Skills are a person’s toolkit: each one you add makes you stronger and lets you operate on a higher level. Few skills are truly useless. As long as you can combine one with others, it can become part of a multidimensional competitive edge.
Music, chess, calligraphy, and painting are often dismissed as “refined pastimes.” But think about it: people who master these skills can apply the ways of thinking behind them to other pursuits and be just as accomplished—sometimes experts from the get-go. A sense of rhythm in getting things done, a big-picture perspective, the tactics and strategy of conquering new ground—which of these isn’t connected, or even fundamentally the same?
Music, chess, calligraphy, and painting are often dismissed as “refined pastimes.” But think about it: people who master these skills can apply the ways of thinking behind them to other pursuits and be just as accomplished—sometimes experts from the get-go. A sense of rhythm in getting things done, a big-picture perspective, the tactics and strategy of conquering new ground—which of these isn’t connected, or even fundamentally the same?