The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Polymaths are of increasing value in the twenty-first century because the big problems of the world — such as the unequal distribution of wealth around the world, racism and bigotry, terrible inter and intra country aggressions, climate change — are not going to be solved by someone coming from a single-disciplinary perspective. If their solutions were simple we would’ve solved them already. I don’t see them being solved by someone who is just a political scientist, just a diplomat or just an economist . . . they’re going to need someone that has at least a sufficient level of broad expertise so that they can help bridge the gap as part of a team of specialists.

  Ashok Jahnavi Prasad

  If the polymath were to manifest himself purely in the academic context, Ashok Jahnavi Prasad, who is probably the most diversely qualified academic alive, would be the archetype. His qualifications span a variety of subject areas; related to but also beyond the sciences. He has a staggering five (real, not honorary) doctorates (Ph.D.s) and ten Masters-level degrees, the majority attained before he turned 35 from some of the leading academic institutions in the world including Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard universities. He has also held full professorships in several centres worldwide.

  Prasad is a scientific polymath whose degrees have been in medicine, paediatrics, pathology, clinical genetics, psychiatry, surgery, public health, geography, biology, mathematics, psychology and aviation medicine. His major scientific contributions include establishing a link between GABA, Valproate and mania, which led to a safer alternative to toxic lithium, and he has a syndrome named after him which links Hashimoto’s with mania. But he also has advanced degrees in the humanities: in history, anthropology and law.

  Prasad now lives a reclusive life, which is why he has not received the sort of worldwide recognition usually afforded to record-breaking geniuses. When asked about what motivated him to pursue such a great and diverse number of qualifications, he responded as a truly holistic thinker ‘I am not so sure if my interests are all that diverse; all of them relate in some way or the other.’ He says his core interest was in psychiatry, from which many of his other interests derived. ‘I then understood that psychiatry was one branch of medicine which had all the dimensions — humanistic, social, anthropological, scientific, genetic and legal. . . . And firmly came to the conclusion that established orthodoxies had to be challenged and in order to gain real insight, we had to look at the specialty from all the different angles.’ He recommends this for all ‘specialists’ looking to gain a rounded and in-depth picture into their speciality: ‘Seeking answers to your field through an adequate insight into other disciplines is extremely healthy and indeed necessary.’

  Prasad feels that a polymath is essentially ‘an enquiring mind prepared to challenge the established orthodoxies.’ In challenging the status quo, however, he recalls the marginalisation he experienced. The reaction from others to his ‘academically deviant’ ways ‘varied from bewilderment to resentment.’ Most colleagues, he said, were ‘respectful and supportive but there were others who felt threatened and even used underhand means to demoralise.’ And then inevitably he was given the label that most polymathic geniuses are often branded with: ‘By and large the label of being an eccentric stuck to me.’

  Nathan Myhrvold

  ‘I guess some people itch in just one spot,’ Nathan Myhrvold ponders. ‘I have itches all over. It feels good to scratch each one every once in a while.’ Nathan Myhrvold began his career as a Cambridge University scientist, where he worked under Stephen Hawking as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics. He then joined Microsoft, where he founded Microsoft Research and became the corporation’s chief strategist as well as its chief technology officer.

  Having perhaps the most important technological position in the world was simply not enough for Myhrvold. He had itches to scratch. So he retired after 14 years at Microsoft to found Intellectual Ventures, a patent investing and invention company that has since become the global leader in the business of invention. The company has acquired 95,000 assets which cover over fifty technology areas. The team includes Lowell Wood, who a few years ago surpassed Thomas Edison as the most prolific American inventor in U.S. history. Myhrvold has amassed a fortune allowing him to spend time on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated projects that fascinate him:

  Things have turned out pretty well for me professionally. So well that at this point I can really follow my curiosity and dive deeply into whatever subjects I find fascinating. Recently that has included metamaterials, the epidemiology of polio, the science and history of bread and baking, thermal modelling of asteroids, the growth rates of dinosaurs, and a number of other topics.

  Myhrvold is no dilettante. His TED profile describes him as a ‘professional jack of all trades.’ He was part of a team that won the World Barbeque Championships and was lead author of the six-volume, 2,500-page cook book Modernist Cuisine, which won two James Beard Awards. He is also a prize-winning wildlife photographer who has been on multiple expeditions exploring volcanoes and archaeological sites worldwide. He has published numerous scientific papers on astronomy and palaeontology, and — as a major donor to the SETI Institute and other initiatives — is considered one of the country’s foremost ‘patrons of the sciences.’

  Myhrvold is a classic case of a non-conformist ‘eccentric.’ Despite having held important positions in powerful organisations early in his career — Cambridge University under Stephen Hawking and Microsoft as CTO, for example — he felt compelled to break loose. For a polymath, such environments can become too claustrophobic. Gaining such high-level recognition as a specialist often comes with the continued pressure and responsibility of needing to be on top of your game. To most, this means exclusive, all-consuming focus. ‘I guess the choice I made is to resist conforming, to not let my wide-ranging interests get pounded out of me,’ he said. ‘Doing that requires a certain amount of defiance of social norms, at least if your interests tend toward intellectual pursuits.’ So for Myhrvold, staying true to his innate disposition was paramount. He set out to establish his individuality.

  He recognises that splitting attention between fields can obviously have downsides, but he believes it has the important advantage of allowing you to come at fields from a fresh and useful perspective. ‘I’ve applied statistical techniques I picked up doing econometric analyses of patent litigation trends to both astronomy and paleontology,’ he said, ‘and was able to show that the conventional methods leading researchers had been using in certain corners of those fields were seriously flawed.’

  Myhrvold has entered all his fields as an ‘outsider.’ ‘In some sense, I’ve been unqualified — at least on paper — for every real job I’ve ever held! . . . Experts who have acquired their knowledge at great personal cost often resent or resist ideas brought by newcomers. So as a newcomer, I sometimes find myself having to push against that prejudice to get a fair hearing for my ideas.’ This is a typical case of ‘experts’ jealously guarding their disciplines. Yet Myhrvold is a critical thinker who relies as much on general intelligence and common sense as on field-specific knowledge.

  Moreover, being one of the prolific inventors of our age, Myhrvold is unquestionably well placed to offer insights into the origin of creative ideas: ‘in the invention sessions we hold at my company, it’s common for me or one of our other inventors to borrow an idea from a very different field and apply it to the area we are inventing in to come up with something quite new and useful.’ This supports the notion argued throughout this book and by countless others that creative breakthrough is the product of interdisciplinary connections.

  As CEO of Intellectual Ventures, one of the world’s leading invention companies, Myhrvold certainly has a polymathic profession — one that warrants a synthesis of different ideas and projects, but one too where code-switching and cognitive shifting is important:

  It’s not uncommon for me to do work in up to a half dozen different fie
lds in a single day. Part of that stems from my job as CEO of a company that’s involved in a wide range of disciplines, so in one day I might be meetings with epidemiologists, then materials scientists, then a photography team, then my research chefs — as well as working on my astronomy or palaeontology research before and after meetings. Because I’m interested in each of these things and engage with them regularly, context-switching isn’t that difficult.

  Myhrvold is adamant that there are certain professions which by definition warrant the input of the polymath. ‘In professional fields where problem-solving, learning and inventiveness are crucial, being broad in both interests and knowledge is useful.’ And ultimately, he expresses an optimism about the fertility of the twenty-first-century world for producing polymaths. ‘This is the best century ever for polymaths. There has never been better access to the full spectrum of human knowledge or to other people interested in whatever niche topics you find fascinating. Thanks to the enormous library of information online, the barrier to learning about a new area has never been lower.’

  Tim Ferriss

  Tim Ferriss is probably the best-known and most influential name in the fast-growing world of business self-help. He shot to fame following the runaway success of his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in which he set out a lifestyle design method that involves a blueprint for reducing work hours while increasing income. It was this blueprint that allowed him to become a successful advisor and early-stage investor in some of world’s leading tech companies such as Uber, Facebook and Alibaba as well as a record-breaking tango dancer, a kick-boxing champion and a polyglot in a surprisingly short space of time.

  Ferriss’ next two books in the 4-Hour franchise were on completely different subjects: The 4-Hour Body, which focused on diet, exercise, sleep and sexual performance; and The 4-Hour Chef, which provided practical cooking tips and recipes. These, too, became New York Times bestsellers.

  Since then Ferriss has dedicated most of his time to developing a ‘super-learning’ framework that allows anyone to learn anything, anywhere. He has produced one of the most downloaded business podcast series in the world, based on interviews with the most successful people in their fields in which he explores their ideas and methods for high performance and personal development (which has earned him the title: ‘Oprah of Audio’). This provided the material for his next two books (also New York Times bestsellers), Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. In ‘stress-testing’ these ideas, Ferriss combined the insights of experts with his own experiments in learning, for which Newsweek has called him ‘the world’s best guinea pig.’

  Such acclaim for his wide-ranging accomplishments leads one to question his own admission that he ‘appears to be a polymath’ rather than actually being one. It did not work out for him initially. ‘Accidentally (or by necessity), and later by design, I was harnessing both my strengths and weaknesses — which could be seen as a combination of OCD and ADHD — to create some semblance of a life or career.’ He clearly had many interests in different fields but there was no method to the madness back then.

  ‘I did not set out to be a polymath; I did not have any particular approach to acquiring multiple skills in the very beginning. As a result, it was all very haphazard — many attempts failed ranging from music to basketball to foreign languages.’ Then, as he was writing his first book, he realised that there was a particularly effective method through which he could pursue his seemingly disparate goals. ‘It was only while writing The 4-Hour Workweek that I began to systematically see how I could codify some type of framework (using some ideas borrowed largely from other people) to acquire skills perfectly . . . and that has led me to where I am now.’

  Very often, Ferriss goes off the grid to engage in some type of total ‘immersion kick-start’ that he uses to assess and accomplish various skills. And each time, whether it’s powerlifting, drawing, or singing, he employs the same framework. ‘Personally, I find having a template to be exceptionally helpful if you are tackling different skills simultaneously. If you have proven to be effective, it helps you to feel as though you’re not starting from scratch every time.’ Ferriss believes that using his repeatedly tested learning model, which he refers to as DSSS, pretty much anyone can learn any skill very quickly. To explain the model, he refers to his most recent immersion — learning to play steel drums in a week, practising six to nine hours a day.

  The first aspect of the model is Deconstruction — breaking the skill down into its basic components. So in the case of the steel hand drums, the question he’d pose immediately is ‘how to take this entire instrument and all the music associated with it and break it down to its constituent pieces.’ The way he did it was to extrapolate components such as hand contact, basic rhythms, accompaniment and frequency of training. Is there, for example, an optimal training frequency for the given objectives?

  Having deconstructed the skill-set, the next step is Selection — applying Pareto’s Law (or the ‘80/20 principle’) to each constituent piece that has been identified. ‘Identify 20 percent, or the components that will deliver 80 percent of the skills you will need for whatever outcome you’re optimising for,’ says Ferriss. He insists that in order to determine the most necessary aspects of the process, it is important to establish a clear goal. ‘My goal last week was to go to a super-packed coffee shop and do an impromptu performance for an hour.’

  Next, perhaps the most important yet often most neglected: Sequencing — taking these components and putting them in order so there is a logical progression. ‘If you take music for instance, if you start a randomly selected sample of 1,000 people with music theory, you’ll have a very high failure/abandonment rate,’ Ferriss insists. ‘If you do decide it’s critical enough, it should come later.’ The order of things can make a major difference to the learning process.

  Finally, the Stakes — ‘I want to have some kind of commitment that holds me accountable to invest the work and time and energy necessary if I want to acquire the basics in a short period of time.’ Ultimately though, the ‘meta-skill,’ as he calls it, is to ask the experts or mentors good and specific questions — trying to identify what they use regularly but which they don’t teach explicitly or often. ‘What are common wastes of time,’ he’d ask, ‘what unnecessary drills get used too often?’

  Tim Ferriss’ ultimate goal is to create an army of ‘super-learners’; hundreds of thousands of people who can then in turn create millions more. ‘If I have a specialism, it is meta-learning and acquisition of doer-skills. That is the umbrella under which all of this experimentation takes place.’ He claims that DSSS applies fully to any cultural or economic context; it simply depends on the approach of the individual. ‘If you look at a place like Japan; it is in many respects one of the most rigid cultures from a hierarchical, professional standpoint you’ll ever encounter,’ he says. ‘Despite that you still find incredible entrepreneurs, rule-breakers or assumption-breakers who are doing things that even 20 years ago would be unimaginable.’

  Ferriss is extremely confident that this framework is the key to exceptional cross-domain versatility. It allows you to acquire skills and knowledge quickly, efficiently — and potentially to a world-class standard. Yet perhaps there is something to be said about ‘going through the hard grind,’ or ‘putting in the hours’; the common assertion that one can only accomplish or excel in a given field if they invest sufficient time and effort into it. Malcolm Gladwell’s ’10,000-hour rule’ comes to mind. ‘I have no problem in people putting in the time, as long as they’re putting in the time to the right thing,’ Ferriss says ‘Massive effort does not make up for lack of specificity. To be exceptional at anything you have to be efficient.’

  According to Ferriss, the result is more important than any preconceived notions about ‘hard work’ needed to accomplish something. Even for major creative breakthroughs, which many assume to come as a result of intense, long-term dedication, it seems that workload and man-hours are not necessa
rily what’s required. The amount of time and effort needed for such breakthroughs is often overrated, he feels. ‘When people “push themselves,” more often than not as a stress response they will default to their habitual modes of thinking; that’s not going to help you solve a problem that you’ve been unable to resolve using that exact same mode of thinking.’ What is essential, he argues, is ‘developing an ability to look at a problem or field from multiple perspectives with inputs from other fields and divergent ways of thinking.’

  This insight is not merely intuitive. He gives examples of numerous highly successful entrepreneurs and investors, many of whom he has interviewed in depth:

  They do not put in more hours per week looking at every deal possible. In fact, they apply more constraints than other people and simultaneously expose themselves to many wider fields of intellectual exploration and historical study. For instance, many of the best investors I know study evolutionary biology and behavioural psychology and the history of mass movements, which to people who are dependent on watching TV and reading financial publications seems ostensibly like a waste of time. Some of them refuse to take coffee meetings or in-person meetings 99 percent of the time. They apply constraints to what are considered as opportunities while broadening their exposure to divergent modes of thinking and also aspects of human nature and behaviour.

  These investors seem to be doing what many would consider a distraction. Yet they (either consciously or intuitively) feel that pursuit of a deeper, wider understanding of human behaviour will give them a competitive edge in business. Such an understanding can only come from stepping back from the micro to the macro, seeing the bigger picture and making otherwise unfathomable connections. ‘Taking the 30-thousand-foot view helps you to look at the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of different fields as opposed to viewing them as purely separate disciplines,’ Ferriss insists.