This essay focuses only on expanding knowledge within programming and business, but I think to truly be successful, you need to generalize outside of programming too.

My favorite example that I like to repeat often is that as a Site Reliability Engineer, more than once my knowledge of sports, entertainment, politics and current events have been quite relevant to my job.

When we were trying to figure out why people suddenly stopped watching Netflix in Mexico and Brazil, it was important to know that there was an exhibition match in Soccer/Football between the two countries, and knowing that that was culturally important and something that they would be using the TV for instead of Netflix.