You know that religious nut in your (extended) family or personal network? That one who mostly reads only the Bible or the Qu’ran or Dianetics.
You can accuse them of a lot of things: blind faith, devotion, close-mindedness.
But a lot of us do the same thing with other topics. We read mostly tech news or marketing blogs or celebrity gossip or motivational books.
And it’s perfectly natural. After all, we act as if because we know that we are what we do. It’s all about routine and falling into a rhythm.
But sometimes, that rhythm becomes a funk.
We place too much importance on our own interest. We see them as being a bigger deal than they really are.
And we confine ourselves to a fish bowl.
Granted, a Jack-of-all-Trades is an expert of none. But someone with really only one set interests kind of lacks an element of humanity. They become somewhat of an automaton, devoid of any real species being.
This is why it’s good to have hobbies. We all need interests outside our trade to keep us sane — to pull us outside of our heads and keep us grounded in community.
Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and we all only have so much mind share. So we have to be careful when we venture beyond the fish bowl. If we just shatter the glass, we risk “drowning” in a vast ocean of all human knowledge.
Rather, we have to hop from one bowl to the next.
Because it’s when we’re mid-air, between bowls, that we truly gain perspective. This is when we see the forest from the trees. This is when we stand in the clearing — even if only for a moment at a time.
CT great analogy here, we really do put ourselves in a fish bowl. Especially when it comes to what we know best in our work. What needs to be realized is that taking ourselves out of our fishbowl and experiencing other things will only help us to be able to relate on different levels.
I know what you mean. Refer to “social media gurus” by name to most people, and they draw a blank. More still, refer to an SEO guru in most social media circles, and even those people stare at you blankly.