Questions: How to be a polymath

Questions I have for polymaths

Leonardo DaVinci

Recently I have been thinking about how I can become really good in multiple fields. These are a list of questions I have been pondering on myself, ones I think that if I can develop better answers to, will result in much higher quality work across the different fields I’m in.

TL;DR

• How can I develop an up-to-date taste for what “good” looks like faster?

• How can I reverse engineer great work faster?

• How can I access my subconscious faster?

• How can I ponder on multiple things simultaneously?

• How can I identify top-tier talent in new fields?

• How do I choose which skills to cultivate in a new field? 

• How can I develop a better sense of bad ideas?

• How do I avoid dogma?

• How can I ask better questions?

How can I develop an up-to-date taste for what “good” looks like faster?

When going from zero-to-one in a new field, it’s quite hard to figure out what “bad/good/great” looks like today in a timely manner.

For example, those “in” tech probably have the best sense of top-tier funds, angel investors, and accelerators today. Whereas someone just breaking into tech, however, will likely adopt an outdated taste palette of what top-tier looks like today, and with that, spend a lot of time learning and (eventually) unlearning bad practices. 

An example of this would be choosing what tech company to work at today (assuming you are choosing based on engineering culture). For most tech insiders, the best places someone could work right now would be a Replit, OpenAI, or Stripe. But for someone just entering tech, Google, Microsoft, and the likes remain the gold standard of what “excellence” looks like. And with that, they become stuck learning and eventually unlearning, the bad practices that “we” have already identified and left behind. 

So how do you develop such a taste faster? It’s a particularly hard question to answer because such information is usually scattered across multiple channels and even finding the right channels to trust takes time. In other words, I’m not sure! But it is something I am actively thinking about and constantly practicing, so if I find a good answer I’ll be sure to share.

How can I reverse engineer great work faster?

If you can’t figure out the rules by which you want to abide, and potentially break, in your given field, then you aren’t really serious about being good in said field - in my opinion of course. 

Reverse engineering what makes great work great is a good way to figure out the “rules” of a new field, and therefore which to emulate and which to perhaps break. This, however, takes time. 

For example, most people can appreciate that Hamilton is a great musical, even without being a musical theatre fan. However, most won’t be able to tell you why Hamilton was so great, talk less of doing so in a timely manner.

It takes time to notice details, rank them in terms of their importance, and so on and so forth. But if you are pursuing multiple different fields then time isn’t really on your side. So how does speed up this process? Or is a different process required given the aforementioned constraints?

How can I access my subconscious faster?

It is clear that cultivating “good” ideas in multiple fields is possible, so it’s clearly not a question of if it is possible, but how it is.

My belief is that most good ideas come from one's subconscious. I’m not sure why that is, but it seems to be true for other people too (Paul Graham and Richard Hamming)

The general flow (for me) tends to be:

1. I am stuck on a problem

2. I think about the problem all day and all night, trying to solve it

3. Something seeps into my subconscious

4. My subconscious begins chugging away at the problem without my conscious input

5. One day, whilst I am watching TV, seemingly not thinking about the problem, the answer pops into my head

It is not entirely clear what happens during steps 3 and 4, but I know these steps can not occur without step 2 first happening.

However, in the context of pursuing multiple unrelated fields, how does one practice this process simultaneously? Or is a different process required for the pursuit of multiple fields? 

Some other questions worth asking in relation to control over one’s subconscious:

• How can we speed up this process?

• What makes our subconscious so good at generating good ideas?

• How can we have better control over our subconscious?

How can I ponder on multiple things simultaneously?

As mentioned earlier, good ideas usually occur from extended pondering of a problem. The problem is that it's quite difficult to ponder on more than one thing at the same time, especially if they’re in unrelated fields. Why is that? How can I ponder on things that are completely unrelated to each other e.g musicals and organ regeneration?

How can I identify top-tier talent in new fields?

How do you know if a person is talented, has potential, has reached their peak, etc in a new field?

Aside from the generic things like work ethic, how can you tell when someone is good at their practice?

For example, how can you tell if someone is a good director, scientist, historian etc? Sure, you can look at their portfolio of work, but you still won’t know the resources they needed to produce said work, how long it took them to produce said work, if they’ve peaked already and so on and so forth. It also assumes that:

1) You have access to a portfolio of their work 

2) You know how to evaluate said work

both of which you probably don’t.

How do I choose which skills to cultivate in a new field? 

One of the biggest constraints faced when pursuing miultiple ideas in different fields is limited bandwidth, particularly in terms of time and mental capacity. Given these constraints, it is important to think through which skills are worth developing.

Should you pick those that already overlap with skills you have from different fields? Or should you simply develop the skills necessary to accomplish your desired goal, even if there is no overlap? If so, how do you manage the constant context-switching?

Again, I don’t know!

How can I develop a better sense of bad ideas?

How do you distinguish between ideas that sound good but are actually bad vs ideas that sound good and actually are good? 

So far, I have found that this problem exists across all fields, but it is particularly challenging if you are exploring ideas in multiple unrelated fields. How does this evaluation differ across multiple domains?

As far as I can tell, the only way to develop a better taste palette is through experience, but, again, your time and brain bandwidth are limited, so how does one effectively go about this?

P.S I deliberately focused on bad ideas, as I feel there are too many variables out of your control that contribute to what makes a good idea. Therefore, it is my belief that it is better to avoid bad ideas, rather than pursue good ideas. But I may be wrong!

How do I avoid dogma?

I have found that the biggest advantage I have when pursuing multiple fields is that I am a blank slate. I don’t know or work on any assumed or outdated truths in any field, which increases the likelihood of me asking the right questions. However, this advantage quickly dies the more “up-to-date” I become with current thinking.

On the one hand, there is use in relying on experts as it greatly speeds up your learning process. On the other hand, it can quickly lead you down the same way of thinking as everyone else, which will probably give you the same, undesired, outcome. So how do you combine the advantages of relying on experts for knowledge with maintaining a “blank-slate” approach?

One thing I have started doing is writing down all questions I have during my “blank-state” period, and cross-referencing them with expert knowledge e.g does current thinking address these questions directly or do they just gloss over them? Although this helps, my gut tells me that more could be done. What “more” looks like, however, I don’t know. 

How can I ask better questions?

Oftentimes, when discovering or creating something, it is really a question of asking the right questions.

It is not enough to generate a vast number of questions, you need to be able to discern the quality and importance of the questions if you are really going to get anywhere. But how do you know which questions are the right ones to ask, especially if you are entering a new field? How do you realize when you are asking the wrong questions?

I suspect that the answer may lie in figuring out how to ask better questions. It may not be possible to avoid a little time wasting on bad questions, especially in the early days of entering a new field, however, if you are able to quickly improve on your question-asking, you should be able to escape this pretty quickly. The question is how?

If you have made it this far, then I thank you for taking the time to read this. This is something I am constantly thinking about and putting into practice, so if you have any thoughts or experience on this topic, please do feel free to reach out adaobiadibe23@gmail.com