horizons. I recall a holiday gathering years ago where one of the attendees was a successful business executive. This executive was very good at talking about strategic planning and corporate strategy, but was a fish out of water talking about most of the topics on people’s minds that evening, including politics, religion, education, and popular films. This executive, so good at dealing with high-level corporate CEOs, was largely silent in a room talking about things that didn’t involve business. It reflected, in my mind, the life the executive had committed to a narrow knowledge base. To be fair, that executive makes a lot more than I do, but at, I felt, a different cost.

A Renaissance Author?

Being a person of diverse interests creates a bit of a dilemma for an author. There is a rule that authors are told to cultivate a brand, being something readers identify with. Think of major authors you know of, and you’re liable to associate them with a specific genre — or at least a broad category — of writing, be it self-help nonfiction, financial planning, mystery, or science fiction. Trying to be a writer of, say, both sci-fi and Aldi is not exactly the norm.

Although it’s also not unheard of. One of my favorite writers, the late, great Isaac Asimov, was about as much the ideal Renaissance Man as you could be. He famously wrote books in 9 of the 10 Dewey Decimal classifications, penning works on everything from history to astronomy to chemistry to the Bible. And somewhere in there, he also found time to become a Grand Master of science fiction.

As a professional, there are undoubtedly going to be things I know more than others, but I also find value in knowing about — and even writing about — more than one or two subjects. If anything, it keeps the things I do specialize in fresh and exciting.

Now … what to learn about next?

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