Polymath: Master Multiple Disciplines, Learn New Skills, Think Flexibly, and Become Extraordinary Autodidact

Being a specialist requires you to perform in the top 1 percent (for example) of just one discipline. A polymath will perform in, say, the top 25 percent of three disciplines or more. And here you see the first main advantage: being a polymath is actually easier, from this point of view. You can more quickly find yourself in the top 25 percent than in the 1 percent. How do you do this? Well, you “stand on the shoulders of giants.” You needn’t invent the wheel anew each time. Part of a polymath’s invaluable skillset is knowing how to quickly find and synthesize the highest quality information. This concept known as skill stacking is central to a later chapter in this book.

Being a specialist requires you to perform in the top 1 percent (for example) of just one discipline. A polymath will perform in, say, the top 25 percent of three disciplines or more. And here you see the first main advantage: being a polymath is actually easier, from this point of view. You can more quickly find yourself in the top 25 percent than in the 1 percent. How do you do this? Well, you “stand on the shoulders of giants.” You needn’t invent the wheel anew each time. Part of a polymath’s invaluable skillset is knowing how to quickly find and synthesize the highest quality information. This concept known as skill stacking is central to a later chapter in this book.

Unfortunately, even though we live in a world almost literally run by polymaths like Jeff Bezos, most of us still cling to conventional wisdom that artificially creates the idea of distinct disciplines in the first place.

As E.M. Forster famously advised, “only connect.”

Being a polymath does require something of a perspective shift: rather than running as far as you can in a single race, you open your field of perception to take in as much as possible, and draw atypical connections to link the knowledge you already have in surprising ways. Be probing and bold in thought; ask unusual questions and put things together that are ordinarily separate, just to see what happens

A T-shape is not the goal for a polymath; rather, a pi shape is, or even a comb shape, representing depth of knowledge in multiple realms.

It’s as though the creative combining of skills across disciplines allows for quicker breakthroughs than merely hammering away in just one field, unaware of anything else in other domains.

When most people talk about famous polymaths, they are referring to people who have not just earned competencies in different areas, but who manage to creatively integrate those abilities—and the sum is inevitably greater than the parts!

We could argue that these people are all geniuses who engaged with multiple disciplines because they were smart and successful, rather than the idea that their success was in part their versatility.

When you survey the most prominent and successful scientists, it’s easy to see that the majority were decidedly generalists.