Is connection everything?
I read through this long time back from Steve Jobs.. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
If you saw Money ball, the connection comes from simple statistics way of looking at team rather than qualitative talent. This is the sort of connection Steve seems to be talking about. The famous scene - "because he gets on base" shows how a team with little money had to connect dots somewhere to challenge the whole league way of doing things. And eventually changing it for good.
Reading and free thinking
Some of this discussion triggered after reading this article from fs.blog originally. Education and how we go about always gets me excited. Kids are natural free thinkers. And sometimes schools are an antidote of it - For e.g. schools asks kids not to make mistakes, not collaborate with one another, change context frequently every hour. Seth Godin has a great book Stop Stealing Dreams. But I digress i think.
Leading metrics for creativity
Back to original point. When Carl Newport talks about what creates impact and how you measure it, he talks about Leading metrics and Lagging metrics. He talks about his work on how many papers he can publish in journal. And his leading metrics be amount of focussed time he was able to spend week on week. I believe if you put that in perspective - at early age, reading and comprehension is a key for most kids.
The voracious readers
Some of the best entrepreneurs were voraious readers by choice or chance. Bill Gates is known to hang around with books early in his career, a pattern he follows to this day. Munger talks about the importance of reading. And Naval Ravikant talked about how he was a latch key kid and how that made him spent hours in library everyday reading without adult supervision - which was a nice thing, as he was able to read wide and figure out what works for him.
Connections are byproducts
Reading is the process gathering material. Then it needs to be understood and digested well. Before the concepts can be applied to other domains as one continue to dive deep into multiple domains. But is connection everything. Would you be able to connect most of the ideas or any idea. It is impossible to know that. But the more time you spend, the more you are inside the goldilocks zone for connections to happen. As always - connections are by products. The journey is what matters.