I am either:
a) A modern day polymath
b) A butterfly brain
c) A Jack of all trades, master of none
All I know is that you won’t go far wrong picking me to be in your pub quiz team.
I’m not talking Leonardo da Vinci levels of brilliance here. You won’t find me churning out beautiful frescoes whilst designing a flying machine and putting together a theory of plate tectonics all before breakfast. No, I’m more likely to be found mastering Nigella’s chocolate loaf cake, reading a book on quantum mechanics and re-familiarising myself with the back catalogue of nineties dance-rap diva, Betty Boo.
I love reading, writing, thinking, travelling, drawing, making things, debating, philosophising, reading the instructions in several languages on the back of my shampoo bottle...
You may have noticed that I like doing and knowing stuff. At school, it made me a bit of a freak. In adulthood it has made me an interesting person.
Interesting and talented people make some feel uneasy, especially interesting, talented and beautiful people. Take Gwyneth Paltrow. She can act, sing, rock a Calvin Klein sheath dress, write a lifestyle blog, raise a family and be an embodiment of glowing health and wellbeing. How dare she?! Who the hell does she think she is?! No one can be good at so much stuff. She has to be too good to be true.
Then there’s James Franco – the gorgeous, multi-talented actor, writer, producer and artist. My first response upon reading an interview with him was “Pah! He must have had it handed to him on plate.”
Models-slash-musicians-slash-actors-slash-intellectuals are also treated with great suspicion. Perhaps with good reason in light of Naomi Campbell’s forays into music and literature. When model and actress Lily Cole got a place at Cambridge, it was a treated as a groundbreaking novelty – a beautiful woman who is incredibly intelligent? Well I never.
Polymaths in the public eye are mocked and maligned. Celebrities are meant to be vacuous and, well, a bit thick. How else are mere mortals meant to make themselves feel better? Intellectual superiority is what we like to hold over the rich and famous.
Being good at more than one thing is discouraged. We are meant to find our unique selling point, play to our strengths and carve out our niche. It begins in school where students begin to consider themselves “artistic” or “scientific”. For some odd reason, excelling at art does not sit well alongside the rationality and logic of maths or physics. A choice has to be made.
Yet history has shown that great things happen when people don’t choose. Beautiful, exciting and near-magical things happen. At the very least, life becomes more interesting.
Self-help author, Barbara Sher, refers to those who refuse to choose a single focus in life as “Scanners”. They are the polar opposite of specialists. Whilst there are numerous benefits attached to this personality type there are also pitfalls.
It can sometimes feel like I’m buzzing through my life, erratically collecting random knowledge. Talk of goals and targets fills me with terror. I get excited at the start of things then get bored within mere moments. I never switch off and always have to be doing something. The number of hobbies I have racked up over the years is well into triple figures.
There was the Japanese phase of 2003, the sugar craft classes of 2009, the typography obsession of 2006 and the screenwriting fad of 2010. My bookshelves heave with the evidence of these short-lived passions.
Harnessing polymath tendencies can be hard work. Writing has proven to be my way of pulling everything together and making the most of my interests and talents. Writing and winning pub quizzes.
Image via Doug.Williams's flickr