By now, it should be clear that what distinguishes polymaths and other intelligent people is not the skillset per se, but the attitude behind it.
If you’re interested in developing your own skillset, it’s natural to ask, “What exactly should I learn?” The answer to this question is obvious: it depends on your purposes.
You might decide that you want to pursue a more diverse inventory of skills to make yourself more competitive in the market, a better businessperson or entrepreneur, or a little of both.
In merely asking the question, you’ve actually begun to shift perspective and open your mind to possibilities outside of narrowly defined job descriptions.
Take inspiration from those who you admire.
Look at the jobs or positions you want and imagine what skills and abilities would come in handy.
Areas like public speaking, anything that encourages critical thinking, the development of time management or leadership skills, or the associated social skills that come with your profession are a logical place to start.
But perhaps, in the true spirit of being a renaissance man, you want to pursue polymathy for its own innate virtues, beyond its benefits in one specific workplace or another.
You may want to learn more and become more well-rounded simply because your life itself is a project that holds the most interest and importance for you, and you’re inspired to be what you can in this life, given your strengths and limitations.
But where to start? A great way to begin is by taking stock of your skills, aptitudes, personality traits, history and experiences.
What do you have that nobody else does? In what ways are you your own unique self, in a way that nobody else can be? What opinions and ideas and interests and passions do you have that have followed you throughout life, no matter what? These things are like gold—they’re the foundations on which to build and cultivate other skills.
Let’s say you are what people understand as a rather mathematically minded type of person.
You excel at the “hard” sciences, you’re technologically proficient and have no problem understanding mechanical and engineering concepts or strategy games.
These are wonderful skills to have but may result in a somewhat lopsided “profile.” You may, on the other hand, be relatively detached from your physical body, have poor emotional, social and/or spiritual development, be artistically illiterate and have the culinary palette of a two-year-old.
The stereotype of a skinny, shy nerd didn’t come from nowhere! Now, this is not to say that people with some skills are necessarily bad at “opposite” skills—in fact, it’s this very myth that is so elegantly shattered by the existence of polymaths, who prove that human beings can excel in all kinds of areas simultaneously.
But, for the sake of our example, imagine that our mathematically minded person follows the old stereotype.
To become more well-rounded, he can deliberately seek to pursue those endeavors that are most different from the ones he gravitates to naturally.
This requires the maturity to tolerate being a beginner, and the courage to get out of old comfort zones and maybe even risk changing as a person.
Our example could take up a study in an entirely unrelated domain.
Ballroom dancing, watercolor painting or reading the works of Jung could all offer vital counterbalance to his natural skills.
In truth, of course, these skills are not really “opposites” at all—the gift of polymathy is realizing how profoundly these activities are connected, and it’s only our narrowmindedness that insists they belong in separate categories.
The natural world doesn’t divide itself into academic disciplines.
What a wonderful thing to realize that “hard” and “soft” sciences cannot be identified and separated out in the actual phenomenological world unfolding before us.
This could be why many brilliant scientists are actually deeply enthralled with Zen Buddhism, dream work, psychedelics, or the great poets, or are even devoutly religious.
Rather than their spiritual side clashing with their scientific pursuits, they enhance them.
Similarly, a person who is naturally endowed with a more artistic skill set may find immense value in developing their logical, mathematical brain by taking up a science, learning chess or model building.
It’s not that a person is improved by taking up this or that specific activity, but rather that the more activities they explore, the greater the chance of making creative connections between them.
Again, the specific material doesn’t matter—it’s the richness, diversity and connectedness of that material that’s significant.
Rather than thinking how much you can learn, can you reorient to seeing how well you can integrate? All the great thinkers have, in their own way, been pursuing a grand “theory of everything” after their own design.
When you combine elements that are seemingly unrelated, the space between them is the realm where creativity lives.
There is nothing new under the sun, as it’s been said, but there is no limit to how you can combine what exists already!
Einstein and Combinatory Play
Surprisingly (or not), the most notable scientist of the 20th century was known for taking time out of his research to play the violin.
In so doing, Einstein was engaging in a combination of the hard and the soft.
Reportedly, he was even very good at the instrument, as he was with the piano.
But while sawing away on the violin during his breaks, Einstein actually arrived at some breakthroughs in his research and philosophical questionings.
Allegedly one of these musical sessions was the spark for his most famous equation: E=mc2.
Einstein came up with the term combinatory play to describe the intangible process in which his favorite pastime led to ideas that revolutionized the whole of scientific thought.
He explained his reasoning as best he could in 1 in a letter to French mathematician Jacques S.
Hadamard: “My Dear Colleague: In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able.
I am not satisfied myself with those answers and I am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any advantage for the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken.
(A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts.
It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.
But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
(B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type.
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
(C) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.
(D) Visual and motor.
In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage, as already mentioned.
(E) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished.
This seems to be connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins).” Einstein seemed to believe that indulging in his creative tendencies was helpful for his logical and rational pursuits.
That might have been the case, and it also might have been the case that to engage in a distraction was helpful for taking on different perspectives and viewing problems from different angles.
Perhaps it’s related to the Medici effect from an earlier chapter, in which the melding of different disciplines will inevitably lead to new discoveries.
Indeed, combinatory play is not simply the notion that play takes your mind to a different world to regroup.
It recognizes, as Einstein did, that taking pieces of knowledge and insight from different disciplines and combining them in new contexts is how most creativity truly happens.
So as mentioned, somehow Einstein saw something in playing the violin that helped him think about physics in an entirely new way.
The lesson here is to engage in your own pursuits and not feel constrained by having to stay in similar or adjacent disciplines, thinking that only they will aid you.
There are always parallels between different disciplines, so find them.
More of the same probably will not help; a dash of something different just might.
