Aside: The silent polymath. There is another type of polymath that is much harder to spot – in others and in ourselves. That is the person who has all their gifts and traits within their mind. Their ability to think in creative and integrative ways is almost always hidden from the outside. This type of multi-hyphenate can be called a theorist – a person who brings vivid and novel thinking to the problems currently befuddling practitioners in their field. But the same truths exist for this type of polymath as it does for the person who displays their traits and talents in outward demonstrations. Life is going to be a tough row to hoe.

But whether you are technically a polymath or not, to the extent you find yourself with a collection of talents and traits this article can provide you with an important review of how well your world supported you as you tried to master all these skills.

So, let’s get to those 29 reasons why being a polymath can feel disastrous.

Top-heavy toddlers

What does a baby polymath look like? She will likely be a tyke who seems to not fit well within her family. She may be insatiable and out of control, or he might be withdrawn and difficult to reach. Her curiosity, distractibility, audacity and so on, or his self-containment, willfulness and distancing will often outstrip the patience and understanding of their adults. And, as I’ve mentioned often on this website, because baby gifts show up early and unrefined, adults frequently see them, tragically, as flaws to be stifled, and quickly! The image that comes to mind for me is a tiny child with a huge head full of talents with a weak little neck trying to support it. These top-heavy toddlers will struggle to sustain the long, long process of mastering and possibly integrating their many gifts. And they will fall down a lot.

You can see how being a polymath renders one in great need for both gracious environmental support and the grace of Fate, aka patient parents who can guide them toward outstanding training.

The first bit of bad news for the polymath, then, is that they are often out of sync with and/or misunderstood by their families of origin, and that misfit can cause them to be denied the very necessary emotional and practical support they need to develop crucial ego strength.

Playpen

If we consider our childhood an existential playpen, you can begin to see how a one-size-fits-all childhood could be especially limiting to someone with many gifts. Let me describe the environment that would allow a factotum to flourish:

First, of course, would be the need to see the top-heavy toddler as a unique individual with her own, very specific needs. These needs will include all those of a monomath, but in addition such children will need to be educated about how to deal with the reality of their polymathism.

In the ideal world, special attention would be paid to teaching them strategies to handle the difficulties facing them such as sequencing, patience, resilience, perseverance and self-soothing. They also need to be forewarned about how their future may look. Because there are so many ways polymaths can be tripped up by the dominant culture, it would be helpful to a young factotum if her parents understood all 29 reasons that make it difficult to be a polymath and could discuss each one with her at the age-appropriate time.

Young polymaths will also need to be exposed to a wide range of teachers and mentors and cheerleaders. As described further below, this is a lot of pressure for the parents. It won’t always be obvious what lessons to provide and at what point in the child’s life; when to push the child past a learning block; when to ease up if the child is truly not needing the training; how to find teachers who are a good fit with the child’s learning style and personality; which coaches are effective, etc. A polymath’s need for multiple areas of cheerleading can also exhaust a parent meaning that such parents need to pay special attention to creating their own support system.

Finally, a lucky polymathematical child is one who has parents brave enough to take their jobs seriously and hold themselves accountable. Specifically here, these two attitudes mean that the adults don’t just flap their lips uttering platitudes when the little ones express dreams for their future. If little Teddy says she wants to be an astronaut, the parents don’t just give her a smiling “You can be anything you want to be.” generic response. They listen, watch and seriously consider what the child is expressing.

To summarize, an adequate playpen for a polymathic child would need to include careful and consistent parental attention, a warning about the dangers ahead, much coaching in the strategies that can foster the development of many gifts, a string of good teachers, abundant cheerleading and a prediction of how the culture may respond to them down the road.

I realize this is a pie-in-the-sky description of parenting, but I outline it here in order for you to see the ways you may have been underserved growing up. If this sadly is true for you, you may have missed that window when youthful brains are designed to charge gleefully up a steep learning curve, but you can absolutely start now looking for training, mentoring, understanding, cheerleading, opportunities, etc.

The bottom line here is that you can’t always grow where you’re planted, no matter the allure of the aphorism urging us to flourish no matter what. Few parents have the courage to be honest with the child about the difficulties of life, have the ability to guide them through their early years of trying to ride a number of horses simultaneously or have the energy to keep up with their multitalented offspring. The image of an orchid in a cabbage patch comes to mind as we picture this little kid. There is nothing wrong with either an orchid or a cabbage, but they definitely need very, very different environments if they are to thrive.

Pencil neck

Back to the image of the top-heavy toddler, the tiny metaphorical neck trying to hold up this massively talented head is ego strength. From the APA dictionary definition, “an individual with a strong ego is thus one who is able to tolerate frustration and stress, postpone gratification, modify selfish desires when necessary, and resolve internal conflicts and emotional problems before they lead to neurosis.” Developing ego strength is a challenging developmental task for all, but the pressure of exercising so many talents to mastery can increase this difficulty significantly. Therefore, a multi-gifted child who is likely extra slow to develop these executive-function strengths is at great risk to be seen as neurotic. This diagnostic dismissal will often manifest in those very necessary parents, teachers, coaches and mentors losing interest in the child or even disliking him. What a child like this needs are adults who have such a deep understanding of the polymath’s dilemma that they can advocate successfully for that child when necessary. Parents who are themselves polymaths need to have figured out how to navigate through that difficult reality in order to model effective behavior for their child. Parents who are not need to have figured out how to support their child with direct teaching and advocacy.

Strengthening those little necks will require much overt teaching of the skills that underlie frustration tolerance, delay of gratification, self-soothing, differentiation and empathy. Successful parents will hold their child accountable for developing the life skills underlying ego strength and yet will exercise extra patience as the child’s pace may be slow and terribly lurching – a very narrow parental path to navigate.

Always hungry

When you have a talent for something, especially if you also have the personality traits needed to underwrite that talent, you will experience a restlessness that serves to drive you out into your world seeking a way to manifest that talent. Gifts call out from within us not saying “I can do this.” but saying “I must do this!” Your particular gifts seek their particular work and they will not let you rest peacefully until they find it. More gifts mean more seeking and probably less peace.

This hunger-driven, quintessentially human behavior is will to power. I can pretty much guarantee that very, very few parents know how to teach this concept to their children because very few of us are trained existential thinkers. (Will to power, covered in the previous article, is the Nietzschean concept that yokes our hunger to master a gift with the discipline to practice it.) As a result, nearly all of us rely on dumb luck to stumble upon the requisite experiences that can feed our will-to-power hunger. The polymath will need several helpings of that dumb luck. That’s a big ask of an indifferent cosmos.

Section III of the website is dedicated to this construct – finding and thus feeding the appetites of our talents and traits. With a polymath, this tricky and life-long endeavor is multiplied by a factor of two or more. If you truly want to understand the plight of the factotum, you will need to read all the articles in this section.

One more point about the multiple hungers of the polymath: Often people get discouraged in the process of acquiring the collection of underlying skills while waiting for the superordinate gift to manifest. For a concrete example, if you are very good at framing, siding, finish carpentry and tiling you may not be able to compete with those subcontractors who specialize, but you will probably be an extraordinary general contractor. But you have to stick with each of these lesser talents long enough to mature into the senior-level position.

Picture the polymath, then, with several of these existential hungers all pulling at once and most often in different directions. Can’t you imagine that it might be a little bit uncomfortable?

Competing with the monomaths

Let me make sure to state clearly here that there is nothing wrong with singularly talented folks. (And, of course, that term itself is a misnomer because mastery of all domains requires multiple talents. For the sake of clarity only I’m going to make a distinction between monomaths and polymaths.) But a footrace between a young monomath and a young polymath is going to be most often won by the monomath simply because they can bring all they are to the competition.

What this means, of course, is that a polymath will probably spend a lot of time feeling like a loser. As I described in the article on triumph, it can be difficult to learn to distinguish between losing and being a loser. If you are an excellent violinist but also a gifted equestrian, mathematician and poet, you will be less likely to win first chair in the high school orchestra over a person for whom the violin is their thing. This sense of not being the best can demotivate many folks from continuing to foster their gifts.

Mentoring

Hoo, boy. This is a huge category of bad news.

If your gifts are related, recognizable, valued and trait matched, you are one of the lucky ones who will probably have little trouble finding people to guide you to the land of success. Your talents will unfold, one after the other, and will be met with squeals of delight from the adults around you. Patronage and training will be there in abundance as needed and stipulation will abound.

More often than not, however, it can be extremely challenging to find a collection of people who can support you as you collect the requisite skills. Let’s list some of the many obstacles to finding a mentor or three:

1. There may not be anyone in your area capable of providing you with the support, training and challenges you need to foster a specific gift. If you are a human metronome poised to be the next Buddy Rich, it would be helpful if the nearest drum teacher wasn’t 250 miles away.

2. If there is a teacher close by, it would be nice if she was a good personality match with you. Every kid will react differently to different teaching styles. A tough-minded tennis coach might stifle a sensitive little boy but provide excellent structure for a rough-and-tumble girl.

3. If there is a great teacher nearby who is a good match for you, that teacher must know her own limits. An effective mentor is one who is willing to send a pupil on to the next teacher once that pupil has outgrown her.

4. Mentors tend to be monomaths who might struggle to understand that you are being pulled in many directions and might therefore be impatient with you if you split your practice time among several domains. Effective teachers for polymaths are those who can see how their contribution fits within the learning process of the whole child.

5. Parents must be watchful to ensure that a coach or mentor isn’t in thrall to envy of the child’s polymathism. If the teacher’s jealously goes unnoted, the teacher/student relationship can take on macabre feel. When sabotage occurs outside the parents’ awareness, a child will be severely damaged by the bitter adult teacher. This happens a lot.

6. Parents must also be aware of the Svengali tendency of some teachers who will be eager to become a child’s everything. It’s natural to want your students to admire and emulate you, but you shouldn’t become their guiding star.

7. Many teachers work best with students in a limited age range. I knew a gifted piano teacher who only worked with the little ones because introducing youngsters to the instrument was her favorite thing. She had several colleagues who preferred older students and she would pass the tykes off to them as soon as they were ready. What a lovely set up!

8. It may take decades for a polymath to find a niche that fulfills their particular constellation of gifts. An excellent guide for that child will be someone with abiding patience and a wise existential stance. Unfortunately, few people study pedagogy before they hang out a teaching shingle, which means that they probably lack a theoretical understanding of the stages of teaching, how different teaching approaches affect different students, how to set reasonable learning objectives, how to motivate students past challenges, etc.

Polymaths can also benefit greatly from mentoring around their multi-talented reality. Most multigifted people are more than willing to serve an apprenticeship in the arts underlying an effective factotumhood – self-soothing, patience, metacognition, and career development. They just need to find someone under whom to apprentice. Unfortunately, wise mentors with a long view of life are beyond rare.

You can see how complicated teaching and mentoring can be. With an excellent teacher, a child will naturally use their adoration of the teacher to pull them past any learning or practicing difficulties that may arise. So despite the many pitfalls of the mentoring process, when it works well it will guide you directly to the existential Promised Land.

But, for those polymaths for whom their multiple gifts were met with silence from the world, how is that not an utter tragedy?

Agitated giftlessness

Imagine for a moment what life might be like for the unlucky people who have no idea that they are polymaths. Who very often have no idea they are even gifted.

Imagine getting up every morning in a state of agitated giftlessness. Your talents are all behind the scenes urging you to jump into life. But because you don’t know they are there or what they are seeking, you feel stupidly unable to make your life into something potent. You feel like a car stuck in neutral with the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor. You watch the gas gauge slowly sink toward empty even as you watch your peers motor off into potent lives. You are going nowhere. You feel pathetic.

Very subtle gifts and traits rarely get recognized or garner any respect. An example might be a young boy who is empathic, calm, responsible, well organized and interested in other cultures. He might make an extraordinary diplomat, but who in this kid’s life would recognize what his collection of gifts would lead to? It’s a long shot to expect our environment to recognize the intersection of those subtle gifts and traits that can result in an exquisite nexus of synergistic giftedness.

To add insult to injury, what society often does in this situation is focus on the agitation rather than the hidden giftedness. Sound familiar?

Some people in these circumstances lead lives of quiet despair. Others act out their agitations in ways pretty much guaranteed to isolate them from people – perhaps the very people who could help them discover their gifts. I would say that at least 30% of the people entering therapy with me fit this disconcerted, distressed description, and 100% of those folks attribute their overwrought, lonely state to personality flaws. They see their failure of will as a personal indictment of their worth as an individual.

Trapped in the shallow end of the pool well into their adult lives, these anguished people remain unable to dive into the glorious depths of mastery seeking. If you’re restless and depressed, this may well be you.

Loss leader

Now imagine this dilemma: you are beautifully designed to develop software that enhances the interface between artist and canvas. Your art talent shows up first, but it isn’t as great a gift as your natural ability to program. If you fail to recognize art as something you need to master, you can fill your academic schedule with everything but art classes.

So, this little category is a bit esoteric. It concerns the situation where the first few gifts that appear in a baby polymath are not their strongest. What can happen then is that the child and her adults will miss the opportunity to put a little extra effort – or maybe any effort – into developing these early gifts. When the later talents and traits come online, the synergizing initial gifts may be weak or missing altogether.

Another dilemma here is that the child will struggle to master the lesser talent with lesser rewards and then burnout in terms of diligence and practice.

And, of course, the converse can also be true. When the first gift or trait that appears is the strongest one, it can often overwhelm the system to the point that people get diagnosy. By this I mean, when a tyke is obsessed with learning something to the exclusion of all the subjects the parents and schools want that child to learn, the adults will often start to slap labels on that child. The labels can be “flattering” as in “She’s our little star softball pitcher.” Or “He just lives for his improv group.” which may then preclude her or him from developing other gifts. Or the labels can be pathologic such as “She’s on the spectrum.” or “He has an oppositional defiant disorder.”

All of this is to say, the order in which our talents and traits appear can add a huge degree of difficulty to our internal motivational system as well as access to training, support and success.

Monomath and Sons

A common tragedy for the multigifted is created when a parent insists that the child follow in his footsteps. This can be directly stated as in: “You’ll start to work in the business right out of college.” Or it can be more vague, as in a family culture that recognizes only white-collar professions as legitimate. This particular type of upbringing curse is detailed here.

Little brats

From what I can tell, Albert Einstein had a bit of trouble as a kid in school. Einstein’s son reports that his father often felt like an outsider because his mind worked so differently from those of his peers – and even from his teachers.

Not all extraordinary gifts need traditional schooling, but many do. Most polymaths struggle to sit patiently in a classroom paced for an average student. Their sense of boredom and their hunger to learn something else can start to feel like torture.

Alternatively, many gifted students get bounced ahead in school meaning that their less-developed social skills may hamper their interpersonal success. This may affect their friendships, their confidence and even, due to the subjective nature of evaluations, their grades.

When little kids don’t feel like they fit, when they are bored, when their curiosity isn’t being fed and when they don’t make friends easily, they can act out in an effort to draw attention – and therefore help – from adults. Most adults don’t have the time, the training or the inclination to recognize early misdemeanors as a signal that the child is seeking a more comfortable route to mastery. Wouldn’t it be nice if all adults were familiar with the existential concept of will to power?

Big brats

A treacherous and related difficulty for these kids deals with their evolving relationship with their parents and teachers. There are few things worse for a child than to feel disliked by the adults surrounding that child. Too often kids with many talents can feel so out of sorts within themselves and so distracted by all they want to learn and do that they can be poor citizens within a family or a classroom. Failure to do chores, follow rules or get along with siblings and peers are all common characteristics in the young and the gifted. Again, these are misdemeanors, but if they collect within a child’s life long enough, that kid can start to feel so resentful and disconnected that there will be no social incentive to cooperate. What tend to follow that mindset are some serious self-sabotaging behaviors which can set the kid permanently apart from society. A very, very, very common tragedy.

Cog phobic

When a young woman has a bunch of strengths that are all running around, bucking and rearing, trying to get something started, she is not going to be at all interested in being asked to be a cog. Minor but necessary doesn’t cut it for her. In fact, you could say her natural will to power would make her cog phobic. That autonomous attitude won’t tend sit well with the adults in her life who would just as soon find a little cog position for their daughter asap. Like a parking space downtown, the spots for a factotum are rare and hard to spot. Parents can tire of circling the block for years trying to help the daughter find her niche. Can’t blame them for that, but you can blame them for shaming the daughter for not wanting to be a cog – to please just take a parking space out in the suburbs of life and be happy.

She may not even want to be a gear, but rather the watchmaker. How on earth do you help someone find that wish and move toward it?

All of this can be true for sons, but sadly, it is often true for daughters.

Low hanging peaches

It can be very tempting to a young polymath to flit from one gift to another, staying with one only long enough to harvest the skills made easy by their talent.

The danger of this dilemma increases significantly when a person is gifted in unrelated ways because there will then be a whole orchard of trees laden with that tasty fruit.

Everyone does this to some extent – gads about gathering the easy stuff of life. But for all those 29 reasons, this very human foible takes on a greater danger in the life of a polymath. Here is where good parenting becomes even more crucial – helping the little ones gain the discipline needed for accumulation of good work habits. If you didn't get that back then, you need to go get it now.

We move now into those dilemmas that tend to appear later in life. While many of these issues overlap with each other in how they cause distress for the multigifted, each is distinctly problematic.

Headless chicken running

Once the many-gifted have trained their talents, they often find that they are choking a bit on all that they have bitten off.

Sometimes this is due to the fact that the area of giftedness has to take a back seat to a salary-earning endeavor. Dancers who work all day and rehearse all evening are truly inspiring. But they will have little time and energy left over for friends, family, grocery shopping and laundry – meaning their lives can feel chaotic and lonely.

Sometimes if your job integrates all your many talents, you may take on too much work because every opportunity or project will be just too enticing to pass up. How can you possibly not write every script for every episode of your show? This is the source of workaholism, exhaustion, burnout and drug use.

If you have several areas of mastery, you have an additional challenge because you will be presented with multiple opportunities to use your gifts in multiple domains. Picture a rattled soul who has two unfinished concertos, a college course to prepare to teach, a performance to rehearse, private students to challenge, a novel almost finished and a pizza oven half completed in their backyard. Gives me a headache.

Too many demands

When you are very good at many things, demands will also come at you from outside yourself. Everyone around you will ask you to contribute your talent to his or her particular project. This can set you up for having to say “No” too many times for comfort. You will sense, on some level, that you are being stretched too thin, but you also sense that others are unaware of (and perhaps uncaring about) all the other demands on your time, energy and talent.

There is no way, it turns out, to clarify for people why you cannot meet their needs without seeming to dismiss their importance to you.

That italicized sentence is so easy to brush aside, but it is excruciating to many polymaths to hurt people’s feelings day in and day out. Please take a minute here to think about your past week or month. How many times did you have to set limits? And conversely, how many times did you sacrifice yourself by not setting limits? They both hurt – denying someone your assistance and denying yourself protective limits. There is nowhere a polymath can rest from pain caused by the demands of others.

And because polymaths tend to be very impressive people, being seemingly dismissed by one carries a little extra sting. So the polymath faces, week after week, hurting people’s feelings while still working too hard. Gives me heartache.

The bottom of the top

I believe that this is worth repeating – it is so hard to maintain motivation when the rules of the game are such that you will almost always lose.

As I’ve mentioned, polymathematical children can struggle to compete with the monomathematical kids. They are good at say geometry, but won’t be as nimble as the math geeks. They get A’s in other words, but won’t be the best. When you spend too much time at the bottom of the top, you can start to feel very overextended and lost. You may sense that you have a superordinate gift (theoretical sociologist, for example) but that feeling can be so vague and fragile that it may not survive too many times being less successful than your peers. It’s very hard to maintain rigorous training when you never, ever win a race.

But this dilemma remains true your whole life. Because you can never focus all your energy on just one of your gifts, it will likely never be able to compete with people who are able to do that. Stipulation, career advances, applause and, sadly, money can often lag for the multigifted.

Shoot the moon

When gifts call out to us to be put in the game and when we are exposed to how the game is being played on a global level, we understandably feel eager to jump in. Sometimes, a polymath can get ahead of himself a bit by putting himself out there too soon. If you aim too high, too soon and too publicly, you can face plant so completely it will be hard to recover.

Hard to phone it in

It is very difficult for talented people to do less than their best. When a gifted person approaches a task, their world-class future memory can already picture that task completed to extraordinary standards. As a result, the initiation threshold for many parts of their day can be dauntingly high as they approach each job as a potential work of art.

A polymath may also struggle with an internal demanding self that wants her to constantly excel at excelling! She probably won’t realize that she is consistently raising the bar on herself until her baseline for both effort and success are exhaustingly high.

And, of course, it is hard to always do your best when people around you don’t realize how much energy it takes to do so. They will probably think everything is easy for you because you make everything look easy. Polymaths just don’t get much empathy.

Again, it is easy to brush aside the tiny pinpricks of pain that each of these three dilemmas inflicts, but they add up. Try to imagine how many times you flinch during the average day.

Painful exposure

In addition to not being able to phone it in, when you are very good at something you will often struggle with the disagreeable feelings that accompany exposure to other people’s sloppiness or wrongheadedness. Put more frankly, when you are truly gifted you are exposed to all the work of the non-gifted. This state can feel painful, lonely and tiring. Try going for a walk through an average neighborhood with a talented architect and gifted landscape architect. You’ll never view those houses and yards the same way again!

It’s important to understand that this discomfort is not a function of snobbery. A talented person simply interfaces with the world in a different way. Their evolved and accomplished taste cannot be turned off. Therefore, a polymath can have many experiences over the course of their day that are reminiscent of sitting valiantly through a junior high band concert when you’re blessed with perfect pitch. In other words – ouch!

Daily living skills

This issue is reminiscent of the absentminded inventor trope.

Many people with many talents will find it hard to keep their daily lives in order because their willpower tends to be depleted by their multiple mastery-seeking behaviors. Even if a polymath has time at the end of her busy day to do some of the checkbook balancing chores of life, she will have often used up her self-discipline by then. Chores mount up and the resulting sense of feeling overwhelmed further reduces the already diminished willpower.

Other polymaths can be so focused on their passions they will not even see the accumulated chaos. It is absolutely impossible to correct poor habits when the negative results of sloppiness don’t even register.

So, while it may not be a priority for the polymath to pay the bills or clean out the refrigerator, they do need to keep the electricity on. A chaotic laboratory can be problematic in that it can slow down the work or even be dangerous. A chaotic work or living space can be demoralizing to polymaths whose personalities actually crave order. If you can be clear with a polymathic slob that their messiness is not due to laziness, then you simply have a pragmatic problem to solve: what external structure can you put in place to assist them with keeping their lives running more smoothly and safely? A coherent to-do list, phone alarms, or a Get S*%t Done Day are all examples of task scaffolding.

Tethered

Polymaths tend to be earnest folks, meaning that they attach to the things they do and to the things they create. With so many attachments, the potential for distress is high. Vulnerability goes up because both entropy and other people are ever present to destroy their works. Classic examples are the writer who has to suffer the bastardization of their work when Hollywood gets a hold of it, and that gifted landscape architect whose clients plant some lovely running bamboo in the middle of a beautifully designed yard.

Nietzsche’s granddaughter

In my experience, polymaths tend to be extra curious people and extra curious people tend to be naturally inclined to view life through an existential lens. There are no easy answers to the big questions of life for this type of person, meaning that, in addition to all their other issues, polymaths are also likely to struggle with the givens of existence.

They also may be somewhat bored by people who invest too heavily in seeking easy answers.

Lonely at the top

Which brings us to this: It’s also been my experience that polymaths tend to be lonely. There are many valid reasons that this be the case.

First, when you have many powerful facets to your personality, it can be nearly impossible for any one person to be able to see and understand all of you or even most of you. You will find yourself surrounded by people who each know a little about you. Meaning no one “really gets you.” This is a fragmented mirror within which to see yourself. Meaning you struggle to have a complete relationship with yourself. Meaning loneliness outside and inside.

Second, it can be difficult to find peers. This is partly due to the fact that there are few polymaths statistically speaking, and partly because many potential (read: unrecognized and unactualized) polymaths are too depressed or anxious to be capable of healthy friendships.

Third, mastering the interpersonal world takes a long time and much practice. The polymath may simply have not taken the time to learn social skills. If that’s the case, they may be behind their peers developmentally and will seem awkward or naive. They may also have little time to attend to others because of their very full work life. On the other hand, they may be more psychologically developed than their peers and thus struggle to find friends who are capable of sophisticated interpersonal relationships. Or they find it difficult to participate in social small talk because their drive to learn pushes them to seek deeper conversations. It turns out that not a lot of people like to discuss the motivational aspects of the fear of death at a dinner party.

If you’re a factotum, you can be seen as an intimidating, inflexible know-it-all by people who are unaware of the effort you have put into mastering many domains. No one will witness all the solitary hours you have spent acquiring the basic information and skills you need. No one can see how much time you spend thinking your way through the problems you see before you. Nor will many people realize the courage you have needed to innovate, to put your talents out there in new and perhaps controversial ways. All they see is your tendency to jump into discussions with strong opinions or recherché lectures – definitely how to win friends and influence people.

And finally, if you are too esoteric or too out of sync with your zeitgeist, you may find it very difficult to earn a living doing what you are designed to do. This situation can leave you poor and a bit bitter. Again, not a winning stance in terms of making friends.

Blind spots

In a related story, here’s another sequence of events that can alienate polymaths from their compatriots. Because they have a greater ability to see the big picture, to integrate knowledge from other areas and to think outside the box, they may be right a great deal of the time. And because most polymaths are also extremely earnest people, their pure enthusiasm for participating in any brainstorming may cause them to over contribute. Which is how polymaths can become so used to being right they can be oblivious to those times when they are not. I’m sure you can see where that foible tends to lead.

Here’s to your health

I would guess that just reading this article to this point is creating a little anxiety. Picture what living with all these dilemmas all day, everyday is like – especially if you’re lonely. That stress, added to the regular stressors of contemporary life can very easily overwhelm the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems causing autoimmune and autoinflammatory problems for the multi-talented.

The constant pressure to strive and thrive in many domains can also precipitate health problems if a person somaticizes their stress. You can often find these folks suffering from TMJ, backaches, headaches, gastrointestinal problems, insomnia and so on.

In further bad news, with all that’s on their plate, these folks can find it very difficult to clear the time for feeding themselves a healthy diet and for a health-saving exercise program.

And it’s sadly not unusual for those poor health indicators to precipitate extremely dangerous behaviors such as drug or alcohol abuse. Self-loathing is sure to follow.

Clearly there are serious health risks to be had if you have many, many talents, ergo the need to analyze your lifestyle extra carefully. I know. One more thing to put on your plate.

I’ll have what she’s having

It’s bad enough to constantly compete with monomaths, but polymaths also can’t help but compare themselves to the flourishing polymaths. Global exposure to superstars exposes us relentlessly to the top of the top in every category of life. And polymaths, like all of us, are also exposed to fantasy polymaths through movies that seem so real it’s hard for our brains to remember that they’re not.

Now, because polymathism is normally distributed relative to potency, there will be extraordinary polymaths and average polymaths. There will also be extraordinarily lucky and unlucky ones. All that is to say that there will be many average, less lucky multigifted folk who will find themselves struggling to accept their location on the success continuum that runs between Terry Malloy (On the Waterfront) and Tony Stark (Ironman).

The one missing piece

The most basic skill needed to insure and ensure success in life is self-discipline. Some lucky folks are born with high levels of this, but most of us have to learn this skill and often the hard way. As mentioned above, most polymaths have to learn this skill too, but they have to do it while also mastering all their gifts, often without the external motivation of being seen as a winner, in a state of loneliness and perhaps with adults all around them angry with them all the time. Backward, in other words, in heels.

Another missing piece

Building on the last category, sometimes one large gift finds no place to land in the daily life of the polymath, and he can spend some of his day feeling like a sheepdog without any sheep. Like the neurotic little corgi we had as kids who tried to guard shoes or herd dinner guests, polymaths can create some problems for themselves if they try to enact their gifts in inappropriate ways. If you’re someone with extraordinary leadership qualities but spend your days in a solo practice, you may drive some people around you crazy if you start leading their lives for them. Or, if you have yet to find an outlet for your passion for teaching, you can annoy people with your frequent advice as you feel the need to bring all you have to offer to those who don’t care to accept that offer.

Here again it falls on the shoulders of the polymath to pay attention to this possibility and take responsibility for reining it in. Wouldn’t it be nice if the world around you would offer to do a little of that for you in a kind and clever way?

Peace out

Moments of tranquility may be few and far between for a factotum. Here are just three among the many reasons for this.

Remember the section above about talents being always hungry? The relentless multipotentiality within polymaths results in many parts within them constantly caterwauling for attention. It’s hard to sleep when your music-loving side is having a petulant fever dream about getting some resources sent its way – accompanied by an ear worm from hell.

Then there is the time spent being becalmed. As you master a skill or a domain, there will be a plateau of some length as the underlying skills all strengthen and jell. A person learning many, many skills will experience many, many plateaus. If several hit at once, demoralization can settle in, making it difficult to stay motivated and optimistic.

And, if one necessary ingredient in the polymath recipe is missing, there may be a loooooong plateau when that unnatural skill has to be overlearned. Even more tragically, there will be polymaths who lack a key and nonnegotiable talent or trait that cannot be taught. A friend of mine is perfectly designed to be an inspirational, tireless spiritual leader. All her career assessments agree that minister should be her primary career goal. But, as an asserted atheist, organized religions are anathema to her. No God, no career option #1.

When a person spends her life with few episodes of peace of mind, she likely won’t even realize what’s missing. The highway of her life has no rest stops, and yet she gets up every morning and gets back on the road. Amazing.

The word “boss”

People rise in management most often when they have shown noticeable skill in pre-management positions. These folks are usually those who specialize in a field and have therefore acquired expertise early on in their career. These folks are usually monomaths. What that can mean is that the monomath boss will often not understand a polymath employee.

The very word “boss” can stick in the craw of a factotum who finds it hard to trust the leadership of someone with fewer gifts than she has. Or who has a boss who is threatened when the he has better ideas. Or a supervisor who takes credit for the ideas of the polymath. Or a manager committed to sticking resolutely inside the box.

With more aptitude and less authority, polymaths need to be really good at speaking truth to power, finessing positive outcomes with upper management and being skillfully assertive. In other words, they need to be good at politics. Another thing they have to learn.

Finally, polymaths are often overlooked when management positions open up because they may have a rather fractured résumé or CV. So even though research suggests that polymaths can make excellent CEOs and deans and senators, they can struggle to get their feet on the lower rungs of the success ladder.

You can see why many a polymath itches to get out from under his boss. Unfortunately there are no good antihistamines for a virulent boss allergy.

Master of none

There is disdain reserved in our culture for people who “dabble.” Low status words like “generalist” or “dilettante” can be slapped on a polymath before she has had a chance to integrate her gifts. At best the culture will simply ignore people who seem to be amateurs. At worst, it will pull opportunities such as salary, scholarships, promotions and mentoring away from these “lazy” folks.

Let’s sit with that sad truth for a moment.

You may wonder why this most obvious polymath dilemma is set deep into this article. I wanted to first demonstrate why a factotum feels so very bitter when this indictment is thrust upon him. He knows just how many of the above dilemmas he has been facing – perhaps only marginally successfully. And he senses just how many of the dilemmas described below await him in his future. And the culture labels him as a good-for-nothing waste of time. Yikes.

Everything is interesting

The mind of the polymath is used to seeing learning as fun. When presented with a college catalog of hundreds of courses, each one can look intriguing. How are you to distinguish between the fun of learning biochemistry, say, and the reality of becoming a biochemist?

One of the hardest lessons for a factotum to learn then is this: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should! If you take some time to think through your past few months, you might be surprised to discover how many times your love of learning sent you off in tangential directions. This is not a flaw, it is a gift – one that can lead to many serendipitous discoveries. It is, however, in great need of the balancing skill of focusing. When singularity of purpose doesn't come naturally to us, we will need to build guardrails to protect our progress toward the passions that we most want to pursue.

Wait, wait, wait

If you go to a smorgasbord and the first item you see is one of your favorite foods, you may have a hard time not filling your plate right then and there. A polymath can have a similar problem moving off a thrilling and steep learning curve. A prosaic example would be losing yourself in learning the banjo when your band needs you to stay nimble on the guitar and bass. Again, not a flaw, but something to be noticed.

School daze

A tragedy I see played out repeatedly in the lives of polymaths is a lack of access to higher education.

Sometimes this is due school burnout, to the depletion of curiosity and discipline caused by many years of mastering the curriculum dictated by the dominant culture. I’m all for general education requirements, but, if you think about it, we all spend 12 years learning a bunch of stuff set out for us by someone else.

In addition to being a compliant school kid mastering a culturally-determined competence, often by the time a multigifted person finds his specific area of study at the undergraduate level, he is too drained emotionally and financially to pursue that training. What tends to follow is either resignation to making do with what he has already learned (how many kids tragically “pick” majors based on how many courses they’ve already taken that will fulfill requirements for the major?) or the long and winding road of being self-taught.

Conversely, if a child is low in academic comfort, he may miss out on some assist from the culture. This type of person often self-trains to great success, but it would have been simpler for them to learn the already-known material through an organized curriculum provided by knowledgeable instructors. The final coup de grâce for the self-taught is the fact that those in power will withhold certification from them. Without that college diploma, many potent people are denied work.

And, even if the polymath is determined enough to try to pursue formal training, very often training cultures are unwilling to accept an older student with a fragmented CV. Families and spouses can also feel drained by the relentless need for expensive training for their polymath relative.

No ladder

An additional way that a monomath can have a significant advantage over a polymath is this: most career ladders have their feet planted at the bottom of recognizable and culturally valued professions. These tend to be tightly focused fields that are well suited to monomaths.

There is often no career ladder leading smoothly up for the multi-talented folks. The opportunity to enact their full power may not become available until they have mastered all their gifts and can then “sell” themselves to a world not always wise enough to see that it needs what a polymath has to offer.

This is, to me, the most lugubrious of the polymathematical dilemmas.

Fighting the odds

A lot of polymaths are trying to locate themselves professionally at the intersection of several domains. If you know on some level that you’re good at a lot of things but that none of those things hold your interest to the exclusion of the other things, you are probably a polymath looking for that intersection. The greater the number of sets that intersect in a Venn diagram – in this case talents and traits – the smaller the area of total overlap. For some polymaths, this will mean that they are looking for a teeny, tiny area of work that can satisfy their many gifts simultaneously. The upshot is a nearly indescribably difficult endeavor.

Many are able to pull this off. And those folks are lucky.

For other, not so lucky folks, the journey will be long and fraught. It isn’t the straightforward difficulty of the tedious but understandable needle-in-a-haystack challenge. A more apt representation would be a quest to find an undetermined number of pieces of a powerful motor hidden on different continents that may or may not fit together to create something that may or may not yet exist. The kicker being the damn motor won’t run without ALL the pieces.

And, even unluckier are those people described in the section above on agitated giftlessness who have absolutely no sense they are looking for a point of overlap that will provide them with a magnificent obsession. They just feel disjointed, giftless and lazy.

So you can see that the polymaths who have synergizing gifts have a pretty tricky time finding that place where they can yoke all their gifts to pull together. There’s very little solace for these people in the aphorism “Not all who are wandering are lost.”

Deep, dark hole

So, many polymaths never, ever find their bliss. Let me describe what that is like:

People constantly write songs and plays and scripts about the unbearable misery of not being loved by another. It is a much worse state to be unable to love yourself. And it’s almost impossible to love yourself if you haven’t managed to put all your gifts in harness. Many polymaths – especially those with gifts that go unrecognized and are unrelated, unvalued and unsupported by the necessary personality traits – never, ever find their niche. They never, ever get to feel the thrill of flow, when they are certain that they are in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. They never, ever feel the stipulation of folks in their lives in a way that signifies respect. And they never, ever feel at peace within themselves.

This, to me, is the deep, dark existential hole that imprisons people in a symptom-filled, lonely life. When they review their life to date, they do not see how resolutely they have prowled through their world looking for something they can do well. They see, instead, a wandering path down many dead ends that signifies to them a shameful and lazy existence.

Add to that misery the shaming narrative of personal responsibility put forward relentlessly by the dominant culture, and you have the bleakest state imaginable.

Everyone has gifts to apply to their world. Everyone is born to be industrious with those gifts. No one is born looking for a vacation.

Thirty-seven reasons

Those of you with extra tidy minds will have noticed that I have actually included 37 reasons why being a polymath can feel like a curse. And there are probably even more that I haven’t thought of. (If you think of some I’ve missed, please email me those thoughts.)

My aim in writing this article isn’t to demoralize you or make you feel trapped in a lonely and difficult life. It is rather to encourage you to recognize that, to this point in your life, you have been carrying some pretty heavy burdens – probably all alone. It would be wise to take a moment to feel proud of your endurance, renew your efforts and perhaps fine-tune your focus on getting more assistance and stipulation from your environment. I would also hope that this article will encourage you to put some thought into your friendships. For all those 37 reasons, social support for factotums can be less than optimal. It may be necessary to do a little extra tending to those relationships that are important to you – weeding some out and nourishing others.

So I’m hoping this article helps you better understand your struggles as you move forward with your complicated and impressive life.

And, finally, there is some good news for polymaths.

But when it works

There may be far fewer than 37 reasons why being a multi-talented person is wonderful, but there are some.

Mastery is such a powerful human achievement that it actually changes your brain. A mind that has developed one area of mastery will much more easily develop another because the necessary infrastructure for developing proficiency is already in place. For more details on this phenomenon, see the article on wanting.

But the opposite is also true – being at the beginning of the training process for one of your gifts can also feel marvelous. Learning is fun. So whether you’re starting out in graduate school or are a full professor, you can feel the joy available to us when you are enriching one (or more) of your talents.

And when you know how to create a prepared mind that can then experience inspiration and creativity (seeing beyond current realities or constraints), success and inspiration will create a positive feedback loop.

Further, when you spend time in flow, which, of course, is what mastery precipitates, your brain comes out of the activity squeaky clean biochemically speaking. That just-washed mind is then poised to tackle the next thing. If, for example, you are having flow with the piano during your morning practice session, your brain will be ever ready to be a writer in the afternoon.

Another benefit is this: If you are a protean human your many, many gifts can connect you to many, many power sources in your world. When you’re struggling in one area of your life, therefore, you can shift to another to power up. If your writing is stalled, you can jump-start your optimism with some time at the piano.

When you have moved well along the road to enhancing and perhaps integrating all your gifts, you will be in the lovely position to provide mentorship to others – including your children. And you now know how precious a factotum mentor can be.

This next advantage is somewhat tricky to understand, which means it’s tricky for me to explain. Here goes. There is a superordinate truth to the dilemma of always being at the bottom of the top and it is this: brainpower is a function of how many different things a brain can do well. If you are in the top 15% of three different areas, in other words, then you will be in the top 1% of all people in terms of sheer power. This higher level competency comes from combining your areas of mastery in synergistic and novel ways. Not only do the gifted areas of your brain swell with practice, completely new neurological structures are formed by your consistent and diverse exercise of those talents. You end up with a big, fat mind.

Here is my favorite factotum bene: You could be a theorist. Theorists have to be polymaths because they have to be gifted enough to master the domain or overlapping domains within which they are theorizing plus they have to master thinking and writing and engineering (because all theories have structures that have to be captured in writing.) A theoretician also has to be able to transit easily between the granular and the global as she works to fine tune her hypotheses. So, visualize being able to draw on and integrate disparate bodies of knowledge and create a new understanding of the stature and texture of the human animal. That sounds like so much fun.

And, if that wasn’t enough good news, a polymath is in the superb position to find elite-level partnerships. It’s my belief that some of the greatest acts of inspiration are co-created by two people open to new experiences, curious, generous of spirit and well-prepared. Maybe you’ll get to be one half of a duo that generates sublime collegial cross-pollination.

Being a polymath is a challenge indeedy. Ah, but when it works – when we can harness those powerful Clydesdales of talent to a wagon of our choosing – the results are magnificent. Theorist, innovator, interdisciplinary researcher, leader, mentor, writer and entrepreneur are all jobs that are well suited to polymaths.

Can you see the power that flows when the unpredictable quality of the person born to chase multiple possible creative outlets hits the jackpot? Wow.

Ah-hem

There is one final factotum dilemma I’d like to address and this one is self-inflicted. Many polymaths spend too much time wishing it were otherwise for them. They bemoan their difficult reality and long for childhood simplicity. While completely understandable, this stance is dangerous if left unaddressed because it is always true psychologically that moving backward developmentally simply, eventually drops you back where you are – in that place you are wanting to step off of. The only possible route off of a sticking point is to move forward – be it grief, temptation, petulance, anger or wishful thinking. As harsh as it may sound, you need to be able to firmly request that your mind acknowledge how hard it is to be a factotum, but then work to move beyond the grousing about “ignorance is bliss.”

And the way forward is through some big thinking. The tenor of those thoughts has to do with the specific challenge of fully embodying the process of mastering mastery. You have to understand that you are a remarkable person who has been set on a journey that is fraught psychologically, but you are well equipped to handle it. Spend your days looking for places to step up – to take greater risks, define things more on your terms and speak your truth. I realize that these behaviors are both dangerous and exhausting, but they are the only routes to power for you. The only way to get to will to power.

When you step up, you may find new doors to walk through and behind those doors new people to befriend. It’s important to remember that when you think big thoughts and do brave deeds you are transmitting your essence on the frequency most likely to be received by others like you. And remember this too – those new potential friends are seeking you just as you are seeking them.

The polymath motto needs to be: With great power comes great challenge and great responsibility. Don’t forget to focus on the latter. A bigger version of you is always possible. It’s your lifelong job to keep inching your way toward it.

In conclusion

Taken all together, a polymath is one who fears the question: Who are you? When they try to answer, their facets blink in and out in such a way as to suggest fragmentation. And the word “dilettante” pops into everyone’s mind. If you cannot affirm who you are, it is very likely you cannot act from a place of coherence. This opens the door wide to living in bad faith because we cannot ever hold the truth of all of our parts together at once. We must somehow stitch together a sense of our complete wholeness. This is extraordinarily hard to do for the polymath.

All thinking people struggle with how best to live their human life. When you add those 37 (+1 if you count the last section) degrees of difficulty inherent in being a multipotentialite, that struggle becomes increasingly difficult. If you are a polymath, I hope this article can serve as a catalyst that changes how you see your potential and how kindly you can treat yourself in the face of such difficulty. To quote Paul Tillich: "Man [sic] tries to actualize all his potentialities; and his potentialities are inexhaustible."

When you can integrate the many facets of your life into a sense of wholeness, you can begin composing your life in symphonic splendor with each part adding to the glorious sound.