It’s been way too long since profiled a polymath. It seemed fitting to honor the memory of one today.
Much has been said about Steve Jobs as the visionary, business genius, electronics wizard. These may be true. I’ve seen many testimonies by those who claim that Apple’s products have changed their lives. Though I still think the Apple Cube was the coolest looking computer ever – I’ve never owned an Apple product. So what am I writing about? I’m talking about a more subtle quality of Steve Jobs, that of being a modern polymath.
Steve Jobs combined things that others never considered. The Macintosh was different because it was developed not by computer scientists, but by a completely different breed of individuals. With backgrounds in history, poetry, calligraphy, art, design, these people (under Jobs’ leadership) applied ideas across disciplinary boundaries. They made something great and new, out of many great and old things. That is the way of the polymath. Creativity, as Jobs’ thought of it, was connecting things in ways that others hadn’t thought of before. The polymath’s eyes are open to these connections. He is constantly following his heart to learn new things, even when he doesn’t know how they relate to his day job or his company’s mission statement. As Steve Jobs said:
“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” –2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
Polymaths deal with a wider range of dots than most other people. They must then look at, analyze, play with the dots to see what can be made. That’s where innovation comes from. That’s why Steve Jobs was special. That’s why he’ll be missed. That’s why he was a polymath.
