I have been known as a receptacle of all sorts of information (both useful and useless) and was often used in trivia games as a ringer. I was once told that I was a jack of all trades, master of none and kind of took offense to this statement. I felt that it implied that I have passable skill but not great at anything I did but I have since changed my mind. Jacks-of-all-trades, also known as polymaths, are quite useful in a world of over-specialization; they can do many things well and do not get bogged down in the minutia of the task at hand.
A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. –Wikipedia
I, personally, have had a number of different jobs in many different fields including: nanny (I was more childlike than my charges that were 2 and 4 and used to have to beg them to colour with me), administrative assistant, retail sales (you want a soul-killing job, work a holiday season in retail listening to Christmas music 8-12 hours a day without rest), cook, phlebotomist (AKA vampire), visual merchandiser, laboratory technician, and photographer. My current position feeds into this multi-hatted idea because working for a small company means that one’s job is never the same from day to day.
In doing research for this blog, I became overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy. The people that occupy the list of polymaths are some of the great thinkers of this time and times passed. Examples include Leonardo da Vinci (the epitome of the polymath. With all his accomplishments it is a wonder if he ever found the time to sleep.), Galileo, Hildegard of Bingen, Noam Chomsky, Viggo Mortensen (Yes, Aragorn is a renaissance man; actor, painter, poet, and publisher), James Ephraim Lovelocke, and Douglas Hofstadter. These are some heavy hitters, intellectually speaking, and it is easy to feel like a lazy person when viewing their lives and achievements.
F. Story Musgrave is the leader in my feelings of inadequacy. He has so many accomplishments to his name that I will only name a few. Please take a moment and google him to see the full list; it is mind-boggling. He is a decorated Marine, an aviation electrician, a mathematician, a surgeon, a professor of physiology and biophysics, holds an MBA in operations analysis, and a MFA in literature (I’m sure, just for fun). To top all this off, he was an astronaut who was the only one to have flown on all five shuttles. Honestly, what else could top that? …possibly the first intergalactic ambassador to Alpha Centauri or winning the Nobel Peace prize for the solution to world hunger?
Brian May, composer and the lead guitarist of the band Queen, is a modern day renaissance man. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in astrophysics and was the chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 to 2013. I mention Brian May because of the coolness factor. I mean he is in Queen and he is highly intelligent. That is very cool. He actually earned his PhD after an absence of 33 years from university while he pursued his music career. How many of us could do that? Maybe it is something that we are all capable of doing if we just got past the initial, “no, there’s no way I could ever do that”.
What seems to be the common motivator from this type of personality is the unending curiosity in many things and an openness to the new. Many creative people will borrow ideas from differing fields and use them in what they are doing. They cultivate many interests and are passionate about them. I also believe that these people never let others tell them that they cannot do something new. If you buy into these limitations, you are limited to doing the same thing. Life changes and learning shouldn’t end once you have reached a certain intellectual level; you do not need to coast on your prior education and experiences.
“Invention fights specialization at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it. In traditional cultures, everyone can do a little of everything. Though one man might be the best hunter or archer or trapper, he doesn’t do only that.” –Robert Twigger
The great thing about the modern world is there is a wealth of information at your fingertips with the internet, online universities, and the such. My husband and I have a habit of looking things up when we find something that interests us and sharing it with the other. “We should google that” is one of our favourite things to say to each other, so very romantic and not a euphemism for anything else. With knowledge comes power and if you can do many things with some amount of expertise, you become more interesting and useful in a variety of situations. Wouldn’t you prefer someone to say to you, “I didn’t know you could do that” or “how do you know that”, to “oh, we are going to talk about your cat again”? Of course, sometimes, those things are not exclusive of one another.
–Janice Willson
