The Polymath Playbook

1. Over-specialization: This often happens to PhD students who have pursued very niche, highly specific areas of expertise. It’s rare to find jobs that can actually serve their level of specialization. They find themselves given a choice to continue their career in academia, or take a less desirable job in the workforce that doesn’t actually leverage their unique skills.

2. Diminishing returns: The larger your team is, the more difficult it becomes to be the absolute best in a particular area. As a simple example: It’s quite difficult to become the most technically proficient engineer in a given company. However, it’s much more straightforward to differentiate yourself through excellent communication skills, design sensibilities, leadership skills, and so on.

One of the strange things about having multiple pursuits is that you never quite fit into social groups. I remember joining an iOS developers group where most of the members had been doing iOS development for more than a decade. Meanwhile, I had worked on countless platforms, in different roles across a variety of industries. We may have been in the same group, but we had lived completely different lives. It was hard to relate.

Ironically, the moment I started to feel like I was finally getting settled in a group, I’d get bored! I’d feel an urge to explore something new, or try a different angle. That’s the blessing and the curse of the polymath lifestyle. You’re always exploring, and rarely settling.

I believe it’s important to have at least one strong foundational pursuit (in my case it’s engineering). That way you can explore other areas while always having something to fall back on. You need to work at something for many years before you really start to hit the meaningful learnings. Make sure you’ve refined your mental models before moving on to try and combine them with new ones.