On any given day, the productivity section of my news feed greets me with umpteen articles espousing the virtues of staying focused. Pieces about the science of staying focused, techniques for keeping my mind from wandering, and re-hashed messages on how billionaires become billionaires because of their nearly inhuman ability to stay laser-focused on specific goals. It seems to be generally accepted among success-minded folks that focus is fundamental to excelling in business and life.

But what happens when we carefully analyze that idea? Let’s, shall we say, focus on the origins and philosophy of staying focused for a bit and see what problems we can dig up.

The concept of “staying focused” in the context of financial success is intertwined with the economic notion of division of labour. The idea of dividing tasks among people to improve productivity on the population level isn’t new. Plato described the division of labor two and half millenia ago. Essentially, an economy can produce more stuff faster if it functions something like an assembly line, with each person focusing on mastering specific tasks. It’s more efficient for a carpenter, a plumber, an architect, and an electrician to work together to build fours houses than for each of them to build a single house alone. Thus, dividing labour into smaller, more focused tasks and assigning workers to each task means more productivity.

There’s no question that dividing labour and focusing workers on specific tasks improves productivity of groups of workers with diverse skills. Henry Ford revolutionized industrial production with the assembly line, the embodiment of extreme division of labor. Large businesses thrive when different departments of people with different skills collaborate and combine their abilities to move the business forward. However, problems begin to arise when we attempt to extrapolate from the economic scale to the individual scale.

Staying sharply focused on the same goals and ideas for long periods of time runs counter to human inclination when artificial constraints are removed. And some serious cognitive dissonance ought to start creeping in when focus advocates consider the importance of curiosity in the development and evolution of human beings. Curiosity is deeply ingrained in human nature, and it has been curiosity, not hyper-focus per se, that has led to some of the greatest advances in human knowledge throughout history. Even a cursory glance into the past at people we hold in great esteem as brilliant thinkers and history-changers undermines the message that focus is key. Names like Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo certainly don’t evoke notions of focus — drive, perhaps, and curiosity certainly — but focus? Not so much. The stuff these people and others like them worked on was all over the place.

We can learn a lot from toddlers and people who inherent substantial wealth at a young age. Young children are the antithesis of focused, but their creativity is off the charts. My daughter is three. She has the remarkable ability to sit on her bedroom floor with a pile of garbled toys and play with ten or more of them per minute. She talks to herself, creating some imaginative narrative connecting all the seemingly random stuff and apparently enjoys doing it. Trying to get her to play with a single toy would be utterly futile. Similarly, people who gain windfall wealth early in life are envied by society why? Not because they have money per se, but because that money eliminates most of the constraints working-class folks face. They can do whatever they want. Very few wealthy people who have a choice pursue a limited career working a job that requires focused attention on particular things. They travel, try different business and investment ventures, and network with other people doing other cool stuff. In other words, they aren’t particularly focused.

And before we go any further, we need to dispel the notion that uber-successful entrepreneurs are super focused. Sure, they start out with general goals in mind, but anyone who has achieved success knows that getting there requires a nimble mind capable of shifting focus to wildly different tasks all the time. Focus and “goals” in the entrepreneurial sense are more like guardrails that help keep the progress generally on the right track. The goals are in the periphery, not dead ahead, and they typically aren’t super concrete.

Many productivity articles — written by who knows who — seem to imply that there is a specific and clear path to greatness. That focusing on particulars will allow go-getters to achieve those goals. What the articles fail to convey is that clear goals aren’t compatible with breaking new ground and doing something innovative. You can’t set a goal to become the next breakout, industry-disrupting startup because the steps to attain that goal are unknown, by definition. That’s an organic process that arises from curious inquiry and finding links between existing problems that nobody else notices.

Focus requires a clear target at which to fire an arrow. Innovation and brilliance require only the arrow and the bow (mind) with which to fire it.

Curiosity and broad inquiry are what come together to form the target that no one else sees. And curiosity and broad inquiry are necessarily incompatible with focus on specific goals. Polymaths embody these traits — they tinker, they think, they read, and they learn about all kinds of seemingly unrelated stuff. And then one day, poof! An important innovation materializes because problems we didn’t know were related turn out to share a solution.

Conventional views on productivity encourage us to suppress those urges to let our minds wander and to start another project before our last one is finished. But every time we force ourselves to avoid getting distracted, we potentially miss a golden opportunity to connect the dots. Curiosity and distractibility are marks of potentially great individual minds. Focus on a particular mission is the framework of a business entity or even an economy. When individual problem solvers — that is, people who allow themselves to be distracted with potentially interesting new ideas — are placed in the context of a business with a clearer mission, that’s when great progress can be made.

Attempting to restrict your own life to clearly delineated goals will only engender frustration and boredom. Broad acquisition of diverse knowledge allows for a better understanding of the world. You’ll never understand everything completely. That’s not the goal of learning widely and being okay with getting distracted. But you’ll also never understand the finite without having an understanding of the context of the world we live in. This seems self-evident, but the shifting paradigm in education away from general liberal arts to a hyper-focus on STEM topics suggests society doesn’t appreciate diversity in knowledge anymore.

The human brain can synthesize diverse information better than any computer system. It takes the spark of human genius to recognize important links between apparently tangentially connected concepts, yet we neglect this treasure of human uniqueness. Historical writings are full of accounts of admiration for so called “well-read” members of society. These are the people who knew much about different things and followed their curiosity to gain a balanced understanding of how the world works and what it takes to excel in it. Today, we’re producing so-called “experts” at an alarming rate. College graduates with PhDs in esoteric phenomena who are overwhelmed with anxiety when they leave academia because the diversity of the real world is foreign to them.

Contrary to the opinion expressed in so many articles on how to succeed, we should not be waking up each morning thinking only about doggedly pursuing specific goals. We should arise with open minds and look for things that give us that little tinge of curiosity, of wonder. We should not feel as though undertaking inquiry into a new arena is somehow going to harm our ability to succeed in another.

Great leaders and pioneers embrace getting distracted. They have a lot going on, in many different arenas. Take the poster boy all the productivity gurus like to fawn over — Elon Musk. This guy is anything but focused. Just take a look over all he’s got going on, and what he’s done before getting to where he is now. I’d challenge the “focus” fanatics to read Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon and then summarize exactly what his specific goals and focus have been as he achieved astronomical success. You can’t do it. The guy’s tried all sorts of unrelated stuff.

So, how does one go about healthy distraction? The first step is to read very widely. If you’re a computer programmer, read some classic literature and follow it up with some anthropology and economic history. If you’re a biological scientist, read some philosophy and some history of the rise of cryptocurrencies. Broad exposure to knowledge is infinitely more enlightening than hyper-deep exposure to only limited topics.

As we continue down a path of economic uncertainty and wealth concentration in the hands of a select few entities, mostly corporations, the increasing tendency for individuals to focus on isolated bits of knowledge and finite goals will grow more dangerous. From the perspective of the mega-corporation, whose goal is the pursuit of profit, having more “experts” capable of executing specific tasks is more desirable. However, if we’re at all interested in achieving a fairer and more harmonious existence, we need to embrace curiosity and distraction.

It’s okay — and healthy — to be into lots of different stuff. Besides, it makes you far more interesting at cocktail parties. I’ll leave you with this other guy whose pursuits appear all over the map but who we all love because he’s so… interesting: