Dabbling in personal interests builds our brains and opens the doors to innovations. We saw a great example of dabbling with the late Steve Jobs, who dropped out of college and took a calligraphy class out of personal interest. He learned about the different kinds of fonts and what made text look good. He was fascinated by it – and thought it had no practical application. 10 years later he designed the original Macintosh to have a wide range of fonts, marking Apple as the choice for creatives to this day.
Over at Entrepreneur.com Lisa Evans writes more about why dabbling can make us better entrepreneurs:
Dabbling is cross-training for the brain. Pursuing interests in a variety of subjects stretches the mind and pushes the imagination, causing us to be more creative. Dabbling is simply a way of gathering new information and experimenting with new ways of doing something. It causes you to think differently about everything else that you do, a process which can lead to incredible innovation. “The best way to discover something is to take an existing concept in one discipline and apply it to another,” says Stibel. Hopmann says Dabble fields lots of fan mail from people who have felt inspired after taking their courses, showing inspiration can come from the most unexpected places – even a glassblowing class.
Check out the rest of this article at here.
