In life I have been a jack of all trades, but master of none. Or so the idiom goes, and my English isn’t spectacular so I’ll stick with that idiom. You see, I’ve been fascinated with life around me and wanted to learn about as much as possible at least just to know something about it. I have picked up bits of musical training, juggling, slight of hand tricks, bits of languages [Spanish, German, French and Greek all mean almost nothing to me, but not nothing like Russian], mathematics, philosophy, woodworking, gardening, driving a car, riding a motorcycle, fishing, coffee brewing, tea brewing, cooking, bicycling, photography and parenting 🙂 However, there are a few items that are on a much shorter list, a list of things that I want to know a lot about. I want to know about programming and computers, I want to know a lot about theology and I want to know a lot about my wife. Those subjects are very important because my depth of knowledge in those areas has a broad impact on my future.

I want to add hundreds of things to my repertoire of experiences and understandings so that I can have a breadth of knowledge that understands how various fields of learning interact. Sometimes breakthroughs in one field are a direct result of knowledge of things in another field. At other times having a knowledge of one field helps you explain another field to people who only have a good grasp of the first field (example: explaining how Apple OS X works to people who use Windows requires a third party object to explain simplicity. Windows users inherently look for more complexity in software which makes learning how a Mac works twice as difficult for experienced Windows users). I once read an essay by Albert Einstein in which he encouraged people to gain a broad knowledge of many fields so that they could be educated.

I love history. Not just dates and times, which are of some use, but stories of people who lived through things and hopefully learned things as well. I love to learn about how nations were created, wars were faught and won, and how people succeded through failure. I figure that failure is only part of learning in this human life. Sometimes death is the only way to see life [see: Christ’s Resurrection]. Sometimes we have to try the many possible solutions before we succeed [See: Thomas Edison and Team’s work on the light bulb to find the right filament]. Sometimes we get it right the first time, and those times are often sweet. They are when we feel like we’re ‘naturals’ or that we have a talent or knack for something. I have a knack for learning things and I think making people laugh. My depth of knowledge in many areas is not very deep, but enough to make me dangerous, but I do know one thing: I know what counts. Do you know your strengths and weaknesses and what matters most? No matter what I learn I’ve found that knowing those things keeps me grounded… well, that and gravity – I know a wee bit about physics.