Check out part 1 here.
Do you know the real story of Harland Sanders? He was born in Indiana in 1890, and he worked dozens of jobs before any of the fame. Farmhand. Streetcar operator. Insurance salesman. By the 1930s he was running a service station in Corbin, Kentucky, where he started serving the pressure-fried chicken with 11 herbs and spices that people drove out of their way for. Then, in the 1950s, a new interstate bypassed his restaurant and the business dried up. He was 65. Most people would have called that the end of the road. He hit the actual road instead, franchising his recipe one restaurant at a time. One of his partners, Pete Harman, gave the food its name: Kentucky Fried Chicken. In 1964 he sold the company for 2 million dollars.
This is what the life of a polymath sounds like.
And yet there is a scoreboard in the back of your mind, and you did not agree to keep it.
A majority of the people you graduated from high school with picked one lane at 22 and never left it. Now they have the clean title, the straight line, the corner office by 40. And here you are, starting something new again, quietly doing the math on how far behind you must be.
But you are not. And I am going to prove it to you.
I want to take that word, behind, and turn it over. Because behind never stays behind. Left alone, it grows into something much heavier: the quiet belief that you are a failure, that you are never really going to be successful at anything. And that belief has been lying to you for years.
In 2022, three researchers, Arne Güllich, Brooke Macnamara, and David Hambrick, pulled together the largest study yet on what actually produces a world-class athlete. More than 6,000 athletes, including 772 of the best on the planet. Everyone expected the answer to be early specialization. Pick your sport as a child, drill it, never look up.
The data said the opposite. The ones who reached world class were usually the kids who sampled many sports first. They came to their main sport later. They trained in it less at the start. And here is the part that matters most. They progressed more SLOWLY in the early years than the athletes who topped out at a national level and then stopped.
Stay with that for a second. The slow, wandering start was the signature of the athletes who went the furthest. Fast, early, narrow was often the signature of the ones who peaked young and plateaued.
I call those wandering years your base years. Before a distance runner ever chases a fast time, they spend months building a wide, slow, unglamorous base. From the outside it looks like nothing is happening. It is the exact reason they are still climbing long after the early sprinters have burned out.
Your base years were all those fields you dropped into and walked away from. From the outside, they looked like false starts. Under the surface, they were building a base almost no one around you has.
This is why so many of my clients hit their real stride after 35, not before. The founder who built the manufacturing company and plays acclaimed music. The trade master who became a global influencer. The athlete now training to be a doctor. Not one of them ran a straight line. They spent years gathering, and then it compounded, all at once, into a way of leading that the straight-line people simply cannot copy.
I did not run a straight line either. I have a degree in civil engineering and land survey tech. I used it for six years, then retired it to a shelf. For a long time I read that as proof I was defective, that something was wrong with me for not being able to stay in one career more than five years. Nobody ever sat me down and told me this is normal for some people, and that the world actually needs it. That one conversation would have saved me years of feeling behind. Those exploration years were invaluable. I still use some of the engineering, and I use the math every single day.
Here is what the word behind actually costs you:
- It makes you rush.
- It makes you grab the first available lane just to have one.
- It makes you abandon the very range that was about to become your advantage.
- It pushes you to force yourself into the straight-line life, right at the moment your winding path is ready to pay.
So go back to the list of interests you wrote after Part 1. Look hard at the fields you once filed under wasted time. Now hunt for the through-line. The skill from one world that quietly shows up in another. The way a season of photography taught you to see, and that shows up now in how you read a room. Mark three of them.
Then answer me this. What is one thing you once called a waste of time that is quietly showing up in how you lead today?
JoyGenea Schumer
Personal Development Expert To The Unconventional Leaders
Transcription:
Welcome back. We are on part two of a three-part series. If you missed part one, it’s in there if you’re on YouTube. It is out there. It’s on my website. I highly recommend it. We are talking about the term and the usage of the word polymath and where that might apply. So in part two, I’m really focusing on how that looks, and one of the key things that happens for polymaths as they live their life and move forward is they might apply some terms that they need to just clean up and move along.
And if you’re a polymath and you’ve just been realizing this, yay! Let’s clean up some of that. You do not need to carry it forward, and you weren’t meant to have it to begin with. So those are some kind of broken beliefs, but we’ll get to that in a minute. If you’re at that place where you’re like, “Wow, she’s almost a minute into this and she hasn’t explained or reminded me what a polymath is,” a polymath is a person whose knowledge and expertise spans multiple subjects and areas.
That’s it. And a lot of times for people that don’t work like that, don’t find subjects and go really deep in a variety of areas, they can make some judgments about that, and that’s what led me to say we need to have some more conversations about this. This word needs to get used a lot more. So in part two, we’re talking about that.
The first thing that I– we have to talk about that came to mind to me, a great example was the story of Colonel Sanders. If you do not know the origins of Kentucky Fried Chicken, it’s very interesting. Colonel Sanders had a wide variety of jobs from, you know, for many years. Then in the 1930s, he actually opens a gas station along a very, you know, congested, busy road.
Does really well, and since he has a gas station and he has clients, people already coming in and buying stuff, he then decides, “Well, I’ll start feeding them also.” He has his 11 seasoning system recipe, and he starts making chicken. Goes really well. Then they move the road. It, it happens. I worked in civil engineering, trust me.
They moved the road. They moved his road. He just then realigned his mission and his goals. Gas station shuts down, but he takes his recipes. Remember, guy’s not a chef, he’s not a cook. He’s been a longtime business owner of a gas station, and he now sets out on a mission to reach more people and to franchise this great thing that he has, which he does in the 1950s era.
He is in his 60s when he does this. That’s polymath. That’s a great example of a polymath. He’s just taking things and evolving and taking things that he knows and applying it and moving forward and continuing to grow. In the end, building a very successful franchise and business. I see it often with clients.
What I also notice is if they’re not aware of this, one of those beliefs I was talking about earlier is a score- that scoreboard that they’ve been keeping applied by other people where they’ve thought, “I must not be enough.” This is really weird. Other people… One of my best friends in grade school knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life when we were in grade school.
She’s like, “I’m gonna become a vet. I love animals. I’m totally gonna become a vet.” Guess what? She’s a veterinarian now, a very successful, thriving veterinarian. She knew, and I remember when she’d talk about it, I’m like, “Wow, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Is that okay that I don’t know what I’m gonna do?”
And then as the years went on and I watched her thrive, succeed, like have this lane and really get into it, I thought… I judged. I judged myself, and I saw it in multiple people I graduated with and was friends with. They went off and they knew their, their one lane, and they did their one lane, and I’m out there going, “Well, maybe it’s the…”
You know, like, I wanna learn this. Oh, I wanna learn that, and, and always making sure I was getting paid for what I was learning, and always making sure I was safe as I was learning those things, but definitely always exploring kind of new horizons and different avenues. That’s why my business has flourished so well, is because I look at new opportunities, I explore new things, and they just get woven into the experience that my clients have and how my business moves forward.
So let go of the judgment. I- if you have been looking at a variety or have done in your lifetime a variety of things that don’t look connected, let go of any judgment that you have about that. And if you are a young person just starting out in the world, just graduating from high school and you’re like, “I, I don’t know what I wanna do.
Like everybody else kinda has this lane and I’m not sure,” you’re okay. You’re okay. My best Best, best advice to you is go figure it out. And you do that by doing things. So what are you interested in right now? What do you spend hours doing that, you know, like totally enthralls you? Go learn how to make some money in that area for a while and explore it and go deeper.
You may… I’ve multiple times watched and encouraged clients, and they’ve gone down a lane for a year or year and a half, and they’re like, “I’m bored now. I’m kinda interested in this thing over here.” And I’m like, “Go for it. Rock on.” Like, figure out how you can make some money and make a living and, and explore that some more.
Keep evolving like that. And I’ve been doing this long enough now. I’ve gotten to watch them evolve and start to build some incredible businesses, these young leaders. And I know they’re young future leaders. They’re just not at that space of ex- you know, running the company yet. Oh, but the company is growing in their back of their mind, but that’s another story.
Totally in alignment though with our current topic. You’re not behind. So if you have been exploring multiple careers or multiple chapters, you’re not behind. You’re just fine. How do you bring that together? How do you continue to bring that together and generate income and feel valuable and feel on your mission?
That’s the greater question you need to be asking yourself. And if you’re wondering like, “Is she just saying this to make me feel better? Did she make this up?” No, I don’t need to make this up. This is very much factually based. This has very much been researched, thank goodness. One of, one of the more interesting research items that I brought into this blog, in particular an article, was about world-class athletes.
When they studied the top athletes, the high performers, those achieving what I’d label as greatness, is they found out most of them, huge majority of them, did not start out in that sport. They didn’t start out in that sport that they’re currently in and thriving in. They started out in a variety of different sports, or they didn’t even participate in sports till high school, some of them.
And then they got involved, and then they dove deep once they figured out the one they really, really wanted to know. Those are actually the most successful aths- athletes. That is actually what they found. So it’s about if you are a polymath, and if you are older and more mature, so over 40, I’m telling you, it’s a great time to look back and say, “Wow, what are the foundations and the base that I’ve been building?”
Play with AI. I would encourage you, play with AI with some of that and be like, “Where could I go with this? What might I explore even more? How could this help me in my current career?” Great. Tr- you will get some incredible answers. Explore the heck out of it. Have a good time. If you are a young person and you’re bouncing around in a variety of careers and exploring a few things, those are your base years.
That’s all you need to know. You can just be like, “Wow,” you know, “why do I keep exploring these things?” Because you are wired a l- differently than those people that have one niche, know their niche, and go down that path. That’s all. No big deal. And what you’re doing is building the base years that are going to then add up to and compound into an incredible later when you apply all those learnings and all of that rich knowledge.
That’s all that is. So your line in life is not gonna be linear. It’s gonna be crooked, right? And it’s gonna go in a var- uh, trust me, mine goes up, and then it kind of goes down, and then it goes up some more, and, and it goes in a variety of directions. So will yours if you are a polymath, if you are one of those people that explores and gains immense knowledge and expertise in a wide variety of areas.
So you are not behind. You need to cast that whole concept aside. And if somebody judges you in that manner, get to learn this word so you can be like, “Oh, you maybe didn’t know I’m a polymath. Like, this is what we do. It’s pretty cool. Wait till I’m about 40. Wait to see what kind of business I’m running, or what kind of career I have, or what achi- what I’m achieving.
Give me a few years. I’m just marinating. I’m just working up to it.” So find three thorough lines that are hiding in your s- in those years, those foundation years, and then take the next step with me if you need to. If you wanna explore that more with a coach, I’m the person you wanna be talking to. You could also just explore with AI and say, “Look at this. What, what does all this lead to?” Get interested in finding that thread. Get interested to know more about your journey to this point, ’cause it will help to tell you where you can head next easier and more effectively, and with more joy and happiness. I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and a champion for your success.
Bye now.