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rmduenas's avatar

Another very insightful piece, Tomás; thank you. It is going straight to my 14 year old daughter who, in her first high school year, is currently struggling with a lot of these issues.

I am surprised you did not mention languages, though. I know you speak three, at least. Being fluent in several languages gives you not only more possibilities of communicating, but also a deeper understanding of how different people think, and how their thinking differs, and thus of adapting your messages to different publics.

Knowing different languages is closely related to understanding cultures. If the US lost the war in Afghanistan (as did previously the USSR, and the UK), it is mostly because they were not "culture literate," to say it some way, in Afghan culture. Being able to understand and adapt to different cultures is a skill that can be paired to amplify any other you might have.

Secondly, as a woman, while reading your piece, I kept thinking: "In a way, he is talking about what we know as 'multitasking'." Women are excellent at being good in different domains, because we are always multitasking. From cooking (which is chemistry and physics), to psychology (children), to running a home (management). I suspect many women have known this all along. You just have presented it in an academic format (I guess these are your storytelling skills at work).

It is said that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (a Mexican nun, and a genius of the 17th century) once remarked: "If Aristotle had known how to cook, he would have discovered many more things than he did."

So yes, having different 'niches' definitively takes you to the next level. Wanting to be No. 1 carries a lot of frustration. Wanting to be better every day is probably more rewarding.

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Giovanni A. Barbieri's avatar

Your post today resonates deeply, for me, with something I've been thinking about for many years. There's a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox", whose point is that one of the most profound differences that divide human beings is between foxes and hedgehogs. It all starts with an obscure fragment by a Greek poet, Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing". The poet seems sympathetic with the hedgehog: imagine a fox meaning to kill and eat a hedgehog. She tries many different strategies, but every time the hedgehog rolls up in a ball of spikes, and the fox is frustrated.

Berlin doesn't take sides but classifies writers and thinkers according to this criterion. By instinct, I take sides with the foxes. I think I am a fox myself. Maybe not a very clever one, but a fox nevertheless.

It seems to me that from your angle, foxes have a significant advantage over hedgehogs. What's your opinion?

For completeness, below you find a lengthy quotation from Berlin's essay:

"There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation."

Isaiah Berlin. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. Princeton University Press.

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