The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

Creativity – Connecting and synthesising seemingly disparate fields for a creative outcome

To emancipate ourselves from this unfortunate reality, we must recondition our minds. We must each revert to our primordial self – the innate polymath – and take an alternative path to growth and development.

perceived the vastness of knowledge to be unmanageable as a whole. So a highly critical, reductionist approach to learning, pioneered by French philosopher Rene Descartes, steered the trend towards intellectual specialisation,…

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Leonardo's mathematical polymathy was of a particular kind, but I do think it likely that most polymaths see more unity in their diversity than we can readily discern. They are better at seeing relationships, analogies, commonalities, affinities, relevancies, underlying causalities, structural unities.

Kids are very cognitively flexible; it is school with its multiple choice tasks, regimental learning, and compartmentalization of subjects that has scorched that flexibility, that creativity, that inherent ability to see the world outside of single disciplinary boundaries … see it polymathically.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can already beat humans in most mind-challenging games such as chess, backgammon, quiz contests and scrabble.

Intellectual specialisation by the 1800s thus became a reality and different disciplines of knowledge were being institutionalised in the form of academic departments at universities. The word ‘discipline’ – imported from the military notion of control or restraint – began to be used in the…

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Around the world, whether in the form of the Persian hakeem, West African griots, the Chinese junzi, or the Mayan itz'at, the tradition of the multipurpose, polymathic courtier existed in most eras of premodern history.

Daniel Pink, in his book Free Agent Nation, noted that America's career landscape was changing and would soon be dominated by freelancers or portfolio careerists. Bill Bridges' book Jobshift argued along similar lines, Marci Alboher's One Person/Multiple Careers highlighted this growing trend among normal people in the United States and more recent