Wanting to do everything
I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of polymath. Someone who can do a lot of different things. Not the “jack of all trades master of none” but “jack of all trades, master of many”. I am also surrounded by people around me who are this. From a trained chef and poet who is learning to be a dancer and is an active investor, to a game developer who is also a designer and musician, to a visual artist who used to be a bassist in a band, people around me inspire me and feed my desire to go broader and broader.
When things get too confusing, most of this category of people like to say that they are “problem solvers” and basically the things they do are dependent on the toolset they have. They will keep developing new skills, learning new tools, finding new collaborators, and all of it is in service of expanding the kinds of problems they can solve.
Not that this is a specifically creative people problem, folks in all domains can feel it, but it is a problem that plagues the creative spirit more. Divergent connection making is the backbone of creativity, and this makes people who are creative seek divergence quite strongly. Novelty, versatility, exploration are all second nature.
To the uninitiated it can feel like a trap.
Afterall, the most common advice when you get into a new domain is “pick one thing, and do it very well”. The advice that simplifies for the sake of it, and ignores the fractal nature of knowledge. Education systems have solved it to some extent, by starting out broad, and then only going deeper when you have spent some time learning those broad domains.
Imagine if on first day of school, you were asked to pick a PhD thesis topic. Boy would that be a tragic way to kill any and all enthusiasm.
To me, being told you can only be a master of one feels the same as being told you can only learn one language. Yes it is true that majority of the world only ever becomes fluent in one language but there is nothing fundamental about being only able to master one language. There are friends of mine who can speak and understand upwards of 5 languages. Just like there are friends of mine who have deep knowledge on 5 skills. Musicians who became artists. Artists who make games. Investors who write poetry.
I don’t think it is the infinite pursuit of mastery that motivates one to be a polymath. At least that's not what motivates me to try to be a polymath. For me, it feels like it would be truer to say that I like the breadth of things, and the freedom to not box myself in.
There is this myth that one can internalise growing up that you have to be “one thing”. The most fun question that is often asked is “what do you want to be when you grow up” as if adulthood is a monolith. That you can ever only be one thing. For me deciding to pursue a creative career while getting a professional education in science, was a little bit of a middle finger to that system. I could actually like science and choose to do design. I could actually do design well and still choose to learn writing, so on and so forth my life has gone.
Every time I start feeling even a little bit boxed in I know somewhere inside me, the desire to shake things up rises and like an earthquake it moves everything.
It’s not bad, but by now, I am familiar with the rhythms. It happens once every years, the desire to change my domain, change my expertise, change something about how my brain sees the world. A small part of me wishes that I could be okay with less. That I could say “this much is enough” but somehow I always keep wanting new ideas and new things to explore. Another part of me loves this constant change, and has an excited “ I wonder what we will do next” attitude about life.
But if this wasn’t about mastery, why would being good at many things even matter, I could just “do something” even if not well. That’s where I feel another deep seated value of mine shows up, that I care about the things I make. And I want to make good things.
You can’t make good things without becoming technically good at something, afterall its only once you have learnt all the craft that you can let go and start making art.
And thats the part that feels exhausting. In my head this doesnt feel like laying down 10 bricks in 10 different houses (which would result in no house) but more like trying to build a mansion. It takes a long time, I don’t even know how close I am to the kind of craft expertise that I am looking for, but I know I am closer to being the artist that I envision myself to be than I was when I started 15 years ago.
That definitely is something I have certainty about, that all of these different pieces of my self that I am collecting, through learning orthogonal domains are adding three-dimensionality to my own inner self. This layering of the mind, when it connects a concept from general relativity to something about narrative structure just could not be achieved if I didn’t understand both. Those aha moments of insight are beautiful, and for almost everyone I know who knows more than one domain really well, that’s the thing that drives them.
Back in 2018 when I was doing well as a product designer, I had a close friend ask me to dive more deeply into it, learn the deeper details even of front end engineering and become a kickass app designer. I went into game making, and started an 18 month long struggle of trying build games, which worked fundamentally different from products. It’s a stupid path on the surface, because I give up mastery and money to satiate curiosity. But 7 years later, after having made many many games, and still having worked on product design work in between, I can say with certainty that pursuing this curiosity has made me a sharper product designer.
Honing one’s instincts as a creative is the most essential skill, because if you have killer instincts, it doesn’t matter if your tool is just a pencil, you can still create remarkable things. And there is nothing quite like learning brand new skills every few months to hone that instinct.