An Introduction To Polymathism

Something that I’ve been toying with for a long time is the idea of wearing many hats, so to speak. Even with the rise of people working from home and things such as freelancing that we see in the modern world, the idea of pursuing many careers at the same time or exploring different creative avenues at once, is something that I see little talk of.  Growing up, I recall a dialogue around work that assumed you would only really have one serious job, I suppose for the sake of simplicity this makes sense as it makes it easier to build a specialized skill-set, but it also strikes me as needlessly rigid and unsatisfying. The idea of doing something on repeat sort of week in, week out, makes me think whoever came up with such a model did not really have human beings in mind as the actors in this performance. For me personally, I have always found the idea of doing one thing for a career incredibly boring and so I ended up stumbling on what I might call polymathism, by accident.

It probably goes without saying but basically I would define polymathism as being competent, or at least attempting to be, in many different, often seemingly dissimilar skill-sets, be it on hobby or career side. One of the reasons that I find polymathism so fascinating is that it seems to be talked about so scarcely and yet from my exploration of what I might call, “world class level experts”, and what goes into game-changing ideas, I find that many of the most incredible ideas one can think of, or perhaps not given the esoteric nature of some, are born from the spaces in-between disciplines that come from synthesizing many different areas of expertise and skill-sets/lenses to be able to see what others with only one deep domain expertise might miss. Apologies for that run on sentence. I was going to break it up, but I said what I needed to say.

The reason that I am writing this piece, is because I think we should shatter the idea that one should focus on one career most if not all the time, and be okay with a more functional, though perhaps unorthodox, way of approaching things. Many people have certainly beaten a dead horse on shattering the 9-5 and so on, so I feel no need to do that here, however I would encourage anyone also to explore things they wanna try in a broader sense. If we all meditated on those ideas and plans we dismiss due to perceived in-feasibility, and figured out how to make those things work from a financial and time perspective, I think we would find a lot more happy, fulfilled people, and also more diverse, interesting work that comes alive.