There’s an interesting story about Benoit Mandelbrot, the well-known French-American mathematician, which always struck me as a lesson on the value of picking our heads up from our day-to-day work. In the early 1960s, Mandelbrot was at Harvard to speak about his economic research on income distribution. Before his presentation, he walked by an office and noticed a graph on a blackboard which resembled a key visualization from his own research.

After some quick investigation, it turned out that the graph was not only unrelated to his presentation, it had nothing to do with his subject matter (income variation) at all! In fact, it had to do with the price fluctuations of cotton. This realization set him off on a long and fruitful academic investigation of the dynamics underlying unrelated systems and laid the groundwork for his most well-known mathematical contribution, fractal geometry.