Someone asks what you do. And you freeze.
This happens to me all the time. I know what my head wants to say, and I know they are not ready for the answer. Because the honest answer is not a job. It is a list. Thirty-five browser tabs open, from five different worlds. Five projects half-built. A new field every few years, and a real ache under all of it: why can’t I just pick ONE thing, like everyone else seems to do?
Many people have given you words to describe this way of living. Unfocused. Scattered. Jack of all trades, master of none. You have apologized for it in more rooms than you can count.
I want to hand you a different word.
Polymath. Or the newer one, multipotentialite. A person who goes seriously deep into many fields across one lifetime. Not a dabbler. A different thinker whose brain is built to cross borders and carry what it learns from one world into the next.
A quick history, because the word itself tells a story. Polymath comes from two Greek roots: poly, meaning many, and manthanein, to learn. Many-learning. A person who learns across many fields. It showed up in English writing about 400 years ago, in the early 1620s, back when Leonardo da Vinci was the picture everyone reached for. The newer word, multipotentialite, is only about a decade old. A woman named Emilie Wapnick put it on a TED stage in 2015, for people with many callings instead of one. So why have you barely heard either one? Because school, work, and almost every question you get feels like it rewards the person who picks one thing. “What are you going to study in school?” “So what is your one thing?” “Congratulations on thirty-five years in HR.” The word for the rest of us has existed for centuries. It just never got handed to you.
Here is a name most people never learned. María Guadalupe Evangelina de López. In 1902 she became one of the first Latina instructors at the school that would grow into UCLA. She taught Spanish. Then she became a suffragist, the first person in California to give speeches for women’s right to vote in Spanish. Then World War I broke out, she took a leave, learned to drive an ambulance, and shipped to France to do it. She also flew an airplane. Instructor, translator, organizer, ambulance driver, pilot. One life. Nobody would call her scattered now.
I will tell you what I have watched for years, in myself and in the leaders I coach. The trouble was almost never focus. Somebody handed each of these people one small word for a big way of living, and they built a whole self-image on top of it. And the people handing over that word were not cruel. They just had one word, because they had never been around anyone who lives across this many worlds. So they reached for the only one they had.
I wrote once about the Right Word Vice Effect: how certain brains lock onto a word and cannot let go, and the feeling stays stuck until the precise word finally shows up. “Unfocused” is a wrong word. It locks a person into shame. “Polymath” is the key that fits the lock.
And this is not a nicer nickname I invented to make you feel better. It is a documented pattern. Take Richard Feynman. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on how light and matter behave. He also played the bongos, cracked safes for fun, and sold his own sketches under a fake name. Or Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel in Economics for how people actually make decisions, and along the way helped invent artificial intelligence, played piano, and painted. Or Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel in Medicine in 1912 for a way to stitch blood vessels back together that made organ transplants possible. He learned that stitch from a lace maker. Embroidery, carried into surgery.
The researchers Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein studied this across the lives of Nobel winners and found it again and again. The people at the very top of their fields were far more likely than their peers to keep serious interests outside their work. Their range was not a distraction from the prize. Many of them called it the fuel for it.
Here is one from a very different corner. Two researchers, Alva Taylor and Henrich Greve, tracked thousands of comic books and the people who made them. They expected the winners to be the creators with the most years in, or the ones backed by the richest publishers. Wrong on both counts. What actually predicted success was range: how many different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy to crime to fantasy. The more worlds they had lived in, the better the work.
You do not have to win a Nobel Prize or draw comics for this to be true. I watch it in my own clients every week. One is a master of a skilled trade who also became an international YouTube influencer. Another built a multi-million dollar manufacturing company and is an acclaimed musician. One is a gifted commercial designer who also builds intricate dollhouses by hand. Another is an accomplished athlete now training to become a medical doctor. I could keep going for a page.
When I look at my clients over 35, they all carry the same pattern. A past full of variety, of learning and exploring in every direction. And that range is the engine under how well they lead now. The years of chasing different things are a big part of what makes them the kind of leader other people actually want to follow.
So sit with this. The exact pattern you keep apologizing for is the one that keeps showing up at the top. In the Nobel lists. In the comic study. In the leaders I coach every week. You are small and mighty, wired to hold more than one world at once. Period.
So here is your one thing this week, and it takes a pen. Not your phone. A pen. For a few minutes, set yourself free and write down every interest you have ever chased. The ones you finished and the ones you did not. The photography, the coding, the language you may never speak, the thing from fifth grade you still think about. Write the whole list. And as it fills the page, do something new with it. Be proud of it, for once. Let yourself feel the understanding that has been missing: this was never a mess. This was a many-learning mind, doing exactly what it is built to do.
Then read the list back and tell me. What is the first feeling that shows up?
JoyGenea Schumer
Personal Development Expert To The Unconventional Leaders
Part 2 available now: why your slow start was never you falling behind, and the study of 6,000 athletes that proves it.
Transcription:
Have you ever heard the term polymath? I had not. It’s actually a very well-known, in certain circles, term that’s been around for about 400 plus years or more. It was particularly used and originated, as far as they can tell, about 400 years ago around the time of Leonardo da Vinci. And why do you care, right?
Why are you gonna keep watching this video? Because I believe the term polymath definitely belongs in the category of a lot of unconventional and different thinking leaders, and it is not used often enough, and it has such great power and excitement to it and kindness. So polymath is about the fact that somebody learns, deeply studies multiple different areas of study throughout their lifetime, and they might be very different from each other.
Why that matters is because quite often people do this and a lot of other people don’t understand why. And what I find in particular is with my clients and the people I work with and those people I’m helping to understand themselves better, this is common. They’re going to explore three or four different things deeply and bring those things together quite often.
Another thing they talk about is when polymaths do that, as they’re learning certain things in a certain area, it’s almost like learning a different language in another country, and then they travel back to another country and learn that language and… But they bring with them the study from all of the different places and the experiences from all of the different learnings.
That’s what makes them a little bit different. It’s not just that they study certain things. It’s that they study it somewhat deeply and then take that information and bring it with them and bring that into conversations and into the learning and into the growth. Where I see this in particular is in business and in meetings and those types of spaces where people are problem-solving.
Having a polymath around or a few of them in your employment, in your groups as problem solvers can be incredible. I see it quite often. I am starting to get brought into conversations for that reason, which is really interesting as this word is catching on as more people are knowing about it. It is quite interesting.
What they found… So I have a whole article about this. I highly recommend if you wanna deep dive. I did some deep diving. I wanted to understand it so much more.
Another term that is becoming more popular, not quite as old, is multipotentialite. And again, it’s just explaining a person who goes seriously deep into many fields across one lifetime. So it’s not somebody that just like dabbles in something for a week, it’s somebody that actually dives in, learns quite a bit, and then just steps back and is “Oh, I wanna explore this now.
I wanna travel into that now.” And then compounding that together with all of that learning, that’s where that is so important. And why it’s important to bring this terminology into it, because quite often, like I said, unconventional and different thinkers will do this, will study multiple things, will go deep on a variety of things.
And for other people that aren’t like that, it looks like there’s… And they, I’ve had this term projected onto me quite often. I hear it often when clients come in. They’re like, “Yeah, but then aren’t I scattered? Or aren’t I… my family just really wants me to just settle down and get really focused on this thing.”
And I’m like, “But that’s not how your brain works. That’s not how you’re wired. You actually do best to be studying a couple things at once and allowing them to mix.” I have clients that are running multimillion-dollar businesses and have recording contracts in the music industry. I have clients that are athletes that are also a gourmet chef.
I have clients that are incredible interior designers that also make mini, teeny, tiny dollhouses that are, like, unbelievable. They’re different. They’re utilizing different parts of their brain, and what they’re finding, they’ve done a bunch of studies, like I said, that deep dive is over in the blog.
There’s a link. You can go to that article. But what they found is Nobel laureates, a majority of them studied and drilled deep into one particular thing, but they also had some very diverse hobbies and very diverse other things that they dove into. They’ve also found this with athletes. The most successful athletes that had lifetime of success in their lives, not just as athletes, but overall, didn’t dive into their sport until a little bit later.
They played a variety of sports, and that allowed them to actually be a better athlete because they had that variety and experiences from other places. So polymath, that’s what we’re talking about today is a term that I want you to explore a little bit more for yourself. See if it might be a term that might describe part of how you’re living your life, and if it is, I highly recommend you teach the people around you about this word.
Just take it as a fun thing. “Hey, I got a word for today. Here’s today’s word.” And if that is you, and maybe throughout your life people have told you, “Ugh, if you would just drill down,” or, “If you would just get more serious,” all while you are making a good income, living a successful and thriving life, but doing a variety of things which for other people makes them feel uncomfortable.
If you’ve ever had that, I want you as a coach to take a moment to take pen or pencil, and a piece of paper and literally write down all the things you’ve studied in your lifetime that you can remember. And trust me, I set this piece of paper aside when I did this exercise, and I kept adding things.
Oh, I remember when I learned about this. Oh, I remember learning how to crochet from my grandmother. I remember learning how to knit. I remember learning how to sew from my mom, which I still use a version of I say it like that because she knows I’m quite the hacker for sewing. I will take a lot of shortcuts to get the outcome I want.
And that’s okay. That’s my style. I’ve learned it, and this is how I’m applying it. And I want you, as you write this paper, to release any shame, blame, and guilt that you have for the fact that you are that diversified, that you have spent your lifetime growing yourself, expanding your wisdom, making yourself that invaluable for a world that is ever-evolving and ever-changing.
And this ability to be that agile and to explore new things and to bring all that back together is an incredible gift and opportunity for you. And if you’re not tapping into that, I’d highly recommend that you do, and learn how to use it more as a strength for yourself. And if somebody does judge all of the variety of your journey, just smile and say, “Oh, did you know there’s a name for that?
And it’s polymath.” I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and oh yeah, I’m a polymath, too. Bye now.