As an aspiring polymath, you’ll soon run out of books and courses if you really wish to explore the intersection of multiple domains based on your current intellectual requirements.

That is a great problem to have and the solution is to transition into the mindset of chunking your learnings into projects rather than subjects.

I’ll recommend maintaining a sense of pragmatism (incentivize application of what you’re learning in the foreseeable future (with non-pedagogical intent)) and haste during your initial iterations. Perfection (The will to tend towards it, rather..) can follow once the prototype is principally sound.

One cannot rely on objective standardized tests to gauge how good one is at the act of being.

They’re good to indicate a specific aspect of where you wish to affirm your competence in, but have exhibit numerous fallacies when you’re trying to optimize a probabilistic, unstructured, instinct based behaviour over longer spans of durations, ranging from weeks to decades.

Such a gauge is probably only exhaustively captured in how the complexities of life unroll around you based on your behaviours.

If you’re new to the concept of polymathy (I personally ventured into the idea when I read Da Vinci’s biography by Walter Isaacson), a lot of counter-intuitive traps await you when trying to build competence in multiple areas.

You don’t need to be a generalist at all times during your journey into polymathy. I mentally grasped this fairly recently that you don’t need to shun specializing for smaller durations. Something like a day is obvious as a candidate but, in the past, I would shy away from even periods of a month to actually focus on a singular thing. I’m fairly comfortable doing that for upto three months now but would recommend touching a large span of domains over the span of six months for you don’t want to start losing out on the humility that interdisciplinary pursuits enforce on you.

check out what an IKN0x means here

Understanding different languages can open up one’s mind towards different cultures.

The evolution of languages over centuries and common ancestors there-of over millenia indicates the evolution of cultural complexity.

The Conventional Take

I grew up actively conversing in 4 languages: English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujrati. French was my first romance language I was exposed to for over 8 years (I say exposed as was learning this academically as a third language and didn’t use this as a “natural” language as much as the others).

check out what an IKN0x means here

Snap-shotting projections of the mind over time is a good habit that you should practice.

I will try my best to persuade you of that…

An over-powered upside to pursuing multiple interests over the span of your life is to have the ability to compare and contrast multiple domains, akin to having multiple hill forts over your territory than only establishing a centralized castle.

Checkout the previous polymathy musings

Context

I intend to formalize my plans of getting good at multiple domains not for the reputation that follows but for the generic insight about the world that you may harness as a result.

This is the second refactor of the way I approach this subject and this time around I will be pushing for practical indicators that allow me to gauge my progress over time.

I partition my days in phases of different mindsets that allow me to cater to my varying epistemological hungers. One of them is a daily ninety minute ideation hunt and feast that helps keep my skills sharp.

The laws of thermodynamics do form a formidable devil that really does mess up your ordered habits if you do not inject in the necessary energy from time to time.¹

As a way to sharpen the intellectual axe, I envision myself going on domain hunts to allot myself a new class of game to look forward to during minor breaks from my usual, comparatively conventional endeavors.

Some-days, I wonder that I’m born half a millennia too late into this world given the extent of novel societal tendencies that I’m not fond of.

Although, the notion of Batman didn’t exist then, given a choice, I’d probably consider time traveling to an intellectually simpler life when much of what the present science and engineering entails was just beginning to be discovered and invented.

Research options then weren’t thresholded by who’s packing heavier compute but rather open to all that could observe patiently and portrayed the will to ask, sceptic-ize and act according to their whims.

Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here

The Unaltered Entry

[2022-04-17 Sun 17:09] - 8021

3 hours ago, I encountered a semantic crisis. It all started with the thought that I’m not really prepared for a lot of things in life. Now, that in itself is a toxic thought - one can never be prepared for it all but I definitely have time to figure out several things with minimal extra effort. This would definitely result in a lot of uncertainty being cared for. I’ve encountered the nihilistic philosophy before: if complete certainty cannot be achieved, why try clearing away any of the uncertainty you have around you.

Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here

The Unaltered Entry

[2022-02-23 Wed 18:11] - 7968

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, “having learned much”; Latin: homo universalis, “universal human”) is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.

For the past 2 years, I’ve begun exploring several domains simultaneously, maintaining a generic enthusiasm and curiosity for most of them. Here are some thoughts on what I feel now, actively pursuing polymathy.