The digital Renaissance women (and men)
I walked into a Starbucks the other day. While waiting for my Matcha Soy Latte (that’s right), I had a chat with the barista. She’s studying industrial engineering. On the side, she works as a DJ and a barista. She composes her own tracks and has a cool track-record of gigs. She said that “after graduating, I don’t know if I’ll look for an engineering job or continue making music more seriously. I really enjoy both, but for different reasons.”
Polymaths are everywhere. Their stories are close to my heart, too. When I was a teen, I hit a crisis point: I was told I had to choose among maths, humanities and sports. I loved the way maths and science made me think abstractly, but I also wrote weird short stories in different languages and sold them for pocket money. On the side, I had a summer job as a windsurf instructor. Why were the interests in calculating, writing and “sweating” perceived as so unrelated? Why could they not be reconciled? It took a year of teenage drama to decide I was just going to have it my way and carry on with everything. The education system happened to disagree with me, but the job market ended up quite pleased with such a weird product. It was different. I learnt to seek difference.
Right, so what about the Singularity?
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” Mark Twain
Today, different fields are converging at an increasingly rapid pace. Value is created at their intersections. You don’t need to believe in the Singularity to play this game. If you study seemingly unrelated areas, you’ll connect dots that have never been connected before.
Cryptography + economics = distributed ledger technology
Design + hardware = smartphones adopted by the masses
AI + neuroscience = brain-computer interfaces and cyborgs
Love + psychology = relationship bonus points ;)
Information asymmetry always pays off. We get flooded with too much news. Knowing which news to listen to is what matters. One of the easiest ways to create information asymmetry is by transfering knowledge from one domain to the other. That’s the polymath’s game.
Carve out your own market like the pros (across history)
Polymaths tend to be renegades. It takes an opinionated mind to go against the current — or at least, a problem with authority. You have to entertain seemingly conflicting ideas at once and accept all the criticism that inevitably comes with it.
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the famous polymaths of the Renaissance era, produced groundbreaking work we study and appreciate to this day as:
A painter.
An engineer.
A sculptor.
A mathematician.
An architect.
A goldsmith.
A musician.
(Pretty sure I left a couple ones out. No pressure.)
Leonardo faced a lot of hardship and controversy in his life — challenging the status quo in such obvious ways comes with a price tag. Yet, he was famous for saying that “learning never exhausts the mind”. Today, we have science to back him up. It’s been proven that an older brain can generate the same amount of new neurons on a daily basis as a teenage brain can.
Learning never exhausts the mind.
“Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”
A much more modern character is responsible for this quote. Steve Jobs, a self-proclaimed polymath, brought design and technology together to create the world’s most valuable company as of this writing.
Steve isn’t the only one who’s been recently mixing arts and science. Elon Musk defines himself as “a designer, an engineer, a technologist”.
The wheel of skills
How do you make a habit out of swimming in cold waters? To get familiar with new areas, you can think of a wheel with left-brain skills on the left and right-brain skills on the right side. By left-brain skills, we understand all disciplines that require logic thinking: sciences, maths, finance, logistics, etc. In the right hemisphere, where our intuition lies, we put humanities, psychology, music, arts and other forms of creative expression.
Your goal for these two hemispheres should be to have at least one discipline “under construction” and another one “out of your depths” at any given time. The former is a subject you’ve gotten familiar with, but are learning more about, and the latter is a subject you don’t understand yet and have to start getting more comfortable with. Eventually, your “under construction” areas will move into proficiency (where there’s limitless space) and make room for new subjects.
You can always pick more and more subjects in a specific area — e.g. coding or dancing — and build a portfolio of talents in that category.
Redefining polymaths
“Hold on girl” you should be thinking at this point, “where are the female examples after which this article was named?”
There are some amazing figures across history. Sadly, many of those stories have gone untold over time. There are also leading examples in modern society and that’s very encouraging. But let’s be real — there’s a huge gap, so it’s about the future and what we can build going forward.
I guess that’s what makes my clickbaity title a little counterintuitive.
After all, polymaths should think outside the box.
