As non-linear a Range as it can get

Back in my school days, I was interested in a myriad of subjects and my career never had a linear path.

While the last 16 years do look linear, I still retain my bucket list of careers I want to dabble in or at least have a sampling of. And they are as diverse as they can be. Even if I can’t do them for reasons of destiny; I would still like to at least try and have an internship in design thinking, branding, advertising, film making, cargo ships and in

the hotel industry besides a few other things I would like to try my hands at.

While I was a hard-core science student who used conduct his own science experiments from the age of 7 and day dream where he couldn’t access products and pieces to build real stuff, I was also interested in music, films, photography, detective novels, radio and whatever else my curious mind could find interesting, including gene splicing, perpetual motion machine, theatre, sea harrier jets, brain surgery, trains, war history, Mahatma Gandhi and non-violence, submarines, ferns, forests, mountains, rivulets, cooking, cricket, computer programming, conflicts, meditation and forgiveness (in fact my LLM dissertation was on the same topic), etc.

While it was around 2012 or so that I came across Leonardo Da Vinci’s definition of creativity that Steve Jobs popularized, I realised in retrospect that, that was what I was always into during my school and BSc days – connecting and mixing things to see what all comes up.

Over the course of my career, I went into different spheres. From science I happened to go into law and from there I started my career in social work and human rights where I first got the opportunity to design and deliver training programmes and from there into academic research, training in the judiciary, legal research and speech writing for a chief justice of India, immigration, financial services, restaurant industry, guest lectureships, entrepreneurship, back to a job in corporate training and development, quitting it, going freelance in the field of L&D, alternate healing methodologies, experimental and experiential learning design processes, setting up my own firm in the sphere of L&D and yet also associating with expert L&D organisations in the professional services industry, continuously exploring the fields of design thinking and behavioural sciences, neuro-sciences and more.

Be that as it may, I found great resonance with this book (that I bought sometime early last year) and the quote you see along with. I am also sharing three links on the subject:

-1. 9-minute book summary from the Productivity Game YouTube channel: https://lnkd.in/ggN_aZpt 

-2. 14-minute TEDx talk by the author David Epstein: https://lnkd.in/giF_aYqY 

-3. 5-minute video by David on Why divergent thinkers beat geniuses in the real world | David Epstein: https://lnkd.in/gBrycV6w 

In the end, I would also like to recommend the book Design Your Work Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Have fun.

🙂🙂🤘🤘🤘🤘