In her most recent post, Heather mentioned that one of the reasons she doesn’t regret having purchased an Android phone (only to learn shortly thereafter that the iPhone would soon be available for her carrier) is that she likes “having the chance to do some troubleshooting of my own and learn something new.”
Learning something new is something that most of us enjoy, I think. For many of us in academia, a thirst for learning had a great deal to do with our choice of profession, and we strive to do a good job of keeping up with new learning in our chosen fields.
Sometimes, though, we’d like to learn something outside our fields, because we think it will help us in some way, because we think it’s valuable for its own sake, or simply because, for whatever reason, it intrigues us.
For myself, there are two things I’d like to learn: Biblical Hebrew, and how to write code (beyond the most basic of HTML, that is). The latter interests me both because I think it might eventually prove useful for my long-term academic work, and because I just like to understand how things function. The former interests me because—well, I really don’t know why. I’ve just always had a fascination with languages. In any event, I’m of the opinion that learning something new that’s not entirely in my professional field contributes to my overall well-being; it gets me intellectually engaged with something without it feeling like work. In doing that, it helps me enjoy my work more, if that makes sense.
Have you found that to be true for you as well? What kinds of things outside your field would you like to learn, and why? Let us know in the comments!
[Image by Flickr user Ed Yourdon / Creative Commons licensed]