Fulfill Yourself

Embrace Polymathy; Expand Consciousness

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic applies the Polymathic Mindset by first exploring how it’s neither new nor unique across cultures. We’ll then show how embracing polymathic ideas from India can broaden our horizons and lead to a more fulfilling life.

Intro

Today, we view the polymath as either a unicorn or, worse, when I aspire to become one, people react with hostility, weaponizing it as a pejorative. It’s viewed as such an abnormality that it feels almost pretentious to claim the title! The thing is, in the ancient world, the polymath wasn’t exceptional; they were normal. They weren’t an outlier; they were common. More importantly, the polymathic mindset is a great way to really fulfill yourself across multiple dimensions, and we’ve lost something critical with our modern specialization.

This is why I’m teaming up with Aksinya Staar, another advocate for the polymath, after seeing her LinkedIn post  highlighting that, on the Indian subcontinent, the ideal scholar was a Bahuśruta (बाहुश्रुत), a person who had “heard much.” The prevalent oral culture made this quite literal because, in order to be educated, you had to carry stories, law, medicine, poetry, mathematics, cosmology, and ritual inside of you.

Polymathic Aspirations

In that culture, they prized the person who practiced the 64 Kalāḥ or sixty-four arts. Music and logic. Cooking and astronomy. Martial training and rhetoric. While we treat these as hobbies, they treat them as expressions of Vidyā; knowledge as a unified tree.

This idea isn’t uniquely Indian either. The Greeks called it Paideia, meaning the full formation of a human being through philosophy, athletics, music, and rhetoric, and fused it into what we call the 7 Liberal Arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium

The Confucian world shaped the Junzi who mastered ritual, archery, calligraphy, mathematics, and music. A Confucian master wasn’t a singular expert but a broad practitioner and highly valued in the culture.

The Islamic Golden Age produced dozens of famous polymaths like Ibn Sina, who Waqas Ahmed, author of The Polymath, the book that named my identity, notes in the article The Intellectual Versatility of the Islamic Tradition that:

Ibn Sina. A Persian physician-philosopher who had memorised the Quran by the age of ten, mastered every branch of Islamic learning by twenty-one, and went on to produce the Kitab al Shifa — a single-handed compendium of logic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music and metaphysics that scholars still regard as the largest and most varied work of its kind by any individual in recorded history.

The Intellectual Versatility of the Islamic Tradition

Renaissance Italy is the best known in our culture and gave us the Uomo Universale, , the Universal Man and we currently refer to polymaths as Renaissance Men (which I dislike because polymathy is a stronger inclination among women, and many famous polymaths were women. Also, those folks we think of in the Renaissance described themselves as Polymaths.) Regardless of the title, the Renaissance was driven by those who mastered many disciplines and explored new domains with insatiable curiosity.

The point is, across civilizations, the belief emerged that the fullest human being is wide and that was valued over the millennia… until recently.

The Shift to Specialization

Ironically, after the Renaissance, through the Industrial Revolution, and accelerating in the 1900s, we came to see depth and breadth as opposing forces. We were told that we must master one thing and, to do that, we must ignore everything else. It began slowly and then accelerated, largely due to the explosion of information and the economics of knowledge.

That’s because, after the printing press and the Scientific Revolution, knowledge expanded beyond any one mind’s capacity. The Industrial Revolution further rewarded division of labor, a logic formalized in The Wealth of Nations. Universities also reorganized around research specialization, especially under the model of Humboldt University of Berlin.

Consequently, depth became economically, rationally, and institutionally enforced. In optimizing for precision and scale, we gradually replaced synthesis with efficiency. The thing is, specialization is a powerful tool. It built modern medicine, engineering, and computing, among many other disciplines.

But that tool became an ideology, and we began to assume that, to be serious, we had to be narrow. Depth became the virtue, and breadth meant to lack rigor, focus, or dedication. Worse, it became a liability. “Jack of all trades” shifted from a compliment to a dismissal as experts sought to protect their domains through credentialism and gatekeeping.¹

But this isn’t the best way to solve complex problems, and it never was. Complex systems require integrative thinking, and fragmented disciplines constantly struggle to see whole patterns. The ancients understood that synthesis is the highest intellectual act, and we are only just now rediscovering that.

The Bane of Specialization

Learning from the Ancients

Back to Aksinya, she pointed out that the Bahuśruta relied on the harmonization of Samanvaya (समन्वय) and involved drawing disparate strands into a coherent understanding. The ancient Indians knew this and had even more terms that beautifully illuminate the polymathic principles from different angles:

• Jijñāsā (जिज्ञासा): the burning desire to know and inquire. This is the root drive of any polymath. It’s a restless intellectual hunger. It appears prominently in the opening of the Brahmasūtra. (I call this Insatiable Curiosity)

• Medhā (मेधा): retentive intellectual power, the capacity to hold and integrate vast knowledge. A Medhāvin is one who possesses it.

• Kuśala (कुशल): skillful, expert, capable, carrying a connotation of practical competence alongside theoretical knowledge.

Wrapped back with Samanvaya, these ideas aren’t an accumulation of knowledge; they’re the integration of it, and integration feels different than specialization. It feels alive.

How alive? This leads us to Pratibhā (प्रतिभा), which is spontaneous creative insight, and almost always arrives at the intersection of disciplines, not at the bottom of a single well. It’s the birth of new ideas through the fusion and confluence of disciplines.

This isn’t some romantic nostalgia of a bygone era either. It’s a cognitive stack that we can pick up and apply today. It’s Curiosity, Retention, Skill, Insight, Integration, and it’s fulfilling both professionally and personally across all cultures and careers.

Insatiable Curiosity

Why Stretching Wide Feels Fulfilling

The best part is that breadth isn’t just productive; it is existentially satisfying. To understand why, it helps to recognize that the brain is a network, not a silo, and a mind exposed to multiple domains builds more associative pathways. The more varied the inputs, the richer the combinatorial possibilities, where stretching wide multiplies the energy to find new insights.

It also solves a critical problem that happens with specialization, where, too often, our identity becomes the specialization, and the more you specialize, the more fragile your identity becomes to change. This is why Max Planck describes science progressing “one funeral at a time,” and Thomas Kuhn talks about the dramatic shifts in paradigms, not the gradual improvements science tells us it believes in.

Conversely, a wide identity distributes meaning across multiple domains: intellectual, physical, artistic, relational, and practical, which is harder to destabilize. Put another way, the broader skill set of a polymath is antifragile and adaptable to new information and changing technologies.

Personally, I can attest to this, as I diversified into writing here on Substack, then wrote The Singularity Chronicles, weaving science fiction with science facts, and began teaching Master’s courses in Engineering Management. I am much more fulfilled, with much less angst, when my day job as a Space Systems Engineer can’t fully satisfy me. I’m mastering arts, sciences, teaching, and learning.

And this leads to the final benefit: polymathic synthesis, Samanvaya, produces coherence. Let me break this one down a little bit. In today’s information-saturated world, we tend to think more information is better, but information alone doesn’t reduce anxiety. In fact, as we found in Infobesity, it can exacerbate anxiety.

Avoiding Infobesity

To deal with the information, we resort to hyper-compartmentalization, which splits the psyche, and that fragmentation produces inner tension. We are literally getting lost in the forest for all the trees and failing to see the patterns.

But when you synthesize across domains and disciplines, you begin to see the patterns that have always existed. You start to find the counterintuitive insights that flip the script on common tropes. We find a lot of sacred cows to turn into burgers, and we learn a lot more about how our brains work.

The synthesis produces coherence, things start to settle, the world becomes legible, and that legibility feels like peace. Each topic I explore here with you on Polymathic Being helps me better understand who I am and how I fit in the world. I’m working to drive coherence, make things legible, and it gives me greater peace; hopefully, it’s helping you too!

And to emphasize an important point on coherence is that an open mind is harder to manipulate, harder to radicalize, and harder to reduce to slogans. Specializing can lead to fragmentation and tribalism, but the Polymathic mindset, especially when applied to our personal lives, can help us see past the divisions and find unity if we can figure out how to assemble ourselves.

Assembling the Self

This is where the counterintuitive point explodes in our brains: Stretching wide isn’t scattering yourself. It’s actually assembling yourself. Think of every new domain as another lens, another dimension of perception that you can intentionally focus on to understand the world around you.

Let’s go back through those concepts from earlier and explore how to grow these capabilities day by day.

• Jijñāsā: Insatiable Curiosity - Treat intellectual hunger as a signal, not a distraction. Follow interests beyond your primary field, even if they seem unrelated to your career. A wide life begins by refusing to let curiosity shrink.

• Medhā: Retain and integrate - Do not just consume. Summarize what you learn in your own words and deliberately connect it to something you already understand. Retention turns exposure into structure. This is exactly what I do with each essay here.

• Kuśala: Embody skills - Practice at least one discipline outside your core identity in a tangible way. If you think for a living, train the body. If you work abstractly, build something concrete. Multiple comeptencies anchors breadth in reality.

• Pratibhā: Create collisions - Regularly force cross-domain connections. Ask how principles in one field illuminate another. Insight is often the product of structured intersection, not deeper isolation. Look for similarities before discounting the differences.

• Samanvaya: Seek coherence - Make integration the goal, not accumulation. Periodically step back and ask what unifies your interests, and you’ll see that fulfillment emerges when knowledge forms a pattern rather than a pile.

What we are rediscovering isn’t a new idea at all; we are simply remembering that the human being was always meant to be more river than well and that it’s incredibly invigorating and fulfilling.

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“Jack of all trades and master of none; but more often better than a master of one.”

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“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”― Robert Heinlein

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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.

• Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays

• Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks

• Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing

• Educating AI Integrating AI into education

• Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency

1. It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally, I find women are much more favorable of the Jack of all Trades than men are. Women view it as an asset, while men view it more as a liability. That’s an interesting point I’d love to research more.