Thinking in Multiple Domains
If you want to deepen your understanding or yield interesting insights, a powerful framework to deploy is the act of thinking in multiple domains.
We already do this in our daily lives without thinking about it. When you are reading or learning about something, you’re naturally applying what you read to your own life, your specific context and situation. But there is a way to deliberately channel this process to your benefit.
Reading#
Let’s say you are a business-savvy person, and your mind is resting in that domain and you think and see the world through a business-like-lens. If you read a book on business, it will apply very neatly to your context and lens, and you won’t have to do much mental gymnastics to see how it applies to your life / domain, since the author has already done that for you. The upside is that the authors ideas will be much more clear and obvious, but the downside is that you won’t yield fresh insights and get a deep understanding just by reading. But suppose you read a book that has to do with arts, artistry, creativity, and viewed it through the business-lens. You will naturally, if you care about the act of reading and aren’t just skimming through, translate the ideas and concepts in to your own domain, in this case business, and this will cause you to understand the ideas and concepts, because in order to translate them you need to understand them. Maybe you at this time don’t care about the arts, but reading about it challenges your mind to reinterpret and internalize unfamiliar concepts through the lens of what you do care about.
The key word here is mental gymnastics. The more mental gymnastics you do to understand the content and how it applies in your specific domain, the more you will get out of it, the more you will see the bigger picture, the more it will help you yield fresh insights and the more enjoyable it will be.
It is therefore a good habit to dabble and read about things in other, seemingly unrelated matters and fields, in which you have no intention of being or caring about, because doing so will deepen your understanding and perspective on your own field (and of the new material, too).
Switching Domains#
Something similar happens when a person, that is skilled and knowledgeable in one domain, goes to work in some other domain. Because that person is viewing problems, ideas and concepts in the lens of the first domains, he or she will yield fresh insights and solve problems in a novel way among other things in this new domain. This person hasn’t been staled by the new domain’s framework of thinking yet, so it is much easier for them to think outside the box. He or she is coming in with the mindset and rules governing the first domain, which suggests new frameworks for the second domain.
Multiple Domains#
In the example of reading books regarding the arts while viewing it through a business-savvy lens, you are translating the material to a single domain. But we all think in more than one domain. A person may be a father, politician, musician and engineer, and if this person tries to translate concepts and ideas they read (this happens naturally when reading) into each and one of those domains, you can imagine how deep of an understanding they will get of the ideas, how many connections and patterns they will see between the domains and what interesting fresh and new insights they will yield.
This is part of why people like Naval Ravikant (tech, investing, happiness) are so interesting. It’s also perhaps part of why someone like Leonardo Da Vinci was such a beast in generating ideas, spotting connections across fields, and envisioning possibilities others couldn’t see. He moved fluidly between art, science, engineering and anatomy.