Temporal Specialization

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.

Now, not “not eternally specializing” in a domain is something that I’m not a big fan of. With that being said, if you did studied everything, everyday, that would be detrimental to you in the sense that it limits the complexity of projects you can tackle.

Depth isn’t evil, but lack of breadth is. Being an aspiring polymath, knowing the difference helps keep your pride in check when you do need to get specific in a particular domain.

I’ve slowly made a mindset shift in appreciating my time off from other domains during such a phase as a fermentation period for all the raw materials that I’d fed into my mind.

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