I recently discovered I’m a polymath, and suddenly my entire life kinda makes a little more sense.
Not the scattered, unfocused, “jack of all trades, master of none” bullshit I’ve been telling myself for years. An actual polymath. Someone whose brain is wired to excel across multiple unrelated disciplines, to see connections others miss, to get bored with specialisation and crave intellectual diversity. Which probably goes hand in hand with the variety of topics I write about in my emails, and how I somehow tie them together in one way or the other…
Crazy thing is for over a decade…
I thought something was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just pick one thing and stick with it? Why did I get restless after mastering a skill? Why was I constantly jumping between interests that had nothing to do with each other?
Turns out, that’s how a polymath and their brains work.
While everyone else is told to “find their niche” and “become an expert in one area,” polymaths are over here connecting dots across completely different fields, synthesising knowledge in ways that create breakthrough insights, and getting labelled as unfocused because we refuse to limit ourselves to one domain.
The world needs specialists, sure. But it also desperately needs people who can think across boundaries, who can apply principles from one field to solve problems in another, who can see the bigger picture that emerges when you zoom out far enough.
And so when I have a little catch up with a friend of mine whose well versed and educated in all of this neurological / brain fuckery stuff.
They asked a few questions:
Do you get genuinely excited about learning things that have nothing to do with your “main” area of expertise?
Not just casually interested but genuinely excited. The kind of excitement where you lose track of time researching Byzantine history even though you’re supposedly a marketing consultant, or you find yourself deep in quantum physics videos when you’re actually a graphic designer.
Do you see patterns and connections between completely unrelated fields that others seem to miss?
You read about game theory and immediately see how it applies to parenting. You learn about jazz improvisation and realise it’s the same principle your favourite entrepreneur uses to build businesses. Your brain naturally builds bridges between islands of knowledge and you wake up with more ideas than what you did just before you went to sleep.
Do you get bored once you’ve achieved competency in something, even if you’re not yet an “expert”?
You learn enough about photography to take decent photos, then suddenly you’re interested in learning Portuguese. You get good enough at coding to build functional websites, then you pivot to studying behavioural psychology. Mastery feels less important than exploration.
Do people tell you that you “know a little bit about everything” or ask how you know so much about random topics?
Your conversations jump from cryptocurrency to medieval architecture to cognitive bias research, and people either find it fascinating or completely overwhelming. You’re the person others come to when they need information about something obscure.
Need to figure out the best time of the year to do some underwater basket weaving? I gotchu…
Do you feel like traditional career advice doesn’t apply to you because you can’t imagine doing just one thing forever?
“Find your passion” makes you laugh because you have seventeen passions. “Become an expert” feels limiting. “Stay in your lane” sounds like a death sentence. You’d rather be a generalist who can contribute across multiple domains than a specialist trapped in one.
If you answered yes to most of these, congratulations… You’re probably a polymath. And that means you need to stop apologising for your diverse interests and lean into them some more.
The future belongs to people who can think across disciplines, especially with the way AI is being force fed into our lives.
Nobody learns and studies anything outside of this massive wall of technological bullshit been directly drip fed into our brain meat via social media.
Stephen Walker.