A guest on my podcast recently called herself a polymath. She described being good at many subjects at once, seeing the whole board, getting bored the moment work turned into repetition, and I sat there nodding, because she was reading my own life back to me. I want to tell the personal version, because for decades I did not have the word, and not having it cost me something real.
I spent years thinking I was unfocused
Pick a lane. I heard it my whole career. I was the person with too many interests, the one who would master something and then wander off toward the next thing before anyone understood why. In a world that hands out one job title at a time, that looks like a defect. I believed it was one for a long time. I thought if I could just force myself to specialize, to plant one flag and stay there, I would finally be doing it right.
The pressure started early. My father was a graphic artist and a civil servant, a difficult man who believed in doing one thing and doing it correctly. When I was a teenager he decided it was time I had a job and put me to work as the night manager of a liquor store in Lake Arrowhead, no discussion invited. The message underneath the job was the same message I would hear for decades. Settle down. Be one thing. I was an introvert who would rather have been reading, and the last thing I wanted was to be one thing.
I never could plant that single flag. Somewhere along the way I stopped trying, at first out of exhaustion instead of wisdom. Only later did I understand that the range was never the problem. It was the shape of how my mind works, and it has a name that goes back centuries.
What being a polymath really means
A polymath is someone whose knowledge and skill run across many different fields instead of down into one. The famous example is Leonardo da Vinci, painter and engineer and anatomist at once. That makes the word sound like a crown reserved for geniuses, but it is really just a description of a kind of mind. You learn fields fast. You reach a working grasp of almost anything and then your attention moves. You see how separate subjects connect, because to you they were never truly separate. And you leave the deep detail to people who love it, because that is not where your gift lives.
The connecting is the part that matters most. A specialist meets a problem and reaches for the tool their field trained them to use. I meet the same problem and pull something from a place that has nothing to do with it, because in my head the fields were never in separate rooms. A photography habit turns out to be a listening skill. A career running data centers turns out to be a way of structuring a book. Nothing stays in its lane, because the lanes were never real to begin with.
I wrote a full explanation of the pattern, the signs, the cost, and the strengths, in a companion piece called What Is a Polymath. This page is the personal one. This is what it has looked like in an actual life, mine.
It started with a library card
The first field was reading, and it saved me. I grew up in a military family that moved often before settling in San Bernardino, in a household shadowed by the death of an older sister I never met. Books were the way out. At five I fell hard for an illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the original grim versions, not the softened ones. My mother noticed, bought me an encyclopedia set, and marched me to the library over my protests, where a kind librarian handed me a cookie and a tour. I walked out understanding that the world was far larger than the one in front of me.
After that the interests multiplied instead of narrowing, which is the tell I did not know to read at the time. History first, tracked on library reading charts I taped to my bedroom wall. Then science fiction, discovered in a swap-meet magazine that introduced me to Jack Vance. Then geology, handed to me by an older friend named Lola who must have been seventy, after which I went deep on continental drift and mineralogy and rock collecting. Geology was very nearly the career. If a few things had broken differently I would be cataloging mineral specimens somewhere instead of writing this. A specialist mind picks one of those and stays. Mine kept collecting doors and walking through all of them.
The evidence is my whole life
I spent thirty-three years in enterprise information technology, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s, keeping the systems alive that kept a growing company running. I built disaster recovery operations, ran Oracle and SAP and SQL environments, managed coast-to-coast teams. On its own, that is a specialist’s entire career, the one thing a person is supposed to be. It was never the whole of what I did, or even most of it.
I have taken more than 980,000 photographs. Many of them come from Renaissance faires, roughly three hundred of them over the years, enough that people on the circuit knew me by a nickname. I wrote about what that taught me in 980,000 Photos, 300 Faires, and What I Learned About Writing. I have authored 113 books and ghostwritten 54 more, across ghostwriting craft, cybersecurity, digital transformation, fiction, and a geopolitics series. I paint pewter miniatures and build model kits. I have written more than five hundred movie reviews. If you look across my work you will find artificial intelligence in one breath and photography in the next, disaster recovery beside memoir, the psychology of writing beside the technology of it. That is not a content strategy. That is what a polymath’s body of work looks like when it is finally written down in one place.
For years I saw that range as scattered. Now I see the wells connecting underground. The photography sharpened my writing, because a camera teaches you to notice the half-second pause before someone answers a question they did not want to answer. The decades running operations gave me the transformation and disaster-recovery books, because I had lived the failures I was writing about. The years at the faires gave me the eye that makes the photographs worth keeping. None of it was a detour. It was all one thing, seen from the inside.
How the wells connect underground
Here is the part that took me longest to understand. The range is not a collection of unrelated hobbies sitting side by side. It is a single capability wearing different clothes, and the clothes keep swapping between fields in ways a specialist would never predict.
My first ghostwriting job proves it. I was seventeen, working from recordings and journals my grandfather left, a World War II prisoner of war. Nobody taught me the craft. I taught myself by listening, learning how to hear the moments that carried the meaning and how to keep his voice instead of overwriting it with mine. Decades later, running incident calls in enterprise IT taught me the same skill from the opposite direction, because if you mishear what an engineer is telling you about a failing system, you can take down payroll for a company. Listening for what a person means underneath what they are saying is the whole job in a data center emergency, and it is the whole job in a client interview. Two fields that share no obvious border turned out to be the same skill wearing two uniforms.
The photography did it too. Before I picked up a camera I was too much of an introvert to approach a stranger. With a camera in my hands I had a reason to be there and a way to make contact, and years of that built a working version of social skills that never came naturally. Every client interview I run now uses that same machinery, a structured reason to be in the conversation and the willingness to ask the question after the question after the question until the real answer comes out. Grief sent me to the camera, the camera taught me to see and to approach, and both feed directly into how I write other people’s books. The specialist would call those three separate lives. To me they were always one.
The cost nobody warns you about
I would be lying if I sold this as a free win. The world is built for specialists. Job descriptions want one skill named on the tin. Hiring systems reward the person who can prove ten years in a single title, not the person who can prove ten years across five. A polymath’s resume can read as unfocused to someone scanning for a specialist, and that is a real cost, not one I imagined. For a long stretch of my life it looked like a liability, and I treated it that way.
There is an internal cost too, and it is heavier than the resume one. When you finish most of any subject before other people get started, they assume you are hiding a secret. People go looking for the hidden tool or the method, when the truth is just how you see. I have lived inside that gap between how a thing feels from the inside and how it reads from the outside, and it can tip into the imposter feeling I have written about honestly in Imposter Syndrome: Writing 113+ Books Anyway. One thing I want to be careful about, because it is easy to run together: being a polymath describes how a person works across many fields. It is not a statement about neurodiversity, and I am not claiming the two are the same thing. Owning the pattern does not erase the cost. It just stops you from spending your life apologizing for the thing that was always your strength.
What I would tell the younger version of me
I would tell him the range is the asset, not the apology. The specialist wins when the world holds still, because the ground under their one well stays put and they own it completely. The polymath wins when it moves, because the ability to cross fields, to pull an idea from one place and use it in another, is exactly the skill a fast-changing world runs short of. We live in the fast version now, and the whole-board sight that once looked like a lack of focus turns out to be the rare thing.
I would also tell him it is not free, so he can stop being surprised when the world pushes back. Hiring systems will still want one named skill. People will still misread the range. The self-doubt will still show up. None of that means the pattern is wrong. It means the pattern is uncommon, and uncommon things get misjudged. The move is not to shrink into one lane to make other people comfortable. The move is to build a life, and a body of work, around the connection itself.
If any of this sounds like you, if you have carried a life that refuses to fit in one box and wondered whether that was a problem, I would gently suggest it might be a polymath’s life instead. You can hear the same pattern laid out from another angle in this conversation on seeing the whole chessboard, and read the fuller explanation in What Is a Polymath. A life like that is exactly the kind of story I help people put into a book, because it is the kind of story that never fits neatly anywhere else. Learn more about me, or come talk to me about your own.