{"id":1805,"date":"2022-12-22T20:18:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-22T17:18:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/?p=1805"},"modified":"2022-12-22T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T17:24:00","slug":"does-expertise-kill-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/2022\/12\/22\/does-expertise-kill-creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Expertise Kill Creativity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question the title asked was something I had thought about for a long time. Should one have as deep a knowledge as possible in a single field, or should it expand the field by staying in touch with different disciplines horizontally? Or what might be the triggers to become a creative individual, or rather to have a different and original idea? In another way, what does it mean to be an expert on a subject? The starting point of these questions was the result of examining the lives of people who made important discoveries in history. Of course, this awareness did not appear out of nowhere, it was a process that spanned years. Until I come across a book that examines this situation one-on-one\u2026<\/p>\n

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Many of us aspire to be experts in a field and delve deeper into nuanced and exceptional knowledge. It should not be a mistaken point of view to say that education is designed according to this understanding or it has turned into an industry where solutions to common problems are created. Like Aesop’s tale of the Fox and the Hedgehog, we are expected to be “hedgehogs” and offer creative solutions with a single point of view. So is this really possible? More precisely, isn’t it a very optimistic scenario for an expert to have original ideas and come up with creative solutions?<\/p>\n

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Expert, by definition, is someone who solves repetitive problems encountered in a specific field. As long as the problems are the same, the solutions will not be different either. We can liken it to a factory that produces one type of product, and we need these factories, of course. However, this process, which enters a vicious circle after a while, not only kills the curiosity of individuals in the medium and long term, but also causes a loss of interest in the current specialization. Undoubtedly, this is political, educational, economic, etc. There are many reasons, but let’s say it is the subject of another article.<\/p>\n

Let’s try to explain specialization with another analogy. This question is actually for all of us: To go 10 km deep, or 10 km away? The common feature of scientists who made very important discoveries in history and pioneered many innovations that we still use today was not going deep, but going far. It was not expected that they would come up with a creative idea by wasting their entire life on a single subject. Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Gutenberg, Pablo Picasso, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Marie Curie and many more chose becoming fox rather than hedgehog, and they also worked at many different points and connected the visible dots which \u00a0seemed as disconnected.<\/p>\n

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Leonardo da Vinci<\/strong> is often referred to as a painter, but he also developed in aspects of philosophy, architecture, engineering, mathematics, anatomy, musician, sculptor, botany, geology, cartography, and authorship. Dealing with these fields gave a perspective that inspired many people not only at that time, but even today Furthermore, we learned from Leonardo that vision is a process that spreads not from a single point of the light retina, but to the whole, and that the heart has not two but four chambers.<\/p>\n

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The founder of America, Benjamin Franklin<\/strong>, was another diplomat, writer, inventor, philosopher, scientist and politician who preferred to focus on many fields instead of dealing with a single subject. He invented the lightning rod, which is used to protect from lightning in many buildings today. His other works are daylight saving time, medical probe, public libraries, bifocal goggles, swimming flippers, etc.<\/p>\n

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Besides being a musician, Mozart<\/strong> was also a good mathematician. In addition to being a world-influencing thinker, Nietzsche<\/strong> also had classical music compositions. Einstein<\/strong> was a good violin player. Charles Darwin<\/strong>, who put forward the theory of evolution, was a very good observer. Marie Curie<\/strong>, who did very important work in the field of radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize, was also a good physicist. Gutenberg <\/strong>who discovered the printing press ,the painter Picasso<\/strong>, and countless people whose names I can’t put here, had in common that they were very successful outside the field they were dealing with and were good observers.<\/p>\n

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Neither in the period when these scholars lived, nor today nor in the coming years, the current education policy and content did not and will not have a structure that would increase the curiosity of individuals and strengthen their creativity. It is obvious that the sense of curiosity of individuals cannot be developed with the educational content that does not change for a long time, an understanding that focuses on solving daily problems rather than raising a uniform human being and producing science.<\/p>\n

There are also today’s entrepreneurs who drop out of school because modern education has dulled people’s creative thinking\u2026 Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, James Cameron, Bill Gates and many more\u2026 What these people did, unlike most of the society, was that they realized the situation early. Even today, they had the courage to leave these prestigious schools for the sake of their ideals and to make their own path. How many of us would go to Harvard, realize that education does not add anything, and drop out of school to make their own way?<\/p>\n

To sum up, it can be expected that individuals who produce different and extraordinary solutions to problems are fed by more than one discipline or art in the background, and that these people have a life in which their sense of curiosity is alive.<\/p>\n

So how do you see yourself, fox or hedgehog?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The question the title asked was something I had thought about for a long time. Should one have as deep a knowledge as possible in a single field, or should it expand the field by staying in touch with different disciplines horizontally? Or what might be the triggers to become a creative individual, or rather […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":""},"categories":[57,68],"tags":[43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1805"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1824,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions\/1824"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foodlifeculture.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}