Why Should you strive for Polymathy?
Future Proof Yourself + Personal & Societal Benefits
#1 Future Proof Yourself:
In the age of hyper-specialization, we have workers staying in their lane for years because that provides economic security for a while. Everyone is in their perfect box and things work well. Until they don't, and the job disappears or the economy dips.
What do the following professions have in common?
App developer
Autonomous car engineer
Big data specialist
Online Content Creator
They didn’t exist 15 years ago, yet they are valuable professions now. We don’t know the future and what will be a valuable skill in 10 years, so why not diversify and strive for Polymathy? Striving for polymathy makes your career future proof. It's like diversifying your skills like how you diversify your investments.
You wouldn't put all your money in one basket, so why would you do the same for your skills & career?
#2 Personal Benefits:
Polymaths aren't born. They're made and the benefits are akin to enlightenment.
Improved creativity, empathy, resilience, perspective
Self-confidence & Self-Worth
Better critical thinking
Better happiness sharing content & knowledge.
Standout & keep in the global economy.
It’s easier and faster to master new skills.
Quality online education is constantly improving, and each domain is adding new ideas and frameworks daily. The golden era for learning and improving your situation is now, and the future belongs to those who invest in in learning and discipline themselves to perform consistent actions towards polymathy.
Take any interest or skill you have and combine it with others.
Enjoy running but also work full-time as a biologist? Talk about the biology of running and balancing life and work as a full-time scientist.
Interested in sociology and biology, combine them into sociobiology.
Yoky Matsuoka combined her interest in neuroscience & robotics to create neurorobotics.
How you create value depends on you. It can be writing online, creating courses, pioneering an academic field of research, or writing a book. The important thing is to create using your combined interests because that’s where the future is.
#3 Societal Benefits:
Striving for polymathy is like striving for enlightenment. You pick up different fields and nuances and add them to your toolbox. Each tool has a single purpose but combined they can be used for many different things.
It's the synthesis of different tools that solves problems.
Our world has no shortage of complex, interconnected problems. These problems require an interconnected toolbox to develop solutions. For example, Darwin needed to synthesize many fields to develop his Theory of Evolution. Steve Johnson from Where Good Ideas Come From, describes it:
The idea itself drew on a coffeehouse of different disciplines: to solve the mystery, he had to think like a naturalist, a marine biologist, and a geologist all at once. He had to understand the life cycle of coral colonies, and observe the tiny evidence of organic sculpture on the rocks of the Keeling Islands; he had to think on the immense time scales of volcanic mountains rising and falling into the sea… To understand the idea in its full complexity required a kind of probing intelligence, willing to think across those different disciplines and scales.
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From
Complex problems such as obesity, climate change, artificial intelligence, regulating emerging industries, all require nuanced perspectives from different domains. No longer can we have everyone hyper-specialize in a field and expect to survive as a species.