What's the Future Like for a "Renaissance Man" in a Connected World?

Anyone who knows me well would never characterize me as a Renaissance Man, which from here on in I will call a Polymath to keep this post gender-neutral.

A Polymath is "a person with encyclopedic, broad, or varied knowledge or learning." It's an individual who knows a lot about a great many things. Leonardo Da Vinci and his famous notebooks, naturally, spring to mind.

I may know a lot about the digital landscape, but I could never be a Polymath. I blame the Internet.

Even though the web makes it easier than ever for an individual to stay reasonably informed about a great many subjects, my gut is that people go deep into their interests at the expense of being well rounded. The implications are significant for business and society overall.

The web is deepening specialization and giving rise to experts that become highly successful in a given domain. This is a trend that Seth Godin champions in his great book The Dip. In addition, it's what Markus Buckingham recently talked about with Oprah as a ticket to success in one's career and life. (For more, check out the podcast on iTunes.)

I have seen this vividly in my own life. I used to read three newspapers a day. I also never missed the local 11 o'clock news every night. I excelled at current events quizzes in school. No more. Since I started living in my feed reader, I became blissfully ignorant about the world, facing an ever-pressing need to stay current in my domain of expertise.

Case in point: when three New York City cops accused of killing a man the night before his wedding were acquitted it made national news. However, I had no idea that there was even a trial going on. Worse, I hadn't heard about the crime itself, which took place back in 2006.

So my question to all of you is - what is the future for the Polymath? Once this was a ticket to success. Now is it equally a way to fail in an increasingly specialized world? Do you know any Polymaths? They seem to be dwindling in number as we spend more time online.

Comments

[Steve Woodruff]

In my mind, we need to take a hybrid approach. Having some Polymath tendencies is incredibly helpful in seeing the world with overall context; but there should be at least one area of deeper specialization (at least, from a professional perspective). I find that the Internet actually helps with both.

[Philippe Borremans]

The future is for the "Special Ops Teams" consisting of highly specialized info ninjas, who come together from their hiding place when they are needed for a project, and then, after delivering the goods, disappear again into their lair to hone their skills for the next job.... ;-)

[Jackson Miller]

Maybe it used to be easier to be a Polymath by accident. It could be that for a PR person, Old Media helped one be well-rounded in the course of business.

However, I think the internet makes it easier to be well rounded. When I have a curiosity I can dig in for an hour and get a pretty decent understanding that will stay with me for a long time. In the past month I have dug in to converting salt water to fresh water, thermal implications of solar energy, how to make killer gumbo, etc. These are all tidbits of knowledge that will stay with me. Some of these inquiries start in my feed reader.

Oh, an I think it is a fallacy to equate the idea of a Renaissance Man with a familiarity with sensational current event stories.

[David Brazeal]

Steve,

It's all relative. If you dropped any of us into the the 1400s or the 1950s, I think there's a good chance we'd be considered polymaths. The Internet has given us access to such a vast amount of information, it allows us to dive deep into our areas of expertise, while still being relatively well-informed on a whole bunch of topics. We can't catch everything, but we soak up enough to make us well-informed by the standards of any other time in history.

[Web 2.0 Asia]

I think I read this somewhere: Get in top 10% in one thing (ie. your domain of expertise), and get in the top 30% in three things.

[Jeff Petry]

Steve, nice change of pace topic. And speaking of the 14-1500's, I recall a few scholars citing Desiderius Erasmus as the last man who was regarded as "knowing all there was to know" in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus

[Jeff Johnson]

Steve, I have simply given up on trying to stay on top of 'real' news via RSS. Just get the economist every week and read Foreign Affairs or something similar every couple of months and you will get all the 'real' information you need about the rest of the world.

As for tech news, nothing I can do to help you there. We all fall into the category of jack of all trades, master of none.

[aureliusmaximus]

IMHO being able to understand the inner workings of multiple disciplines will only continue to increase in importance.

I am not a programmer but it appears to me that the gap between the best of the best and the rest of the field is narrowing. I would cite the ongoing proliferation of a number of different bookmarking/social sharing apps that are popping up as an example.

Those who best understand the needs of consumers and businesses from a wide swath of demographics and industries will build products that appeal to the greatest number of people.

I mean this observation as no disrespect to individuals who have invested the time to perfect their programming skills and I may be completely wrong about this but it just seems like over that last several decades the ability to program with excellence has become/is becoming more of a commodity. If that is the case, individuals who bring more to the table will see their value increase.

[Susan Reynolds]

Specialized ninjas are fabulous, and I've got my own twitter team of ninjas who solve specific issues for me all the time. That said, I'd like to think that people with broad areas of knowledge are still vital to any operation or organization.

They provide depth and understanding across situational lines. They are the "dot connectors" of the world as it were.

I surely hope that we continue to value the big picture people who have a good grasp of wide varieties of people knowledge, historical insights, tech familiarity, and plain old common sense or we're poorer for it.

[Yohami]

I dont think its about how well informed you are, but how great are your creations in diverse field. Write a great book, produce some brilliant math algorithms, direct a movie, record an album, and you´re a Polymath.

Has almost nothing to do with reading feeds, in my opinion.

[Bob Warfield]

Polymaths are alive and well. It's a personal choice, or perhaps a latent talent, not a product of environment.

There have never been many polymaths because it's a better survival trait to be really good at one thing than slightly good at many.

The number who can be really good at many is small, but untouched by the Internet one way or another. One can argue, in fact, that the Internet is much better at being a mile wide and an inch deep than it is at drilling down to the level of real information and insight a serious expert seeks.

Cheers,

BW

[Brent P. Newhall]

Speaking as a Renaissance Man; We have to adapt. Actively seek out new inputs and interests, rather than assume they'll show up on the nightly news or whatever.

[Michael Netzley]

Hi Steve,

Nice and provocative question. Yet, the future never unfolds in a purely linear fashion from any one point in history. Also, technology alone will not determine the face of future societies, workplaces, or cultures. So I suspect polymaths or even a generalist of any sort is probably secure. so go ahead and pick up a couple newspapers, dig deep in a European novel, and experiment with Chinese history. It is all good.

[Eric Eggertson]

I think it's more important not to become so polarized in your opinions that you stop considering alternatives than it is to remain conversant in thousands of areas of interest.

That being said, every group I've been involved in has had at least one person who has a broad interest in the world. Their thinking has always been helpful to keep me from getting too blinkered in my thinking.

Renaissance people have their place, and probably always will.

[Carla Thompson]

Excellent post, Steve, and proof that you're more of a polymath than you think. ; ) With all due respect though, seems to me the solution is to stop living in your feed reader. Force yourself to leave the computer at the end of every day and watch the nightly news. Turn off Twitter and crawl in bed with Newsweek or a good book. Subscribe to the NY Times on the weekend - and actually read parts of it. I've noticed I miss out on a lot of online conversations that happen at 9pm on a Sunday but I am more than okay with that.

[eric hansen]

to the extent that a polymath cannot be without some share of a natural gift, I don't see the economic pressure of a specializing economy supressing this type of person.

Horizontal curiosity seems no less likely.

Great thread Steve.

[John Spence]

Great question. With the volume and velocity of information coming at us from every direction, it can be overwhelming to try to keep up on even one topic. As an example, I read more than 120 books a year -- 80% of those are business books. My goal though is to look for patterns in the information - not to absorb all of it. For example, I just wrote a manifesto for the Change This website (www.changethis.com) -- it is an overview of 160,000 pages of research, into a 16 pages article on the pattern of excellence in all businesses. The idea to me is to make the complex simple - to turn chaos into elegance. I believe that those who are more prone to be considered polymaths, are simply able to discern patterns faster. They see into the heart of a subject and can understand it's fundamentals more quickly. Am I one? I do not think so. I know a whole bunch about a few things - and am completely lost on most others. My excuse -- I don't want to waste valuable thinking time on non-valuable subjects (maybe that is why I did not watch TV for 10 years!) -- can I think of anyone I know that I would call a true polymath... no not really, and I know some pretty bright people. I think there is simply just too much to know today -- too much to learn to have a respectable grasp of, and skills in, a multitude of disciplines. Yikes -- I think I depressed myself a little with that last comment! I am usually much more optimistic -- but living at "download speed" can be a bit intimidating.

Thanks for the great blog -- take good care -- John Spence

[Dan]

Something to consider: Most of the things we all specialize in didn't even exist in da Vinci's time. So he had a far smaller selection of pools to dive into and most of them were nowhere near as deep as they are today... physics, astronomy, biology... these areas of knowledge have so much more "stuff" to know now than they did back then, yet we all have roughly the same amount of time to spend learning and thinking about it all.

[jerami marsh]

"nanos gigantum humeris insidentes - Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." - Introduced by Chartrez and reiterated by epic Sir Isaac Newton. Considered a "500-year thinker," but for the amount of knowledge he posessed, he was only a man. The value of that knowledge materialized in active contributions to the future of knowledge, not to how much money he could make with the information he owned. Could technology be merely capitalization through mining and controlling information to be consumed, reducing the many would-be DaVinci's and Newtons to either consumers or producers of what the imperialists might percieve important to know? Just a thought.

[jerami marsh]

"nanos gigantum humeris insidentes - Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." - Introduced by Chartrez and reiterated by epic Sir Isaac Newton. Considered a "500-year thinker," but for the amount of knowledge he posessed, he was only a man. The value of that knowledge materialized in active contributions to the future of knowledge, not to how much money he could make with the information he owned. Could technology be merely capitalization through mining and controlling information to be consumed, reducing the many would-be DaVinci's and Newtons to either consumers or producers of what the imperialists might percieve important to know? Just a thought.

[Sandra Fathi]

I wish there were more well-rounded individuals in PR. Often I meet people who have worked in PR agencies for 10+ years and they still can't read a financial statement, they don't know much about business, they've rarely left the U.S. (or the confines of Manhattan) and they've spent their entire careers inside the agency hierarchy. How can they be providing advice and guidance to senior execs and CEOs of global companies? I'd rather have people on my team with broad experience and a wealth of knowledge in a variety of subjects than experts with knowledge in only one arena.

[The Jolly Jetsetter]

Interesting thought and it caught me off guard as I read all my media/tech posts in one sitting (haha, its how my mind compartmentalizes). I feel that a lot of what made renaissance men the way they were stemmed from education. Formative years were spent studying languages, the arts, history, while also partaking in sports and hobbies-- students were in many ways, "taught" how to be well rounded. In a connected world information may be within your grasp, but if you do not carry the passion or interest, then it is all for naught.

I am more afraid of what undergraduate "specialized" schools are doing than what the "connected" world is doing.

[Nolongermute]

Steve, have no fear.the future of the polymath is the same as the past.It is the rhythm of life.Generally everything is subject to these rhythms because life itself is a rhythm:the age of specilalization will give way to the polymath which in turn will give way to specialization.The ultimae question lies at the heart of education will we continue to teach children what to think rather than how to think?

[Ian Kemmish]

"A specialist knows everything about nothing much; a polymath knows nothing about absolutely everything." I've always found that stops me from feeling too cocky! Now, if only I could remember who said it (Russel? Forster?)

I suspect it's in the blood. You could still read three newspapers a day online, if you wanted to, but you chose to don the blinkers of an RSS feed. So, one must assume that you have chosen to label whole fields (prairies?) of news and information as being of no interest to you. So I'd probably say that being a polymath isn't in your blood. Maybe it was once, but it isn't now.

The Internet lets me read foreign language literature (Tolstoy at the moment) that's difficult to get hold of even in London, and through YouTube I can compare myself you other amateur harpsichordists whom I would never meet in real life.

A deeper question is what constitutes a polymath. It's been 500 years since one could hope to command all of human knowledge; 100 since all of science, and 40 or so since all of the technology that impacts one's daily life. What we are physically able to master in one lifetime is itself becoming smaller and smaller....

[mediaman]

I have no sympathy for you!
We need more Polymaths/renaissance men and women. Critical thinking, Socratesian reasoning are the true paths to solutions in an ever more complex society hell-bent on destroying itself.
Like cancer, the process is insidious, slow, sneaky, and ever more apparent.
Population control, resource allocation, self-sufficiency in food, energy, all this and much more will have to be achieved if we are not to "blow ourselves out of the water."

[Mark Dykeman]

The polymath will not fade away. In my opinion, successful executives are large corporations need to have polymath tendencies because of the wide variety of topics and experiences that they need to know about. I would hope that guys like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Immelt, Eric Schmidt, etc. have a pretty broad knowledge base.

If your domain is fairly specialized, e.g. PR, web design, and others - it's understandable that narrowing of focus is mandatory. However, despite the popular wisdom about the need to specialize and find a profitable niche, there is always a need for polymath tendencies.

[Rod King]

Steve Rubel asks, "What's the Future Like for a 'Renaissance Man' in a Connected World?" I'd say that as information continues to explode on the Internet, the future of a renaissance man or polymath spells f-r-u-s-t-r-a-t-i-o-n, FRUSTRATION, and MORE FRUSTRATION! Why?

Presentation of information on the Internet (and elsewhere) is predominantly linear. And linear thinking or linear processing of information is slow, slow, and slow especially for polymaths. Take, for example, the posts in this blog, one has to scroll and scroll to see the most recent posts. Why not display the information so that more blog posts can be seen at the same time? Why not navigate and explore information as we do when using topographical maps such as in Google Maps? Wouldn't everyone process more information in less time?

Polymathic thinking is facilitated by tools that enable people to quickly see patterns as well as easily switch between a big picture view and detailed view of situations. On the performance side, polymaths are able to quickly understand many situations as well as solve complex problems in diverse fields. So far, web tools do not exist that facilitate polymathic thinking. However, if you are interested in new tools that facilitate polymathic thinking, visit http://search.galaxyit.com
You could see how the tool of fractal grid, which I believe is intuitively used by polymaths, is applied to visually present search results. Later, there will be demonstrations of how the fractal grid can be used to solve apparently impossible problems. I believe that if such tools are increasingly used on the Internet, the future of polymaths and everyone else would be bright, brighter, and ... brightest.

Best regards,
Rod.

[vruz]

they're not in decline.

if you're having trouble getting to the core of the news at 9:00, perhaps you're relying on mainstream media too much.

perhaps your curiosity is not taking you to the right places ?

perhaps you have to be a polymath so that you can recognise one ?

[kraloyun]

Good news

Thank you for the informations.

kraloyun

[John Vincent]

Having worked in a newspaper's library in the 80's and 90's (paper cuttings) where one was expected to know everything about every subject to guide journalists for their markings , being a polymath was a par for the job. Information today via the Internet is so vast and easily obtained, a polymath today should be redefined as one who knows where to find knowledge.

[Phil]

We will need polymaths because as specialization explodes when things fall apart the center, well, you know.

An increasingly specialized world is nice if everybody's following their bliss. But in practice it just ends up as a world with replaceable cogs in a giant, mindless contraption.

I, for example have a background in accounting, finance, critical care nursing, fatherhood, philosophy, literature, and my friends describe me as polymath-like. I don't think I am, but I can say that I never found work I really loved. There's way more that I want to do than I have time.

So, I realize that specialization is the dominant trend, but we will need minds that can see big pictures, who can swiftly connect things that specialists rarely can.

Polymaths are born. And made. And destroyed. So we aught to cultivate them, or the leaves of the garden we've been entrusted to care for will wither away.

..But polymaths are also poets, and poets infuse the world with bliss of the wise kind.

[Doug Wick]

Polymaths are an essential source of inspiration. Specialists are an essential source of execution.

[starmaiden]

Actually, the future for the polymath is pretty pained. One of the hoped-for elements of the information age, would be decent visual representations of layered information that could easily reflect how polymaths see, acquire, use, and reflect copious amounts of information as quickly as they match and devour it.

That hasn't really happened yet, and it's as frustrating as hell.

The way information is provided is linear, spoon-fed, and rarely progressive. Fast, certainly. Complex and engaging? Rarely. Easily dismantled and restructured in ways that -you- want/need? Hardly.

Fast !=meaningful.

Hmm. I see my own long-avoided blog post coming.

[Geoff Northcott]

The opportunities for polymaths are growing, not shrinking.

A specialist relies on incremental progress or the rare breakthrough innovation to make headway.

The key for polymaths lies in their ability to quickly recognize patterns and key developments in one area of business, culture, science, or technology, and understand the implications and how they could be most effectively transposed elsewhere.

Taking ideas from one domain and applying them to a secondary competitive space is a tried and true formula for innovation and entrepreneurship, and no one is better placed than the polymath to quickly spot the opportunities at a macro level. You can then enlist the support of specialists to implement the vision.

Both groups have areas of opportunity, and the increasing wealth of available information increases the possibility for both.

Most posters are right to say that the tools to process information then become a distinct competitive advantage.