The Secrets of 21st Century Polymaths
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur SchopenhauerEver since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with two things: marketing and Christian theology.
It’s an odd combination — but that’s the point. Discussing theology with other people is a test of your intellectual rigour. Studying religion teaches you to think critically and argue intelligently for truth, sans ego.
As a result of my study of the Bible, the principles and lessons I learned from history, philosophy, and geography inform my ethics, approach, and decision-making in marketing and business.
Take a look at this illustration from Michael Simmons:
The biggest misconception about polymaths, by far, is that they’re “jack[s] of all trades and a master of none.” In fact, the opposite is true. To achieve breakthrough and mastery in a field, you have to relate it to fields and interests in your peripheral field of vision.
The simplest roadmap to becoming a polymath is to achieve journeyman status in 3 different fields, then using the 2 to inform the main one.
Polymaths read a variety of topics to spot patterns and make connections. This breadth of experience lets them solve problems that other people can’t solve — maybe because other people are tunnel-focused on one field.
Once you learn to understand two completely different points of view in your head — and be able to make the case for both opposing arguments — you start thinking creatively and attacking problems from different directions.
Polymaths balance creativity with respect for the worldview and experiences of people who came before them. Because of how much they know, they know how little they actually know. This lets them approach the world with an abundance of knowledge and humility.
In this essay, I’m not going to talk about generalists and specialists. Instead I’ll talk about ...
A few of the benefits of becoming a polymath
Why you shouldn’t read bestselling books if you want to become a polymath
How you should read if you want to become one
Being a Polymath Lets You Think in Ways No One Else Does
What do technologists who all want to ...
Build the same unicorn
In the same industry
Have read (or claim to have read) Peter Thiel’s Zero to One
... Call themselves?
Contrarian.
They all want to be associated with tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s ideas, but that in itself makes them generic. Ironic, isn’t it? This is because if you truly understand Zero to One, you’ll know that Thiel isn’t focused on being contrarian. He latched on to an obscure philosophy called mimetic theory and used it as the Bible for his life.
Thiel’s obsession with finding the truth rather than being right, leads him to ask questions and find points of agreement with both sides of any argument.
Very much like how true polymaths aren’t focused on achieving the status of one. They just constantly burrow as deep as their curiosity takes them.
Being A Polymath Lets You Solve Problems No One Else Can
In Nobel Prize-winner, Richard Feynman’s memoir, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, he doesn’t really talk about physics all that much. Instead, he talks about fiddling with radios as a kid. He brags about cracking military filing cabinets as an amateur safecracker. He writes about the pranks he pulled on his colleagues.
Interspersed among all these random anecdotes are stories about his lateral way of thinking. In one, he talks about solving calculus that stumped all the math students — even if he wasn’t in the math department. He says, “I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.” He approached the problems as a physicist.
Having a different field in his back pocket allowed him to find an alternate solution.
Then there’s the legendary story of how he arrived at the theory for his Nobel Prize-winning paper on quantum electrodynamics while watching a plate wobble. He recounts,
“It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”
Here’s what most people don’t know about that story: Feynman came up with his award-winning paper, while he was on a break from his field — not just his work. At the time, he was studying biology because he was burnt out from physics. Then he had a breakthrough while watching plates wobble.
He could see his old problems because he was in a different environment, with a fresh set of eyes and a brain full of new ideas.
Being A Polymath Lets You Spot Opportunities No One Else Sees
Arthur Schopenhauer once said, "The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”
Having a different viewpoint, language, or mental model begets a unique — and equally valid — lens to a common situation. In other words, you can see what everyone else glosses over.
As best-selling author Adam Grant found in his research for his book Originals, the most creative people tend to be those that experience or identify with at least 2 cultures.
I experienced this myself when I got feedback on my essay on true wealth.
Any Filipino-Chinese Christian would read that essay and say, “D-uh. I already know that.” But for many North Americans, that essay presented a radically life-changing attitude towards money.
Richard Feynman supplemented his lifelong love for physics with his passion for cracking safes and pranking his colleagues. Peter Thiel quit law and built multiple billion-dollar businesses through the employment of a distinct philosophical belief.
It’s important to break out of group-think. To think like no one else does, to see what no one else does. You need to wake up from The Matrix to make the impact on the world that only you can make.
And this starts with what you read.
Becoming a Polymath: Why You Shouldn’t Read Bestsellers
As prolific novelist and runner Haruki Murakami observed, “If you read what everybody else is reading, you’ll think what everybody else is thinking.”
The best way to become a creative, contrarian polymath is to read books other people can’t or won’t read. And this definition excludes most books on the current New York Times Bestseller list.
Why books, and not articles, essays, blog posts, magazines, news or podcasts?
Remember that the goal of becoming a polymath is to have a unique lens with which to attack problems, think creatively, and experience the world. You can’t do that if you insist on following along with what the masses are consuming.
Reading books filter out over 90% of the population who can’t be bothered to pick up or invest time and effort into a book.
Reading long books filter through the 10% of readers who can’t obsess over one idea long enough to understand it.
Reading long, old, and obscure books filter out the best ideas from history that have stood the test of time and are thus, exponentially worth your limited time.
Of course, just because a book is long and old doesn’t mean it’s worth slogging through. Length and age does not equal substance. But there’s a chance that it is. The future life expectancy of non-perishable things like books is proportional to their current age — that’s the Lindy Effect.
But it’s not enough to pick up hard books and scan them. After filtering through the books you read, the next step is to make the ideas in the book your own.
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Marginalia & The Polymath: Why You Should Read to Write
As Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren put it in How To Read A Book,
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it.”
My marginalia for Adam Grant’s book Give and Take
Writing marginalia as you read — notes in the margins of a book — lets you apply the author’s ideas to the problems you’re working on as you read. It shows you how to think like the author. Through marginalia, you get to try on a different life, lens, and worldview than you hold right now.
When you sit down later to write an essay or a newsletter, you’ll already have 50-100 words of your ideas, observations, and cross-disciplinary connections on each highlight. Writer and blogger Maria Popova attributes her prolific output to the extensive marginalia she takes as she reads:
[My blog] is an inquiry into what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life, and a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.
To start taking marginalia, read with a pen in hand. Underline passages that catch your attention and ask yourself:
“How does this concept apply to my field?”
“Why did this catch my attention?”
“How does this relate to that other book I read?”
Personally, rewriting notes hasn’t stuck for me. Instead here’s an overview of my digital note-taking system for books:
I read books almost exclusively on Kindle and Apple iBooks. Whenever I highlight a passage in a book, I add a comment or a note to it using one of the questions above.
All highlights and comments automatically get sent to Evernote via Readwise (more on that in a second)
All the notes in my Evernote account are available offline on my iPad. I have my entire intellectual life, organized at my fingertips at any time.
For specifics on how I use Readwise for note-taking, check out this article.
For more on how I pull all these notes together when I write, check out this article.
As celebrated mathematician and polymath (among other things, of course) René Descartes writes, “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." When you get into the habit of taking notes as you read, you’ll eventually feel like a conduit for ideas and thinkers to connect with each other.
Your Personal Polymath Journey
Becoming a polymath is about building career capital, knowledge, and skills that will free you up to maintain this integrity. As I shared in the 40th edition of my newsletter,
“Unless you can be the undisputed #1 in your field — impossibly difficult because titles, championships, and awards can all be won and lost — you need to go wide to go deep.”
This desire for intellectual freedom drives me to spend 10 hours a week reading old Christian theologians, alongside both modern and old-school marketers, like Russell Brunson and Daniel Ogilvy.
Their books find a place on my Kindle shelf alongside a collection of Warren Buffet's shareholder letters, Marcus Aurelius’ seminal Meditations, and biographies about legendary polymaths like Ron Chernow’s Hamilton.
To be clear, becoming a polymath isn’t about being smarter. It’s about being less of a fool. Richard Feynmann reminds us that, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Becoming a polymath isn’t about status. It’s about having a thirst to see our world for what it is, and quenching that thirst with understanding. Leonardo Da Vinci sums it up nicely,
“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Finally, becoming a polymath isn’t about never committing to a single field. In fact, it’s about being so committed to a single field that every other interest informs that singular focus. This commitment begets the freedom that the non-committal can only dream of and chase after.
I wish you the freedom and integrity that only polymathy — a commitment to a craft, a thirst for learning, and the drive for self-improvement — can bring.