Career Design for the Polymath
At first, a little story. About four years ago, a friend came to me for help, tormented by questions of professional identity. He took up one thing and then another, eventually dropping what he had started halfway through, then switching back to something equally unimportant. And so the years passed. I suggested a “game” to him: what if I created a small system that would allow us, through “Socratic maieutics” (believe me, the art of asking the right questions is art), to discover what he is internally drawn to and what he is good at. And then, I will help him build a career path, and together we will see how it all ends. I created a system; we met and spent two and a half hours making an individual route. I warned my friend that he would not see the result immediately. What we have said and recorded, whether he wants it or not, will continue to work in his unconscious, until at some point there is a “click,” and what we have outlined as a list of intentions, will not start the chain “intention-decision-action.” A little more than six months have passed, the guy already has his own business, he engaged in creative work, successfully combining both. It worked with him. For the sake of the experiment, I began to use this scheme, communicating with different people. And the results are amazing.
Now about Career Design. If earlier it was assumed that a successful career necessarily means getting a prestigious position and a high social status, today we are increasingly talking about the possibilities of realizing creative potential and feeling happy from the chosen occupation. I want to clarify what is meant by “happiness” here. In the book” Odysseus “ by the Norwegian writer Steinar Bjartveit, there is a discussion about the types of happiness. Referring to the theories of the American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, he writes that people usually understand joy either as a fleeting feeling, beautiful, dizzy, intoxicating, but, unfortunately, short-lived. Or they think of happiness as a feeling of total satisfaction with their own life. It is the second form of happiness, according to Kahneman, that is true happiness. The first form based on emotion, the second on reflection.
Bjartveit goes beyond this model and reveals the third form of happiness — associated with the concept of Eudaimonia (Greek: Ευδαιμονία). This word is usually translated as “bliss,” “happiness,” “prosperity.” Bjartveit suggests linking Eudaimonia with the problem of Self-Realization.
Of course, he emphasizes that Eudaimonia comes from the word Daemon (it is unnecessary to emphasize that there are no negative connotations that have appeared only within the framework of the Christian paradigm). Bjartveit speaks of the excellent spirit that lives in us, “the inner voice that helps us fulfill our true purpose.” Remember the Daemon of Socrates. Socrates, for whom it was more important to follow his mission than to avoid pain and death. Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote about the Daemon as follows: “Zeus gave as a portion of himself to each person, to be their guardian and guide.” Plotinus explicitly calls the Daemon a deity: δαίμων τούτω θεός. In the Renaissance, namely in the” Book of Life “ of Marsilio Ficino, head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, it is said: “…Every person has at birth one certain Daemon, the guardian of his life, assigned by his star which helps him to that very task to which the celestials summoned him when he was born.”
I think that Eudaimonia is what we are talking about in the context of Career Design. How many of your friends do things that are related to their real purpose and bring them a sense of Eudaimonia? What exactly prevents most people from living their lives and strive with their goals? There must be other reasons besides the socio-cultural context (although this context also affects us a decisive influence on us; for example, the “specialization” imposed on us, which limits our multi-faceted potential, is an integral part of the socio-cultural context). Everyone will determine these reasons for themselves. First, tell yourself what is success specifically for you, what are the criteria for success? And then think at what point, in what circumstances, success intersects with self-realization. Not with getting a status, not with earning money, but with self-realization. Undoubtedly, both status and money are beautiful and necessary elements of your Being, but not if you have exchanged for them Self-Realization, the deep aspirations of your winged soul.
How to build a career for a polymath, this interdisciplinary pilgrim, especially in a society where the demand for narrow specialization still dominates? I have a straightforward answer, but for all its apparent simplicity, it is not an instruction. But the only thing it can give you is an impulse to some insights, actions, plans. The polymath should create their interdisciplinary project (or join a ready-made one and become part of a multidisciplinary team), where he will have the opportunity to show their full planetary potential.
For a polymathic person, there is nothing worse than being in the Procrustean bed of a narrow specialty, so often polymaths in our society act as rebels, rule breakers, adherents, and harbingers of new scientific, cultural, economic, and other paradigms. For them, “living your life” means living a full and multidimensional life. Does it make sense to live another life?
I consciously make efforts to put on the agenda the topics of “polymathy,” the possibility of forming a universal personality with a wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge, as well as to question the problem of hyperspecialization and the educational system that gave rise to it. Naturally, I encountered several misconceptions about polymaths. I want to focus on one of the main ones apart so that it doesn’t have any basis.
We should not think that a polymath is a person who, being, for example, a physicist, goes to the Opera and watches Bergman’s films in his spare time. Polymath, I emphasize, takes an active part in artistic, intellectual, scientific, creative, and other endeavors that cover several disciplines at once. He doesn’t just listen or watch. He acts as a doer and a creator, who contributes to several areas at once. His active participation can be expressed in public performances (on stage, on radio, on television, as a speaker, lecturer, actor, musician, etc.), in conducting experiments of a scientific or artistic nature, in writing books or articles, etc. Its activities are not limited to diverse interests that do not find real implementation.
A film actor who is also engaged in musical creativity, as well as lectures on Economics or programming, is a polymath. His colleague, who leaf Dickens after filming, listens to Radiohead and shows interest in new technologies, is not a polymath. This is a person with many different benefits. Interests that, I emphasize, do not become an impulse to do and not go beyond the boundaries of their professional field.
My modest experience as a “career design consultant” has made it clear that many people who have severe problems with professional identification are real polymaths (often auto-didactic polymaths).
Their problem boils down to the inability to recognize their polymathic potential and determine under what conditions it will be able to be maximized. These are people who are baffled by the question: “What will You write on your business card?”Modern society has made them almost ashamed of their versatility. Waqas Ahmed insists that we are making a mistake when we give the example of polymaths and say that they are an exception to the rule. In contrast, before the industrial revolution, interdisciplinarity and a polymathic lifestyle were the norm, not the exception. Consulting different people, I tried to find in their intellectual space the Intersection of various disciplines and fields: science and art, music and mathematics, philosophy and business, etc. It is At these intersections that the Medici effect occurs.
In the book “The Medici Effect,” Frans Johansson writes:
«Leonardo da Vinci is the illustrious standard-bearer of the Renaissance, when artists, scientists, and merchants stepped into the Intersection together and created one of Europe’s most creative explosions of art, culture, and science. But the centuries that followed saw a growing specialization of knowledge. Disciplines became more fragmented as we broke the world into smaller and more specialized pieces. Today, however, that fragmentation is reversing, and the effects can be seen in fields everywhere.»
What Johansson describes, I dare say, is one of the growing trends of our time. There is a “unity” of all the arts, gaining integrity and completeness; there is a departure from fragmentation and the acquisition of a holistic vision in the Humanities, which finally re-enter the dialogue with the natural Sciences; philosophers, anthropologists, and artists are in demand in major corporations — from Google to Ford — where they work together with technologists; philosophy enters the business and changes its paradigm; educational programs are increasingly becoming interdisciplinary. Whether you like it or not, it is in the very metaphysical, intellectual, and biological application of man, (if you want, in the very archetypal model!) there is a grain of multi-faceted potential that should be discovered during life. Therefore, the formation and development of polymaths is the highest task of humanity.
