The Approach Of A Polymath

"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."

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.

When polymaths become interested in something, they don't care which domain or sphere it leads them. Some qualities of a Polymath person:

• Above-average intelligence
• Open-mindedness
• Curiosity
• Self-reliance
• Individualism
• A desire for personal fulfillment
• Desire to find connections.

“The polymath not only moves between different spheres or different fields and disciplines, but seeks fundamental connections between those fields, so as to give them a unique insight into each of them.”

"Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour."

To come up with new ideas, you need to know things outside your field.

The further afield your knowledge extends, the greater potential you have for innovation.

A polymath that made fundamental contributions to diverse fields of study, including logic, rhetoric, ethics, physics, story, poetry, government, metaphysics, geology and zoology.

Aristotle believed that we should strive to live a life of moderation, nurturing the virtues within ourselves and avoiding the vices on either extreme end.

H was the father of the High Renaissance style. Da Vinci made contributions to many other fields: urban planning, mathematics, botany, astronomy, invention, history, sculpting and cartography.

• He introduced the idea of painting with aerial perspective (painting faraway objects less distinctly and with less vibrant colors).
• He was also interested in anatomy. He used his skills as an artist to create the Vitruvian Man, a study on body proportion and an exemplar of the intersection of math and art common in the Renaissance era. 

Cultivating a broad range of pursuits was once seen as the richest way to live, and the surest path to Great discoveries. 

Even today, in a time where the model of efficiency via hyper-specialisation has shifted our focus from ideas to output, the envelope-shifters we most look up to are polymaths. (Steve Jobs and Elon Musk spring to mind.)

• Start by reading magazines and blogs to get to grips with new fields;
• Sign up to a course in something new. It will help add extra dimensions to your life experience.
• Pick a new sport – a true polymath cultivates his physique. 
• Give up the myth of the One True Calling and establish a polymath life working around your many interests. 

• First principles thinking: actively questioning every assumption you think you know about a given problem or scenario  and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. 
• Reasoning by analogy: building knowledge and solving problems based on prior assumptions, beliefs and widely held ‘best practices’ approved by majority of people.

1. Identify and define your current assumptions;
2. Breakdown the problem into its fundamental principles;
3. Create new solutions from scratch.

... through everything you do. That's the power of compounding. If you get 1% better at understanding how the world works, how human behavior works, how economic systems function, and understanding your own brain — that 1% improvement impacts everything you do. 

The best kind of knowledge is not ephemeral junk , that will be useless in a few years, but the core pillars of human knowledge and the major academic disciplines. That knowledge changes very slowly over time  and it’s a core foundation that you can build upon and grow from. 

...is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption.

Reasoning by first principles removes the impurity of assumptions and conventions. What remains is the essentials. 

If we never learn to take something apart, test the assumptions, and reconstruct it, we end up trapped in what other people tell us.

We remain trapped in the way things have always been done. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same.

The Pareto Principle could also be observed in almost every industry:

• In software, 80% of the errors and crashes in a system would be eliminated by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs.
• In sports, 20% of athletes participate in 80% of the big games
• In business, 20% of the products bring in 80% of the revenue.

It is hard to accept the truth that there are inequalities everywhere. But depending on how you see it, the rule could help us filter out unnecessary data, better channel our resources, and make better decision in work and life.