Podcaster Big on Stepping Out of the Box

Podcaster Rob Dial, on a recent episode, promoted the idea of continual learning in fields extraneous to one's business or expertise in order to pick up useful information and principles that can cross over with their applications.  He cited examples of the person who transferred the then-innovation of banks offering drive-through options for their customers to the fast-food industry and the founder of Priceline, who observed that grocers would sell overripe bananas at a discount...so why not use this for unsold airline tickets as well?  Dial calls all this "thinking outside the box", an already well-worn cliche, I admit.  But he does have a good point: every field of endeavor and specialty contains within it elements that are transferrable to others.  The podcast host suggested that we take an hour each weekday...or five a week...to learn something absolutely new about an area that we're unfamiliar with. I'm "kind of" on board with this, with two caveats.  One, if you're rooted in your own specialty and only skimming the surface of the target subject matter just to pick up some ideas for your own use, then I'm afraid you're going to miss out on a lot of understanding pertinent to that area. And two, when starting to learn in a new field, the beginning is often deceptively easy, with the more profound lessons to be learned requiring more extensive study, an extra investment of time Dial perhaps wasn't considering: hopping around from one area to another is going to stymie many possible benefits.  And the elite in any field will tell you that while they like to see that field popularized, sometimes those who are accomplishing this aren't exactly on the money with their presentation, leaving out important stuff.  Still, I think...especially with Internet sites like search engines, Wikipedia and YouTube as good points of departure...that delving into unaccustomed areas can not only be lucrative, but also just plain fun...