Most creative breakthroughs come via making atypical combinations of skills.

Researcher Brian Uzzi, a professor at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, analyzed more than 26 million scientific papers going back hundreds of years and found that the most impactful papers often have teams with atypical combinations of backgrounds.

It’s easier and faster than ever to become competent in a new skill. The quality of knowledge in every domain is improving and there is an abundance of free or affordable content from the world’s top experts in every medium you can think of.

Example: 13-year-old Michael Sayman taught himself how to code via Google. One of his mobile games became one of the top 100 apps in the world, beating out Starbucks and Yelp.

It's easier than ever to pioneer a new field, industry, or skill set:

• New skill sets, industries, and fields emerge is by combining them with old ones.
• The number of new academic fields and business industries is increasing exponentially.
• As the number of new skills increases, the number of possible combinations increases exponentially. Every new chunk of knowledge can theoretically be combined with every other knowledge chunk. Every new breakthrough creates the potential for exponentially more breakthroughs.

A polymath can take the skills that she or he has learned and combine them in new ways quickly to master new fields. 

On the other hand, a specialist whose fields becomes obsolete would likely take much more time to adapt to the change and have to start back at the beginning.

Being a polymath sets you up to solve more complex problems. Many of the largest problems that face society and individuals benefit from solutions that integrate multiple disciplines.

The relevance of supply and demand to the job market, to goods and services, to the world of ideas, and to many other places means that you can have the most valuable skill set in the world, but if everyone also has that skill set, then you’re a commodity.

Self-made billionaire Peter Thiel, asks prospective candidates, “What’s the one thing you believe is true that no one else agrees with you on?” This simple question very quickly tells you whether or not you have rare and valuable ideas.

Specialists build up a narrow skill set and reputation and become highly paid for it, but they become fragile as their professions disappear or evolve.

Changes to the environment make polymaths stronger. As new paradigms of business emerge or their passions grow, they can quickly combine their existing skill sets in a myriad of ways.

Polymaths have existed forever (they are often the ones who’ve advanced Western civilization more than any others )  but they’ve been called different things throughout history:

Philosopher king: Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Archimedes.

Renaissance person: Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei.

Gentleman scholar: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams.

Polymath: Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Theodore Roosevelt.

Modern polymath: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.