Recently I have been watching a series on Apple TV called Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson. It’s about how music is made and the various types of technology that musicians and producers use to make music.
It’s the type of TV show I really like because it’s about the creative process and how people make things, a behind the scenes sort of thing. Anyway, in a couple of the episodes, Ronson has an amazing young musician in the studio named King Princess to work on her new album.
She is probably 20 or so and yet she exudes creative confidence.
What particularly struck me about her is how she would think of an element she’d like to have in the song, a bass line , say, or a drum beat, and she would just pull out an instrument and play what she needed.
She could play the piano, the bass, the drums, the guitar, the nose flute, the zither, the jew’s harp, it was just amazing to watch. And then she sang with the voice of an angel. Then she jumped on the mixing board and she would assemble the song, tweak the levels, add effects. She was a literal one-girl band and I was so inspired.
Ronson, who was the titular producer of the track, just stood back and watched her work, as agog as I was.

Recently I rewatched Amadeus, the class biopic of Mozart. He was a similarly talented musician of course, (is it wrong to compare King Princess with Mozart (?!)) and I love these scenes in which Mozart is channeling a stream of inspiration seemingly from the heavens and is able to imagine just what each section of the orchestra should be playing at any given moment.

How on earth did he hold all those things in mind at the same time?

I mentioned this to my wife, how impressed I was by musicians who can play so many different instruments and know how they will all come together and she said, but don’t you do the same sort of thing with making stuff? And I guess in a way it’s true.
I love to use lots of different media as I work in my sketchbook. Dip pens and pencils and gouache and lettering and collage and watercolors and markers and over the years I have (sorta) mastered so many different ones and have an intuitive sense at this point what should go where.
I’m not equating myself with the KP or WAMozart but, like them, having a large tool box has served me well.
I also like to work in lots of different forms.
I make videos, I write essays and books, I do interpretive dances and play the harmonic in the shower. It’s like ideas find their own form. An idea or a feeling suggests what it wants to be and because I know how to use these different tools over years of practice, I am ready to oblige. Maybe that’s the way Wolfie knew when to bring in the bassoons vs. the clarinets. Or King Princess knows which effects to layer on her vocal track or how heavy to make the reverb.

Which brings me to the idea I was originally going to write about: polymathery. Polymaths are, of course, people with many different talents and interests and history abounds with so many astounding examples. Richard Feynman who besides being a Nobel Prize winning physicist also played the bongos and decrypted Mayan hieroglyphs and cracked safes and even painted. Or Einstein who was an accomplished pianist and violinist.
Or Arnold Schwarzenegger who, well, you know. Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, Ben Franklin, Buckminster Fuller, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Madam Curie, Charles Darwin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bertrand Russell, Copernicus, Omar Khayyam — all polymaths with many glittering talents. And of course da Vinci who was the original Renaissance Man. And Aristotle, another polydude. He coined the phrase, “The whole is greater than its parts.” Among other things.

Being a polymath has lots of advantages. The first is that you don’t have to be amazingly great at each of your skills. I bet Feynman was not as good a bingo player as he was a theoretical physicist. You can get away with being very good at one of your lesser skills, say in the top quarter of people who can play the bongos, and yet make astounding contributions.
That’s because the power comes from combining skills. KingPrincess is an okay guitar player but because she can instantly merge all of her B+ level skills to create something new, she emerges with A+ work. The real breakthroughs in art and science often come from people who have an atypical combination of skills. Physics and safe cracking, say. Another advantage is that these days it’s so much easier to acquire new skills. Watch a few YouTube videos, order some gear from Amazon and in a few weeks you too can be churning out albums in your bedroom while cooking perfect omelettes and doing open heart surgery.

Another advantage is that in this crazy, ever changing world, having a large collection of random skills will protect you when change inevitably occurs.
You will always be able to find work or come up with projects that can generate revenue, even success. The world is open to polymaths and more and more of them are emerging to chart the future.

Here’s the key: You don’t need to be great at everything to be great at the combination of things. So avoid perfectionism.
Muddle through. Fake it. Jump in. Be brave. Take risks.
Be willing to fall on your face doing something brand new. By fearlessly juggling things you are only reasonably competent at, you may very well change the world. Or at least win a Grammy.

Your pal, Danny

P.S. 😮 I am writing this essay later than I normally do. And to force myself to get it done, I am doing it live on YouTube and Facebook. It’s an inane experiment and if this essay seems below par, blame it on the stream. If you’d like to watch me write this, you can find the recording on our YT Channel. It may well prove to be a disastrous idea, showing you how the sausage gets made, but it seemed like a better idea than not being able to write anything at all this week. I was stymied by depression and writer’s block and general sense of overload but my friends on the Internet have held my hand while I do my homework and I am grateful to them. Next time I’ll try to be a big boy and do this on my own.