The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Others, such as lifestyle coach Tim Ferriss — proving his point by becoming a record-breaking tango dancer, a national champion in martial arts, polyglot bestselling author, and successful businessman before the age of 35 — go as far as to suggest that with the right approach it is possible for anyone to ‘become world-class in almost any field within one year.’ The method, he claims, is to deconstruct the skill and reconstruct it in a personalised way. In fact, the likes of Josh Kaufman suggest that just 20 hours is enough to learn any skill to a good level, as this is when the learning curve is at its steepest. In any case, we know that multiple accomplishments in different fields within short periods are possible from the lives of José Rizal, Rudolph Fisher, Che Guevara and Pico Della Mirandola — all of whom died before the age of 40. The point is that time, if managed correctly, is always abundant and so any excuses made for a lack of it are seldom valid. As Leonardo da Vinci said, ‘time stays long enough for those who use it.’

  Creativity

  If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word ‘complexity.’ Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.

  — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Creativity has always been the backbone of human progress. So perhaps the greatest value of the polymath to both the individual and to society is that it is both a cause and a product of creativity. To understand this, we must first overcome the common assumption that creativity is solely associated with (or at least best manifested in) the arts and recognise that it is an integral part of most human endeavours. Whether it be a journalist crafting a story, a businessman negotiating a deal, a soldier in action being resourceful, an engineer inventing a device, a lawyer building a case, a taxi driver reconfiguring his route to avoid traffic, a humanitarian starting a charity or a plumber unblocking a sink — people create new concepts, organisations, works of art, and solutions to problems in new and innovative ways on a daily basis. In fact, every unforeseen method or breakthrough, whether on a macro or a micro scale, whether in scholarship or in practical life, is essentially creative act.

  Most, if not all, individuals are thus either creative or have the potential to be. Those whom we often consider ‘artists’ are merely instigators or ‘enablers’ of creativity; imagination and creativity is often left to the reader, listener or viewer of art. The job of writers and artists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Wassily Kandinsky is as much to invoke or provoke imagination as it is to use their own imaginations to produce their works. In this way, given the multifacetedness of human life, most individuals are likely to have been creative in multiple spheres of life during the course of their lifespan. For most, this ‘polymathic creativity’ is not even recognised by themselves let alone by others, except for a small group of recognised polymaths.

  The Creative Force

  If you have a creative mind you can seek to develop ideas in almost any field.

  — Edward de Bono

  Hiraga Ginnai was born in nineteenth-century Japan with a boundless urge to innovate in everything he did. He initially began by exploring new ways of concocting herbal medicines. His creative genius won him an appointment as pharmacologist in Takamatsu Castle’s herb garden. He soon resigned, becoming a ronin, as he felt there were many more things that he could apply his creativity to. Ginnai began with economics. He wrote about trade imbalances and pioneered self-sufficient transplant industries in Japan, and developed methods of manufacturing wool to replace imports from the West, pottery to replace imports from China and the plantation of olive trees to reduce reliance on Dutch olive oil imports.

  He then applied his creativity to the world of business and entrepreneurship — recognising Japan’s strength in metals exports he started numerous business ventures including a mining business, a barge service and a charcoal wholesale business. As an inventor he produced an electrical generator called the erekiteru, which worked by rubbing an insulated cylinder of glass against a piece of foil to produce a static charge.

  Ginnai then decided creativity was best expressed through the arts. Having learned Western oil painting techniques from the Dutch, he developed his own oils and dyes which he used to produce numerous works including the famous Painting of a Western Woman (Seiyō Fujin zu). He also became an art teacher and finally tried his hand at writing fiction. He authored several novels including Fūryū shidōken den, which has been cited as Japan’s first science fiction story, and a famous satire called Hōhiron (On Farting).

  Ginnai showed us that creativity — whether in the realm of business, academia, the arts or everyday life — when genuinely embedded at the core of mind, can be applicable across a wide variety of fields. He was neither a scientist nor artist nor writer nor inventor. He was simply a creator. Douglas Hofstadter reminds us that ‘most people would rather refer to Leonardo da Vinci as a creator who operated in different fields rather than as a polymath.’ The polymath sees himself as a creator, whose inner creative force is like a match that can light several candles. ‘People who are creative in one area, are inherently polymathic,’ says cognitive psychologist Rand Spiro. Artistic polymath Billy Childish certainly agrees: ‘Creativity is boundless and can be applied to anything. If it’s not then it’s not true. If you can’t engage in painting in the same way that you engage in cooking or life in general then it’s probably not a true path.’

  This existence of this creative force within polymaths has been confirmed time and again through academic research. In 1926, psychologist Catherine Cox found through her research that the more creative an individual was, the more varied their interests. Psychologist Eliot Dole Hutchinson stressed that true creative genius has no bounds. ‘It is not an accident,’ she concludes after extensive study, ‘that in the great minds professions disappear . . . such men are not scientists, artists, musicians, when they might just as well have been something else. They are creators.’ This connection between polymathy and creativity is becoming an increasingly accepted truth among psychologists today, as American psychologist Robert Root-Bernstein noted: ‘It has long been observed by psychologists that people who are innovative tend to participate in a wider range of activities and develop a higher degree of skill in their activities than other people.’

  As with intelligence, there has been a long debate among psychologists as to whether creativity is ‘domain-general’ or ‘domain-specific.’ The former view maintains that the skills which lead to creative performance are essentially the same, or at least very similar, across all domains. It subscribes to the fact that there is an inner creative force within us all. The latter — championed by psychologists Baer and Kaufman — argues that the cognitive skills required for creativity in a particular domain are specific to that domain and cannot be applied to all domains. Nonetheless, they conclude that everyone essentially has ‘multicreative’ potential.

  Hybridity

  Diversity really does enrich the process of discovery and invention.

  — Fraser Stoddart, scientist and Nobel laureate

  Hybridity is the cause, process and outcome of any creative output. In this sense, everything is a hybrid. Conceptually (both in philosophy and science), the fusion of two or more distinct, unique entities produces another distinct, unique entity. The fact that the latter did not exist before the fusion confirms that it was created and that the fusion itself was a creative process. A creative experiment in chemistry, for example, must include two or more elements: experimenting on a single chemical element will only get you so far — you can boil it, freeze it, melt it — but that’s it. Combining two or more elements allows for the creation of a completely new compound substance or element. So hybridity is the creative outcome resulting from the synthesis of multiple, seemingly unrelated phenomena.

  This can apply to species, substances or ideas. It has been an ongoing process since the beginning of time, whether involving atoms, cells, genes, thoughts, languages, devices, concepts or materials. The term ‘hybrid’ was ini
tially used in the field of biology when referring to ‘cross-fertilisation’ or ‘cross-pollination’ in plants and animals. From the nineteenth century it began to be used in linguistics and racial theory, when it would describe the emergence of new languages and races from the blend of existing ones. But the notion of hybridity as being a ‘fusion’ or a ‘synthesis’ has always existed in some shape or form in different societies around the world.

  So how does the concept of hybridity apply to polymathy? Some of humanity’s greatest and most influential ideas are by their very nature hybrid constructs. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Ideas That Changed the World, concluded that important ideas come about through the perpetual synthesis of different ideas from different fields: ‘ideas “breed,” ’ he says, ‘they multiply in contact with one another.’ This can happen in a community of minds or even within a single mind.

  The hybridity of fields of knowledge or ‘disciplines’ is today referred to as interdisciplinarity. It is a fashionable trend, promoted at least through lip service, in modern academic and professional circles. As old ways of thinking (or pockets of knowledge) come to seem stale, irrelevant, inflexible or exclusionary, they are reorganised into new configurations and alliances in order to form a new, hybrid discipline that is more relevant to the new situation. Whether among a group of minds or within a single mind, the objective of interdisciplinarity is to approach any given problem or question in a multidimensional way, and in doing so to make important connections in pursuit of a greater understanding of the given phenomenon.

  Connections

  One part of learning doth confer light onto another.

  — Isaac Barrow

  Success has far too often come as a result of borrowing ideas from one field in order to advance in another. This is as true for art or science as it is for scholarship or practical endeavours. Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin are undisputed geniuses, yet we have now discovered that they were not the tunnel-visioned specialists we too often assume them to be. On the contrary, the facts (and their own admissions) suggest that it was the connections made with their hobbies, varied backgrounds and additional pursuits that enabled them to make the breakthroughs they did in their respective core disciplines. Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking discovery of the microbe was only possible because Pasteur also had a background in crystallography, allowing him to appreciate the need for a microscopic lens in order to see the microbe. ‘Polymaths master their activities to a significant degree and perceive the fundamental connections between them,’ notes psychologist Robert Root-Bernstein.

  Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Celebrated nineteenth-century English scientist William Rowan Hamilton was a physicist, astronomer and mathematician who used the interconnectedness of his disciplines to excel in each of them. As a result of this synthesis he made major breakthroughs in algebra, classical mechanics and optics. ‘They [polymaths] made contributions to particular disciplines because of, not in spite of, their broad interests,’ insists Root-Bernstein. And it is polymaths such as these, he is convinced, to whom we will owe the greatest synthetic breakthroughs of the future. This is confirmed by historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. ‘The best thinkers in any one field tend also to be good in others, which are mutually enriching.’ Martin Kemp, the world’s leading authority on Leonardo da Vinci, confirms that ‘one of the characteristics you’ll find of polymaths generally is that they see links where we see separations — for Leonardo everything’s linked up.’

  No matter how specialised we claim to be, we are consistently borrowing ideas from other ‘fields’ (whether consciously or subconsciously) in order to seek creative, novel solutions. This might mean using a specialist skill (be it law, carpentry or health) to make money and become successful in business; insights as a soldier to contribute to government policy, scholarly debate or daily life; use of science in cooking; psychology to explain economics; and so on. Having a diverse range of skills, knowledge and experiences, stimulates an ability to see the bigger picture — which in turn allows for creative breakthrough. This link was aptly explained by Steve Jobs, perhaps the most influential creator of the twenty-first century:

  Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

  — Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1995

  A synthesis, it appears, occurs in the subconscious that somehow enables us to eventually arrive at creative ideas. This notion was recognised over fifty years ago by the creative advertising mogul James Webb Young in his acclaimed book A Technique for Producing New Ideas: ‘An idea is no more or less than a new combination of old elements,’ he said. . . . ‘Insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales. . . . To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge.’

  This is certainly true for the modern interdisciplinary scholar and intellectual polymath Vaclav Smil, who argues that ‘the complexity of the real world demands many perspectives (including historical appraisals) and requires the tracing of many linkages.’ It is especially true for those at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs today. Scientific polymath Ray Kurzweil attributes the solution to the great technological problems of our age to this ability to make connections: ‘Increasingly, the solutions to problems are found at the intersection of multiple fields. For example, my work in speech recognition involved speech science, linguistics, mathematical modelling, psycho-acoustics and computer science.’

  Psychologists have consistently recognised this. Lewis Terman found that there are few persons who achieve great eminence in one field without displaying more than average ability in one or more other fields. Roberta Milgram found that career success in any discipline is better correlated with one or more intellectually stimulating and intensive avocational interests than with IQ, grades, standardised test scores or any combination of these.

  Historians too have found the same. Historian of science Paul Cranfield highlighted that among the group that discovered biophysics in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, there was a direct correlation between the number and range of avocations each individual pursued, the number of major discoveries he made, and his subsequent status as a scientist. Another historian, Minor Myers, studied the lives of many great figures from the Renaissance through to the modern era and discovered a correlation between the range of developed abilities and the diversity and importance of an individual’s contributions. He concluded that the greater the diversity of knowledge and skill set that an individual can integrate, the greater the number of resultant novel and useful permutations.

  Writer Andrew Robinson’s investigations into the lives of polymaths Thomas Young, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray (he has written biographies of each) show that there is an evident link between polymathy and creativity. ‘A significant number of exceptional creators have worked in more than one domain’ he says, providing the example of breakthroughs in decipherment by Young and prodigious twentieth-century Englishman Michael Ventris: ‘In both cases — Ventris and Young — their decipherment breakthroughs depended on their knowledge of disparate domains, which their scholarly rivals did not have.’ ‘Their best ideas’ he wrote, ‘arose from their versatility.’ This is confirmed by educationalist and creativity thinker Ke
n Robinson, who says, ‘creativity depends on interactions between feeling and thinking, and across different disciplinary boundaries and fields of ideas.’

  The Art-Science Intersection

  The greatest scientists are artists as well.

  — Albert Einstein

  Perhaps the best demonstration of the importance of interdisciplinarity is the largely unappreciated connection between art and science. Indeed, science is often used as a vehicle to excel in art, and vice versa. The creativity resulting from the art-science intersection has been evident throughout history. Leonardo used mathematics to achieve geometrical perfection in his paintings such as The Last Supper, whereas Einstein used his music (he played the violin) to spur his imagination while developing his General Theory of Relativity. Both made special note of the importance of these ‘external’ influences on their work. The supposed conceptual difference between the two is that ‘artists’ work with possible worlds whereas ‘scientists’ are constrained to working in the ‘real’ world. In truth, we know that imagination has a value for reality and reality has a value for imagination.

  The reason that this strong connection worked for geniuses such as Einstein and Leonardo is that science and art fill gaps for one another and serve as springboards into each other’s worlds. Indeed the most pioneering and creative scientists such as Einstein agreed that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand.’

  According to a study by American psychologist Bernice Eiduson titled the ‘Sigma Xi Survey’ based on testimonials by numerous Nobel laureates, most great scientists often have multiple avocational interests. In-depth analysis of Nobel laureates in literature between 1901 and 2002 found that great artists and writers often have multiple avocational interests. He found that the science laureates were highly accomplished outside the lab: more than half had at least one artistic avocation, and almost all had an enduring hobby, from chess to insect collecting; one quarter were musicians; and 18 percent practiced visual arts such as drawing or painting. These laureates are 25 times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance or act; 17 times as likely to be a visual artist; 12 times more likely to write poetry and literature; 8 times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; 4 times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer.