In Praise Of Polymaths

Polymath: n. person of great and varied learning.

Sounds much more fun than being narrowly focused on one aspect of one field of interest. The problem with being a modern-day polymath, as Suw Charman points out, is that the world would rather you specialized. Of course, it’s entirely possible that olden-day polymaths like Leonardo Da Vinci had the same problem, I don’t know.

Focus hasn’t troubled me unduly, at least not in my career. I’ve managed to stay mostly in the mobile phone / embedded software arena, and varied life with stints in protocol development, project management, application development, software porting, and a while as a COO.

Even that limited diversity brings problems. Given the precarious nature of my finances whilst launching my own business, I’m keeping one eye out for opportunities to earn a little extra cash; but it’s hard to succinctly explain my wide range of talents*. Do I list the programming languages in which I can code? (C, C++, PHP, Perl…) Or a list of acronyms my code has understood? (TCP/IP, PPP, HTTP, GIF, HTML…) Devices my code has run on? (Nokia 6600 et al., Siemens SX1, Sony Z5 et al., Psion Series 5, Amstrad em@iler, Linux PC, Windows PC…) Those are the standard geek identifiers, but miss the management side of things; project or department management isn’t something I could do for a short period of time, but I could advise software companies on their management, or their software process.

So many possibilities. So many other things I’d like to dabble in: building hardware; design; my artistic side (even if that’s just creating some more cakes). And at the same time I have to make my fortune and make the world a better place. Hopefully, having my own business will give me some of the flexibility to pursue this multi-faceted agenda, or at least the techie part of it.

Experiment? Adventure? Impossible? Probably all three, but it’s going to be fun.

• I know, so modest…