The Life That Made Me Polymathic

People sometimes talk about polymathy as if it’s a personality quirk, like some people are just “wired that way.” I don’t experience it that way at all. Polymathy didn’t happen to me; it emerged.

Looking back, it’s clear that it wasn’t one influence, one mentor, or one moment that shaped how I think. It was a convergence: a set of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual inputs that slowly braided together until a new pattern appeared. At the time, I didn't have language for it, but now I do.

The inputs matter

FUTURIST THINKING - One of the earliest missing pieces for me was the future. I was very future oriented, and curious what to expect of the future. Finding Ray Kurzweil’s work gave me a frame I didn’t realize could change the trajectory of my life. After reviewing Ray Kurzweil's predictions for the future, for a world shaped by AI...I saw a version of reality that looked like a sci-fi movie, and I believed it would come to fruition, not as fantasy, but as predictability. I could see in the world of the future, humans wouldn't be robust if we stayed narrow minded, specialized, and small. In the world of the future, we would need to be more complex, to match the nature of the world we would exist in. Kurzweil shaped my thinking in tremendous ways, mostly because I could see that the future would demand our minds become more alive, more capable, and more awake.

VALUING NEWNESS AND VARIETY - When I started college, a professor, Eric Trules, created the "culture vulture" competition; each week we would try new experiences, and report back on what we had tried. He would tally the list, and at the end of the semester the person who had tried the most new things would win. And that was me. I was voracious, on the hunt for newness, for expansion, for experimentation. And it changed my life, making me realize how much richer life is when it is an adventure into broad experiences.

INTERNAL AWARENESS - Another input was internal. Learning about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the idea of internal multiplicity quietly rewired how I understood the self. Instead of a single, fixed identity, I began to see human beings as constellations of parts, roles, and capacities. That insight didn’t just apply to psychology, to our inside worlds. It applied to learning and how we show up in our actions. To identity. To leadership. To intelligence itself. IFS taught me about internal multiplicity, and polymathy was the second half of that coin--how our multiplicity shows up in the external world.

AUTHENTICITY AND FREEDOM - I was also shaped by mentors who didn’t fit neatly into Western categories. One in particular, a Japanese East–West philosopher named Yasuhiko Genku Kimura also impacted my thinking tremendously. I first met him around 2013. Yasuhiko emphasized authenticity and inner freedom over achievement. He talked about being "at cause" in the world. His focus wasn’t on becoming impressive, but on becoming unconstrained, both internally and externally. That distinction stayed with me.

ORIGINALITY - Being born in and raised near Berkeley, California also impacted me thinking. Berkeley was liberal and experimental; it was cool to be weird, individual, a true monad. Becoming polymathic means we won't fit into boxes and categories, we will become hodge podge bricolage combinations--true originals. I was raised in a place and time where being unique was admirable. I never aspired to be a copy, or to follow the herd; I aspired to become my truest, most original self.

SELF-HELP AND SPIRITUALITY - Add to that a steady diet of self-help, spirituality, and inquiry into what it means to live a good life. I learned from thinkers like Eckart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Marci Shimoff, Ram Dass, Esther Hicks, Marianne Williamson, Tony Robbins, and countless others who taught me that self-mastery demands working on our interiority, not just our careers.

HISTORICAL REFERENCE - Add to that a deep curiosity about history: how humanity moved from the Stone Age to now, and who drove the biggest shifts along the way. For example, when you study the Renaissance closely, a pattern becomes hard to ignore. Many of the figures we still admire weren’t narrow specialists. They were unusually full humans. They wrote, invented, argued, experimented, built, performed. Their intelligence expressed itself across domains. Even when privilege played a role, it didn’t explain everything. Plenty of people had resources. Few had that kind of range.

Intelligence compounds when it’s exercised

There’s another piece that matters, and it’s less romantic. But to develop one's polymathy takes actually work; it requires training. Reading. Listening. Efforting.

I made a conscious decision as a young teenager to take learning seriously--to be excellent academically. I worked at it.

In college, I read everything I was assigned. All of it. Through multiple degrees. Through graduate school. Through a doctorate. I exercised my mind, consistently, for decades.

That kind of sustained intellectual effort does something to a person. It doesn’t just add knowledge. It changes how the mind works. Thinking becomes more fluid. Pattern recognition sharpens. Connections appear faster. The mind gets… awake.

It’s a bit like athletics. Some people have natural ability, but without training, they never reach their potential. Others train relentlessly and exceed expectations. Intelligence works the same way.

Over time, I became less interested in what people knew and more interested in how they thought. Could they generate original insight, or only repeat what they’d absorbed? Could they hold complexity without collapsing into certainty? Could they weave multiple perspectives into something new?

That, to me, is real intelligence. Not memorization. Not compliance. Not picking a side and defending it. But the capacity to create understanding where none existed before.

Polymathy as emergence

At some point, all of these inputs began to converge.

Futurist thinking that made it clear the future would demand broader, more awake minds.

A cultivated love of newness and variety, learned early through experimentation and lived curiosity.

Internal awareness and multiplicity, through Internal Family Systems, revealing that the self is not singular but composed of many parts and capacities.

A deep valuing of authenticity and inner freedom, shaped by mentors who emphasized being unconstrained over being impressive.

An orientation toward originality, formed in a culture where uniqueness, individuality, and being a true original were not only accepted but admired.

Years of self-help and spiritual study that reinforced the importance of interior work, self-mastery, and conscious living.

Historical pattern recognition, especially the realization that many of humanity’s greatest contributors were unusually full, interdisciplinary humans rather than narrow specialists.

Deliberate cognitive training, sustained over years, that strengthened my capacity to think, integrate, and generate original insight.

And a commitment to living a good, meaningful life — not merely a productive one.

What came out wasn’t a label I was chasing. It was a way of being in the world. Only later did I recognize it as polymathy, not as an identity to claim, but as an emergent property of curiosity, integration, and sustained attention across domains. To me, being polymathic is a refusal to flatten reality into something simpler than it actually is. It is to embrace the complexity of the reality we are in, with the goal of understanding as an evolutionary experience that changes over time, rather than getting stuck in knowingness.

Polymathy, as I experience it, isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about staying open. It's about allowing different ways of knowing to inform one another. It's about resisting the pressure to specialize the soul or cage our minds.

In a world that’s becoming more complex by the day, that way of thinking isn’t indulgent, it's necessary.