Polymath or Just Scattered? The Difference That Matters

In Turkish we have an idiom for a certain kind of person. We call them maymun iştahlı, which literally means "with a monkey's appetite." It describes someone who starts things with great excitement and drops them just as quickly, someone whose attention keeps sliding toward the next new thing. Dictionaries are not kind about it either. Easily bored. Never settles on anything.

The image comes from the monkey. It picks up a fruit, takes a bite or two, drops it and reaches for the next one.

Notice that the idiom does more than describe a behaviour. It also hands down a verdict. Fickle.

And yet the same behaviour has another name.

Leonardo da Vinci painted, dissected cadavers, sketched flying machines and designed canals. Nobody calls him scattered. We call him a polymath, someone who goes deep in more than one field and connects those fields to each other.

So what makes one person scattered and another a polymath? This essay is about that difference.

Are you a jack of all trades, or something else?

All my life, this has been one of the labels I heard most, about myself and about the multifaceted people around me.

"Scattered."

As if it were a genetic flaw or a defect of character... As if having wide interests, letting your mind touch many places, trying to see the world through several windows instead of one corridor, were a problem in itself.

I am not sure anyone who has felt this way has escaped these sentences.

"Just focus on one thing already."

"You can't do everything at once."

"Decide what you want."

"Stop spreading yourself so thin."

"These are passing whims. Get a proper job."

"You never finish anything you start."

Sound familiar?

It sounds very familiar to me. (I say this as someone who heard it a lot, especially at home :)

Because for many years I was tossed between two poles inside myself. One part of me loved the discipline of engineering, systems thinking, strategy and how decisions get made. The other part was drawn to the hidden rooms of the human soul, to Jung, Hesse, Yalom, to stories, biology, art, creativity and the search for meaning.

While one part of me was learning to speak the language of the corporate world, the other kept following the trail of these questions. Why do people go silent in meeting rooms? Why do smart people make themselves small? Why do successful professionals feel so tired inside, even at the top? Why do multifaceted people still believe, somewhere, that they are "not enough"?

And to be honest, for a long time I couldn't decide whether this was an advantage or a problem.

Because the modern world asks you a question very early in life.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

It may look innocent from the outside. But it often carries a very quiet ultimatum. Pick one thing. Enter one field. Build one identity. Fit into one box. Turn yourself into something that is easy to explain, easy to measure, easy to manage.

The system loves boxes. They are easy to measure. Easy to manage. Easy to label. Easy to put on a CV. Easy to slot into a performance review. Easy to load into HR systems. Easy to draw onto a career path.

But the human mind does not organise itself that easily.

Especially some minds...

What is a polymath?

A polymath is a person with more than just interest in several fields. They have deep knowledge, curiosity, the ability to produce, and the capacity to connect across them. Leonardo da Vinci, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Benjamin Franklin, Goethe and Ada Lovelace are often cited as well-known polymaths.

But I think we need to talk about this idea again today.

Because some people, as children, are drawn to many things at once. One day they want to be an astronaut, the next day a novelist. They can solve maths problems and cry over a piece of music in the same afternoon. They get lost in encyclopaedias and then go off to paint.

When these children grow up, if they are lucky enough to keep that childlike curiosity, they decode the psychological layers of the characters while watching a film. Walking through a city, they weave invisible webs between history, architecture, human relationships and economics. They can look at the veins of a leaf and think of the flow of water, then of the human body, then of how organisations work.

They don't see the world in chapters. They see it as the living connections of a whole.

I have always loved these people. Probably because I am one of them.

And honestly, for a long time I couldn't decide whether this was a mental gift or a curse.

The modern world usually misreads multifaceted people in one of two ways. It thinks they are either "scattered" or "unstable."

Yet sometimes the issue isn't scatter at all.

Sometimes the issue is a mind that works in connections.

One idea sparks another in a completely different discipline. One observation opens a whole new door. A question refuses to stay in its own category.

Being a polymath is not trying to know everything. Nor is it knowing a little about everything and going deep in nothing.

Being a polymath means not building the walls of your mind too early. It means developing the discipline of depth and the intellectual courage to build meaningful bridges between different worlds. It means being able to think without locking yourself into a single identity. It means reading the world as a living whole, not only through the window of your specialism.

Perhaps, to put it more simply, being a polymath means thinking in connections.

And I believe this will matter far more in the age of AI than we think.

Why does polymath thinking matter in the age of AI?

This mental agility is going to become far more important than we expect.

Because information is no longer scarce. Information is everywhere!

AI can summarise, write code, analyse, generate text, build presentations and produce reports in seconds. Of course their accuracy, context and quality are a separate discussion. But one thing is certain. Access to information is ceasing to be a centre of power in the old sense.

So the question changes.

Not "Who knows more?"

But "Who thinks better?"

"Who can connect, who can make sense of things, who can ask the right question?"

"Who can look past the data to the behaviour, fear, need, motivation and context behind it?"

This is exactly why the polymath mind is gaining value again in the age of AI.

Because AI can produce the average very quickly. The average text, the average presentation, the average answer, the average strategy document, the average analysis… And perhaps that is why, for the first time, average thinking is becoming this visible.

But what made humans valuable was never only our capacity to produce the average. It was context, intuition, the ability to see subtle differences, and the ability to hold the emotional, ethical, strategic and human consequences of an idea all at once.

A performance problem is never only a motivation problem. Sometimes it is a broken relationship between a person and their own possibilities.

An organisational problem is never only an organisational problem either. It is psychology. Culture. Power dynamics. Leadership. Loss of meaning. Learned helplessness. Sometimes it is a piece of feedback received in childhood, returning years later as silence in a meeting room.

An innovation problem is never only a matter of generating ideas. It is a problem of trust. Of tolerance for mistakes. Of an institution's invisible fears. Of people who are afraid not of thinking creatively, but of looking creative.

This is why a single discipline is often not enough. The narrow lens of one field cannot solve a world that is not linear.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs reports of recent years are telling us something similar. In the 2025 report, analytical thinking still stands out as one of the core skills employers look for most, while creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, curiosity and lifelong learning are expected to keep growing in importance through 2025-2030.

In other words, what is expected of the person of the future is not only technical knowledge. It is mental flexibility, the capacity to learn, creative connection-making and the ability to think inside uncertainty.

Notice that most of these are not technical skills. They are about how the human mind works. Curiosity, flexibility, creative thinking, analytical thinking and resilience are no longer just pleasant character traits. They are the mental skills that will decide things in the working world ahead.

And all of this makes me think one thing.

The most valuable person of the future will not simply be the one who knows more. It will be the one who thinks better.

And those are not the same thing. Sometimes they are even opposites.

Because too much information, if it isn't joined to the capacity to connect, can weigh a person down instead of lighting them up. You can follow everything and become unable to truly think about anything. You can look as if you know everything and understand nothing from the inside.

Perhaps part of the mental exhaustion we live with today comes from exactly here.

Specialisation versus narrowing: is being a specialist always better?

One of the great mental illusions of our time is this. We assume that more specialisation always means better thinking.

Of course expertise is precious. There is no seriousness without depth. No mastery without labour. No lasting value without a philosophy of craft.

But specialisation and mental narrowing are not the same thing.

Expertise is going deep in a field. Narrowing is believing you can only think with that field.

And sadly, we have been confusing the two for a long time.

When a person goes deep in one field and loses touch with every other, their knowledge may grow while their field of vision shrinks. They know more but connect less. They answer faster but ask fewer questions. They perform better but feel less meaning.

What so many institutions, so many professionals, so many multifaceted people are living through today makes me think of this.

We know more, but we connect less.

We consume more content, but we absorb less of it.

We hold more meetings, but we ask fewer real questions.

We talk more about performance, but we understand less about why people are tired.

After a while, professionals start to mistake answering quickly for thinking, looking at data for making sense of it, and preparing slides for having ideas. Meanwhile, in all that speed, real thought quietly dies.

As Byung-Chul Han has been pointing out for years, the modern world doesn't only exhaust us. By fragmenting our attention, it also pulls us away from ourselves. As everything speeds up, deep thinking has started to look like a luxury.

Perhaps it is no longer a luxury, but a survival skill.

Because the world is not linear. And non-linear problems cannot be solved by linear minds.

From the climate crisis to AI, from organisational burnout to creative blocks, from crises of leadership to the loss of meaning, most of the problems we face today do not fit inside a single discipline.

Without psychology, technology is incomplete.

Without sociology, strategy is incomplete.

Without ethics, AI is incomplete.

Without aesthetics, experience is incomplete.

Without meaning, performance is incomplete.

Maybe that is why a recent statement by Palantir CEO Alex Karp caught my attention. Karp says the people with a future in the age of AI will be those with strong vocational and craft skills, or those who are neurodivergent, people whose minds work outside standard thinking patterns.

I don't read this only as a debate about "who will get hired." It shows a deeper tension. The value of standard knowledge work, standard thinking and standard white-collar performance is shifting. The faster AI produces the average, the more visible average thinking becomes.

And perhaps, for the first time, the age is starting to turn in favour of the people long seen as "too different."

Those with a craftsperson's mind, the neurodiverse thinkers, the ones who don't fit easily into categories, who can't look at a problem from where everyone else is looking, who think a little too much, feel a little too much, wonder a little too much, the ones whose teachers wrote "very bright, but needs to focus"…

I am smiling as I write this sentence, because I know these people very well. For years I have seen them in one-to-one work, in trainings, in corporate settings, and sometimes inside myself.

Most of the time they think they are the problem.

Because the system misread them for a long time. It took their many sides for a lack of focus. Their sensitivity for weakness. Their deep thinking for slowness. Their questions for objections. Their connections for going off topic.

Yet sometimes the most valuable thing is right there. In the mind that seems to wander off topic while it is actually trying to see the bigger picture.

Thinking like Da Vinci: when the mind widens again

I felt this very strongly recently, during my "Thinking Like Da Vinci" training at Turkcell, one of Turkey's largest telecom companies.

For me that day was not just a corporate training. It was a day I watched a question I had carried in my mind for a long time slowly come alive in the room. Can people learn to think more widely again?

We didn't only talk about Leonardo da Vinci that day. We weren't just interested in telling his life as a historical figure. The real question was this. How can a person think more widely? How can a mind stay observant, creative, analytical, intuitive, systematic and curious all at the same time? How do people in an organisation become not just people who answer quickly, but people who can really think?

What moved me most during the training was how the rhythm of the room changed. At first everyone sat in that familiar corporate armour. Careful, measured, controlled, professional. Then at some point small cracks began to appear in that armour. People started looking not just to answer, but to really see. More personal questions came. They began to stay inside an idea a little longer, to walk around it before rushing to a conclusion.

Real thinking sometimes asks you to slow down. To look at an object as if seeing it for the first time. To walk around a problem before trying to solve it. To ask "Is this really the right question?" before asking "What is the right answer?"

I think this is exactly where the real value of training and consulting begins. Not in transferring information, but when a person's relationship with their own mind and their own possibilities starts to change.

Da Vinci's genius was not only in his brushstrokes. It was in never seeing science, anatomy, engineering, the observation of nature, aesthetics and his curiosity about human nature as separate from one another. When you look at his notebooks, you don't just see sketches. You see the choreography of a living mind. A whole way of seeing that moves from the veins of a leaf to the flow of water, from human muscles to flying machines.

I don't think it was only talent that carried Leonardo beyond his time. It was that he never saw anything as fully separate from anything else. Art was not separate from science for him. Observation was not separate from intuition. Anatomy was not separate from aesthetics. Engineering was not separate from imagination.

Perhaps what we call genius is partly this. Finding a relationship between seemingly separate things that nobody has seen yet.

That is why I focus on a philosophy I call The Polymath Way. To me it is not a career label or a decoration for a CV. It is a way of thinking that lets a person go deep without losing the breadth of their mind.

For me, The Polymath Way doesn't mean scattering into every field. It means finding the invisible thread between your interests, giving your thinking an inner spine, and letting the different sides of a person work together instead of fighting each other. Reading a problem in its different layers instead of from one angle. Understanding an organisation not only through its org chart, but through its invisible emotional architecture and its cultural codes. Judging an idea not only by whether it can be implemented, but by how much it can change.

Because we no longer need only vertical specialists. We need connectors. Translators who can build bridges between disciplines and speak the languages of different worlds.

What is the difference between a polymath and a scattered person?

But here there is a very critical threshold.

The polymath mind is not intellectual superficiality, or the lightness of knowing a little about everything. A strong polymath mind needs a serious discipline of depth. Otherwise it really can turn into restlessness and drifting.

People do sometimes genuinely scatter. Where things get hard, they can escape into the comfort of a new excitement. When a piece of work reaches that grey stretch that demands labour and pain, they can take shelter in the first sparkle of another project.

That is possible too.

So the point is not "being interested in everything." It is building an inner spine between your interests.

Scattered restlessness is an escape from one interest to the next. The polymath mind builds a bridge from one interest to the next.

Restlessness runs from depth. The polymath goes deep in different fields and connects them.

Restlessness keeps looking for a new stimulus. The polymath keeps looking for new connections.

The distinction is subtle, but vital.

And the question to ask yourself in the mirror is this.

"Am I really scattering? Or is my mind asking me to build a larger, higher layer of meaning?"

The smoke in the room and the wings of the mind

Years ago I wrote an essay called "Is Being Smart a Curse?" It is still one of my most read and most shared pieces. In it I wrote that the smartest people I know are often the most fragile, the most different, the most self-questioning, and the ones who feel the most responsibility toward life.

I still think the same today. Maybe from an even more radical place.

Because rational intelligence alone is not enough to set a person free. Sometimes it does the opposite and turns you into a harsher judge of yourself. You see more, you sense more, you read between the lines, but you don't always find an ecosystem that fits.

When you are the only one of ten people in a room who notices the smoke, and the others keep sitting calmly, after a while you learn to doubt your own intuition and your own sense of reality.

Or more precisely, the system teaches you this, all together.

This is why many different, deep-thinking people first learn to hide and camouflage themselves just to survive professional life. They fold their mental wings, retreat into those grey shelters and choose to look like everyone else.

If they are very curious, they ask fewer questions.

If they are very creative, they produce safer ideas.

If they are very sensitive, they put on that cold professional mask.

If they think in connections, they deliberately look shallower and simpler.

And this pains me deeply.

The world is already full enough of average ideas and factory-made minds. We don't need more people who have shrunk and pruned themselves. We need more people who think, feel, make brave connections and open new paths.

Perhaps that is exactly what being a polymath is. Not chasing medals of success in several fields, but refusing to betray the breadth of your own mind and your own nature. Not silencing your curiosity.

Modern education doesn't teach us to read our own inner pattern, our own original map. It only offers us sharp, exclusive choices. But a human being rarely fits into the shallowness of "either this or that." We are born from the productive tension between two opposite poles. Between science and art, analysis and intuition, discipline and curiosity, speed and depth.

This is why polymath minds can feel a little lonely. They struggle to belong to a single tribe. Among engineers they may be found too psychological, among psychologists too strategic, in the corporate world too creative, in the creative world too systematic.

But that is precisely why they are priceless.

Because what our time and the future need is exactly this. Intellectual leaders who can stand on the borders of separate worlds, translate between them, and build a bridge from one shore to the other.

You are more than your CV

When a person reduces themselves to a single role, a single title, it is not only their career that dries up and narrows. Their inner world does too.

Yet a person is not only their title, their business card, their CV or their performance.

A person is also what they wonder about when no one is watching. The sleepless questions they can't let go of, the subjects that secretly pull at them, the moments of flow where they forget themselves while making something, the ideas that still let light in years later.

So to everyone who gets angry at themselves and beats themselves up asking "Am I just scattered?", I want to ask again.

Are you really scattered?

Or were you told, very early, that you had to fit into one narrow box?

Maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe your mind wants to read the world more widely, more as a whole. Instead of filing yourself down to fit one field, maybe you need to build your own original system of thinking.

Some minds don't exist to draw borders, but to build bridges between them.

Some people have an inner geography too wide to be explained by the name of a single profession.

And perhaps the new age will belong to those who were long found to be "too much" and pruned for it. To those who think a lot, feel deeply, can't silence their curiosity, and connect things that seem far apart.

Maybe the issue isn't being too much. Maybe the issue is that we forced ourselves to live in rooms that were far too small for far too long.

Which side of your mind have you been hiding for a long time?

And if you opened those wings again, what kind of life, what kind of work, what kind of mark would you make?

With love,

Gizem

PS: While writing this, I thought again about the skills highlighted in the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs reports (analytical thinking, creative thinking, curiosity, resilience, flexibility and lifelong learning), Byung-Chul Han's reflections on attention, speed and fatigue, Palantir CEO Alex Karp's remarks on craft skills and neurodivergent thinking in the age of AI, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and the invisible inner conflicts of the multifaceted people I have worked with for so long.

If you know someone who might need to think differently, I'd love for you to share this with them. Maybe those beautiful minds and I can widen a little together, who knows. Thank you in advance for sharing and for caring :)

In short

What does "scattered" or "jack of all trades" really mean?

It describes someone who starts things with great enthusiasm and drops them quickly, whose attention keeps sliding to something new. The Turkish idiom maymun iştahlı ("monkey's appetite") pictures a monkey that bites a fruit once or twice and reaches for the next.

Is it a bad thing to have many interests?

The label describes a behaviour and passes judgement at the same time. Fickle. But wide curiosity is not a flaw in itself. The problem begins where interests never connect and none of them is explored in depth.

What is the difference between a scattered person and a polymath?

Both are curious about many things. A polymath goes deep in more than one field, connects those fields, and brings what they find on their wanderings back to their own question.

This essay was first published in Turkish on gizemsahan.com.

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