Becoming Polymathic

Aspiring to Solve Wicked Problems

A funny thing happened to me on the way to a 30-year career in engineering.

When I was a young kid, growing up in the southern US, the normal thing to do was to go to college if you had the patience and means (and it was a lot easier back then), and then to start working somewhere. Now, here’s the interesting part: you were supposed to stay there for your whole career.

That’s right: the norm when I grew up was to aspire to “get a great job one day”, where you could quietly cycle endlessly through the same hamster wheel of work.

I gradually realized that having ideas from a lot of different places had huge benefits. My exposure to punk meant I could write subversive literature in English class, and while this was just a toe in the water for cross-disciplinary thinking, it was an important step for me to take.

It also led me away from that engineering major; switching to art all but guaranteed a fraught future of entrepreneurship.

I was drawn to the idea that you could grab a concept f…