The proper intellectual ambition of all humanity is to develop as a polymath. Of course most will completely disagree with me. Not only that most will couch their contributions in impenetrable language so as to obscure it from the casual reader.
Yet understand what i am saying. A polymath first develops a high level of mathematical skill. My own exposure was actually exceptional and perhaps unnecessary except to understand what had been done if one actually contributes there. Thus my work introducing third and forth order Pythagorean metrics. I really did have to know mathematical history and the full extent of the oeuvre of the foundations of mathematics.
What i am saying though, you are no polymath without a real facility with mathematics at the undergrad level and all that takes time and practice. Do notice that i mentioned practice. Lots of it and that is where the university typically falls short. It is why most polymaths are largely self taught. I regret most taking courses in which practice was invisible or even doing it over intensely as well.
What happens in all this is that your internal tool box expands and becomes sophisticated often in way you do not perceive.
Then we come to the hard part. You must feed your monkey scrutinized information and lots of it. I pick up a book to ferret out a single fact or insight and once attained, discard the rest. I have been doing this for sixty years and from that insight flows.
As an aside, focus on a specific topic will allow local mastery and that is good. Except it is obsolete in a decade or so and in our present world every tradition is been re engineered. Thus it is far better to be a polymath as you can leap farther into the maze of knowledge as i do in this blog..
If you want to stay successful, learn to think like Leonardo da Vinci
"Realize that everything connects to everything else." (Reuters/Phil Noble)
Some of history’s greatest contributions have come from polymaths.
Aristotle practically invented half a dozen fields of study across
philosophy. Galileo was as much a physicist as he was an engineer when
he helped kick-start the scientific revolution. Da Vinci might have been
even more famous as an inventor than an artist if his notebooks were
ever published.
Even in the last 100 years, we have had people like John Von Neumann
and Herbert Simon who have made breakthrough advances across fields as
diverse as computer science, economics, and psychology.
That is, of
course, not to detract from the specialists who have pushed our progress
forward. In fact, until now, these specialists have far outnumbered the
polymaths in both their historical ranks and their contributions.
After all, it takes a lot of time to master the depths of a specific
field so that you can eventually add something that pushes it ahead.
From this point of view, it makes sense that polymaths have been as
scarce as they have been.
Still, it’s clear that whenever we have had giants like Aristotle,
Galileo, and da Vinci, the contributions they made even in specialized
fields may not have been made in the same way if they hadn’t attacked a
problem with a diverse inventory of mental knowledge and understanding.
Polymaths see the world differently. They make connections that are
otherwise ignored, and they have the advantage of a unique perspective.
In a world increasingly dominated by machines, I have a feeling that this approach is going to become increasingly valuable.
The redundancy of reality
One of the reasons Aristotle created so many sub-fields of philosophy
and early forms of science is because these fields were so young back
then.
They were branches of the same underlying tree trunk, and Aristotle
had a deep enough understanding of what was contained in that trunk to
then divide it into different parts and make his early contributions.
Even so, however,
the questions he asked and the answers he provided are still up for
debate, and he is still a highly influential figure in philosophy. He
didn’t just collect all of the low-hanging fruit, but he went the full
length in developing the path that lay ahead.
The lesson here extends beyond philosophy. Reality is categorized in
our mind by words. That’s how specialization is born. We move from a
general observation through our senses and then we divide this
observation into specializations like philosophy, psychology, economics,
and art.
The tree trunk is reality, and the branches are the different
disciplines, which then become their own trunks of knowledge with
branches.
What polymaths realize by studying the different branches is that
many of them have the same foundation, and if this foundation is deeply
understood then all they need to do is apply that ingrained knowledge to
a different context rather than do the work of surface-level
specialization.
For example, as a writer, if I want my work read, I need to know marketing.
I’ve been fortunate and done relatively well for myself in the time
I’ve been active, and yet I don’t read marketing books, and nor do I
spend all that much time trying to formally learn about it. Why is that?
Well, because I’ve always had a deep fascination with psychology, and
to me, marketing is just psychology dressed up in a particular context.
Psychology is the trunk, and it’s a trunk I’ve thought about a lot, and
as a result, I can already see the patterns that most people think of
as marketing tactics.
Reality is redundant, and when you learn widely, that becomes clearer
and clearer. The more you explore, the more you can exploit these
redundancies.
A higher rate of learning
You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp concepts of a broad variety.
The big difference between the approaches of a polymath and a
specialist is that the specialist picks a spot and then goes deep,
whereas the polymath is on a lane that continuously gets wider.
These are obviously not mutually exclusive, and the ideal combination
to me is one that relies on a strong understanding of the fundamentals
of many disciplines with a specific domain or two in which you
specialize.
That said, if we take just a specialist and a polymath separately,
beyond just the benefit of the creative connections that are available
from having studied broadly, the polymath also has a learning advantage.
Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across
domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes
deep doesn’t.
You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp
concepts of a broad variety. This ironically then allows you to
specialize in something else faster if you so choose. This is an
incredibly valuable advantage.
It explains how some of history’s polymaths were able to contribute
in such a specialized way even though they were primarily focused on
going broad.
Now, in a world where narrow Artificial Intelligence systems are
going to displace most routine, specialized work, it isn’t too much of
stretch to assume that this skill of learning to learn across
disciplines may just be the difference between those who reinvent
themselves and those who don’t.
In fact, chances are that our current distinctions between
disciplines will start to fade away and new ones will arise. Many of
them will likely reside between areas that aren’t currently covered by
specialization.
Traditionally, the idea of having a single career over the course of a
life wasn’t unreasonable. The future, however, looks different. People
will likely have multiple careers that differ significantly. Even if
they don’t, we will see more and more project-based work, which will
require similar skills.
In such a world, the learning ability of a polymath may just be the difference.
The takeaway
“Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
At any point in history, most of our knowledge is contained outside
of individual minds. It’s contained in the cultures that spring up
around us.
A big part of today’s culture is the internet. It’s not only
democratized knowledge, but it’s made it so accessible that those who
are curious enough can’t help but embrace the approach of a polymath. As
such, we’re going to see more and more people playing at the
intersection of different disciplines.
While specialization will still have its place, the boundaries
between the many aspects of reality are going to continue to be blurred,
and those who can comfortably embrace such blurring will thrive.
Although this may appear to many as unfamiliar, the truth is that
it’s actually a far more accurate representation of what is going on.
We’ve just been conditioned to think otherwise.
As Leonardo da Vinci would remind himself,
“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
What makes the world interesting is the interaction between objects
and not the objects in and of themselves. If we’re always restricting
these interactions by creating boundaries, we’re also taking away from
our comprehension.
Nothing exists independently of its surroundings and that fact
doesn’t change just because we decide to be blind to it with narrowed
disciplines.
In an evolving world, those who can see that will have the edge.
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This post was originally published on Medium.
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