A Note about Polymathy

Yes - it is a word!

 I just came across an excellent article about polymathy, what it means to be a polymath and how one might go about becoming one. 

Here is an excerpt:
The word itself comes from Ancient Greek, poly meaning 'many', and mathanein meaning 'to learn'. In many ways, it is fitting that Ancient Greek should be the root of the word, as many of the greatest polymaths were Greek.

A polymath, then, is someone who is particularly knowledgeable in many subjects, and the word is most frequently attached to people who have excelled in more than one field of intellectual or artistic endeavour. However, it is not clear just how many fields one must excel in, nor the extent to which one must excel, before one call be called a polymath. Some people hold that a strong interest in a wide variety of fields is enough to earn this most prized epithet, while others would reserve it for a few truly great achievers.

Other people, however, argue that being a polymath is not a state of being, but a state of becoming. Being a polymath is not what one knows now, but what one desires to know. Not a matter of intelligence, but a matter of intellectual and creative ambition and curiosity.


I think I agree with the final paragraph
 

What's It All About?

 I first read about the concept of the ‘portfolio career’ when I was studying for my masters degree in occupational psychology in the early nineties.  It was in a book by management theorist Charles Handy – I can’t now be sure which one – but it’s likely that it was “The Age of Unreason” which was published in 1989 and still has a place on my bookshelf.  At that time, I was fascinated by Handy’s writing.  I suppose because he wrote about organisations and work – the area I had chosen to study – but also because he was (and still is) an ideas person.  What he did best was to look around him at the existing situation and then notice all the subtle shifts and changes and then formulate predictions of how things would look in the future. 

The concept of the portfolio career is pretty simple – it is about having a working life that is made up of many different elements.  Some of these will be in the form of paid work (either waged or feed) and some of it will be free work.  The proportions of these types of work will vary to make up a balanced whole. 

Either by accident or design (I am not sure, and will discuss this in later posts), I now have a portfolio career.  However, I am not entirely happy with the term, as I think it suffers from the same problem as the notion of ‘work-life balance’ – the idea that one’s life is divided between that which is work and that which is non-work.  As a portfolio worker, that distinction quickly becomes blurred, so I have opted for ‘Portfolio Life’.

So there you go – that’s the explanation of the title for the blog.  I plan to write about the challenges associated with managing the portfolio and related topics that crop-up as I go along.

In The Age of Unreason Handy predicted that we would all become portfolio people.  That may be true, but it hasn’t happened yet.  However, there are an increasing number of people of all ages who, for many different reasons, have eschewed the idea of a traditional career path for a more flexible lifestyle.

Next time I will write about the elements that make up my portfolio life.

Coming Soon.....

....honest!

I will post my first entry next week.  For now here's a beautiful photo taken near Brighton last weekend