Turns Out My Lack of Focus Has a Fancy Name

Turns Out My Lack of Focus Has a Fancy Name

Turns Out My Lack of Focus Has a Fancy Name

I recently learned a new word. I like learning new words. This one is really cool!

Polymath.

At first I thought it sounded like either some kind of advanced mathematics class or a prescription drug with side effects nobody wants to talk about.

Turns out it describes a person who develops knowledge or ability across a number of different subjects instead of spending their entire life buried in one specialty.

Well, shit if that doesn’t describe me.

For most of my life I’ve described myself with another phrase: jack of all trades, master of none. I’ve heard that saying used plenty of times, and usually it sounds like criticism. You know a little about everything but never stay focused long enough to become really good at one thing.

Fair enough. I guess.

I’ve certainly provided plenty of supporting evidence for the lack-of-focus portion of that accusation. But there’s a longer version of the saying that most people don't seem to know about:

“Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.”

Now THAT sounds considerably more interesting. Maybe all these years I wasn’t failing to pick a lane. Maybe I was building an intersection, or a complex interstate freeway cloverleaf!

My Brain Has Never Liked Lanes

I’ve always been curious about things. Lots of things. It's always been my nature.

Too many things, according to the amount of unfinished crap scattered around my house, shop, computer, and brain at any given moment. The list is kind of scary when I think about it.

Photography.

Woodworking.

Leatherwork.

Computer equipment.

Writing.

Artificial intelligence.

Programming.

Business.

Websites.

Travel.

Firearms training and instruction.

Homesteading.

And whatever rabbit hole, more like a black hole, happens to wander across my path next Tuesday. This list looked pretty random when I wrote it down. Most of these things seem like they have absolutely nothing to do with any of the others, or so I thought.

The more I looked at it, though, the more I realized they are connected. One interest keeps handing something to another one. They are all tied together in some way. I find connections between them all. Maybe not directly, but the connections are there. From what I understand about the subject, it's classic polymathy.

Woodworking makes me think about measurements, materials, tools, order of operations, and what happens when I confidently cut something one-eighth of an inch too short.

Leatherwork uses many of the same ideas but changes the material and the tools. Measure. Cut. Fit. Punch. Stitch. Screw something up. Figure out why. Try again. It's a troubleshooting mindset that has followed me all my life.

Now I use it with cameras, software, websites, code, and occasionally the stupid television when it decides it no longer recognizes the Wi-Fi password it has used for the last three years. Same brain. Different problems.

Photography Joined the Circus

Photography may be the best example of how all these interests start running into each other.

When I got back into photography, I thought I was learning photography.

Simple enough, right? Camera. Lens. Take a picture. Again, my grasp of the obvious is impressive.

Then photography started pulling everything else into it.

I had to learn the equipment. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, autofocus systems, lenses, tripods, filters, memory cards, batteries, editing software, storage, color, printing, composition, lighting, and enough menu settings to make me question whether Sony secretly manufactures spacecraft. I'm sure they do.

Then I started photographing buildings and realized the old interest I had in architecture back in high school was apparently still hiding in my head.

Woodworking makes me analyze how things are built. Homesteading makes me see fields, barns, animals, weather, plants, seasons, and what the land is doing. Travel puts new landscapes, buildings, wildlife, people, and cultures in front of me and photography ties all of them together.

I take the camera into almost any part of my life and find things worth looking at. That may be why the daily photography challenge has held my attention as well as it has. It isn’t one subject.

It's all of them! All of the subjects! ALL! WTF?

My cameras allow my brain to wander without technically abandoning the original project, although some days I wonder if it's just controlled squirreling, which may be the greatest loophole I have ever discovered.

Writing Wasn’t Part of the Plan Either

August 23 Media started as a place to show my photographs. Then I started writing captions. The captions got longer. I started telling stories about what I was learning, what went wrong, where I had been, what Susan and I were doing, and why I took particular photographs.

Then came the blog.

Once again, my lovely wife made a suggestion to me. “James, you should write a blog to put on your website to go with your pictures”...and my brain went off on a tangent. Photography turned into writing. Here I am six-ish months later and multiple blog posts in, with no end in sight and I'm loving it. Thanks dear. (note the suspicious lack of sarcasm)

That wasn’t really the plan.

Now I’m sitting here writing about why I apparently can’t stop learning things. One thing led to another again. Photography gave me something to write about. Writing made me think harder about photography. Trying to explain what I had learned forced me to understand it better.

A few readers started responding to the writing, which made me realize the story behind the photograph can sometimes matter almost as much as the photograph itself.

Great. Apparently I accidentally picked up another hobby.

Squirrel….rabbit hole….black hole….again!

AI Opened Another Door

Artificial intelligence was another one.

At first I was messing around with it because I was curious. I'll blame this one on Chris, he's always been kind of a computer/gamer guy, and he'd recently gotten heavily into AI and its usage beyond what it's doing with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He got me pointed in that direction and well….

It's how most of my problems begin.

I wanted to understand what it could do and how I could use it. Then I realized there was a huge difference between casually asking AI a question and actually learning how to communicate what I wanted. So I took two prompt engineering courses.

Because I'm clearly incapable of casually experimenting with something. It wasn’t enough. I had to go to take a class for it.

Those courses taught me more about context, instructions, boundaries, breaking large tasks into smaller ones, and thinking about how information moves through a process, and boy is it a process.

Then Susan asked one of those questions she has a habit of asking that changes the direction of whatever I’m doing. If I had spent so much time thinking about how technology could help ordinary people, why didn’t I build something myself?

When she asked that I immediately thought back to when Chris and I were trying to get a gamer streaming channel going. I wanted to build it from the direction of keeping the process as simple as possible. For instance if I were to try to teach someone myself, how would I want to learn? I would keep it at the most basic level… click this first, what is the next click and so on. Like I said, as simple as possible so anyone of any skill level could learn whatever.

Huh.

That seemed a little aggressive.

Unfortunately, she had a point.

So I started programming.

Let me be very clear here.

I am not a software engineer.

I’m a guy who occasionally stares at code and thinks, “Well, I recognize some of those words.”

But I’m doing it. I am in the process of building a program that will teach things, just the way I want to learn and now I am well into building it. It’s called Vulcan and it grew out of the process I’m describing. It taught me how to build spreadsheets. Then I had ideas for interactive business and personal accounting tools. Then more code. Then more questions.

The same troubleshooting habits showed up again. What is the program supposed to do? What is it actually doing? Where does the failure start? Change one thing. Test it. Break something completely unrelated.

Cuss.

Undo it.

Try again.

It would appear that decades of figuring out physical equipment prepared me surprisingly well for arguing with software.

Who knew?

Firearms Instruction Taught Me Something Completely Different

Being a firearms training instructor added another piece.

Teaching a skill is different from simply being able to perform it yourself.

If I understand something only well enough to do it, that does not automatically mean I understand it well enough to explain it safely and clearly to somebody else.

Teaching forced me to slow down and break things into steps. I figured out how to explain why something matters in relation to something else. I can see what another person is doing and recognize where confusion begins. I correct mistakes without making the person feel stupid.

And, most importantly in that environment I had to teach, respect safety and procedure every single time. It was literally a subject that could get someone seriously injured or killed to death!

These skills followed me into other areas as well.

I'm working on building photography classes. I intend for them to be from the perspective of a novice to a novice. Kind of like I was talking about with Vulcan.

I write instructional material. I'm not quite ready to start explaining software, but who knows, maybe someday right? I'm working on using technology to help teach people who don’t necessarily love technology. The subject changes. A lot of the teaching does not. The premise for teaching is the same.

Homesteading May Be the Ultimate Polymath Hobby

If there has ever been an activity designed for somebody who can’t stay in one lane, this may be it. There's always something going on. We're always building, repairing, growing, moving, maintaining, planning. Oh, and we're trying to figure out what died and why. Always fixing something that worked perfectly yesterday. Dealing with all of the things.

Weather.

Water.

Animals.

Tools.

Equipment.

Fences.

Projects….kind of like hobbies right? Here we go with that squirrel thing again! Damn it!

I have projects connected to other projects and sub-projects hiding inside those projects. I'm sensing a trend here.

Sound familiar?

Homesteading doesn’t particularly care whether something falls under your preferred specialty. If it needs fixing, you figure it out. That mindset probably explains a lot about me. I like knowing how things work. I like learning enough to solve the problem in front of me.

The one caveat is that it has to interest me. If something has my interest I have a bad habit of brain locking on it and everything else disappears. Now you all know where my kids get it from. Very rarely, I learn exactly enough to get the job done and move on. Both have value.

Maybe “Master of None” Isn’t the Insult I Thought It Was

This is the part of the jack-of-all-trades saying that has been rattling around in my head. Master of none. As humans we put a lot of value on specialization. We should. That being said, if I need brain surgery, I don’t want a cheerful polymath who watches three YouTube videos and says, “How hard could it be?” Hell, I'd give it a try! Any volunteers? I'd want a brain surgeon. Specialization matters. Deep expertise matters. There are areas where being exceptionally good at one thing is incredibly important. (see brain surgery) But that doesn’t mean breadth has no value. I know something about many different areas. It makes it easier for me to see connections between them.

A woodworking problem taught me something about planning a photograph. I work with layout and project setup which leans directly into composition and shot setup.

Troubleshooting a machine can influence how I use AI (Vulcan) to help me find bugs in the program.

Teaching firearms safety can improve the way I explain photography because it forces me to slow down and use my “teacher voice”

Photography can improve the way I see architecture. Writing can force me to understand what I think and more why I think what I do. Travel exposes me to subjects and people I never would have encountered at home. Business makes me think about how all of this can support itself. AI helps connect and refine pieces that would have taken me much longer to work through by myself. None of those skills exist in a vacuum. They overlap constantly. I would say consistently, but you know how consistency and I work together so let’s not go there.

That’s the part I never really appreciated until recently.

Curiosity May Be the Actual Skill

Maybe the common thread isn’t photography, woodworking, AI, or any of the other individual subjects. I really think it’s my curiosity. Not to sound cliché here, but I kind of compare it to looking at the world through the eyes of a child. That sense of wonderment that you see in a child when they see something new for the first time and their curiosity blooms. I like figuring things out. I like seeing something I don’t understand and trying to understand it. I like asking why. I like learning how something works.

I like taking what I learned in one area and discovering that it applies somewhere completely different. Sometimes that curiosity is useful. Sometimes it results in me spending three hours researching something I had absolutely no intention of caring about when I woke up.

That happens too. Like a lot!

There is obviously a downside. I take on too much. I get distracted. I create more projects than any one human being could reasonably finish. I turn a hobby into a sub-hobbies, then discover the sub-hobbies mated and gave birth to an oversized litter of miniature hobbies. Do you see where I'm going here?

It's how I get myself in trouble. Susan’s seen this movie before. Cue the “WTF are you doing now James” look! But I don’t think I would trade curiosity just to become more focused. It’s too much a part of who I am.

I’m Not Claiming to Be Leonardo da Vinci

Let’s establish something before this gets completely out of hand.

I am not comparing myself to some master artist. I don't need a Renaissance hat. I'll probably never inspire the world. PROBABLY.

Polymaths are typically famous historical geniuses, like Aristotle, Elon Musk, and Benjamin Franklin to mention a few. They’re people who have made major contributions across science, art, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and seventeen other fields before breakfast.

I’m not one of them by any stretch, but I share similar personality traits with some of them. I’m not even sure there is an official test for becoming a polymath. I just recognized some of the traits in what I do and it made sense. I just recognized the pattern. Multiple areas of real interest. A constant drive to learn. The skills I've developed across fields that don’t initially seem related. A tendency to connect ideas from one field to another. An inability to leave a perfectly good rabbit hole unexplored.

Yep.

That sounds uncomfortably familiar.

Maybe I Wasn’t Supposed to Pick One Thing

For years I think I assumed there was something wrong with not having one clearly defined thing.

When someone asks “What do you do?”

It should be an easy answer, right?

Well...

How much time do you have?

Maybe I’ve been looking at it wrong. I don’t have to stop woodworking because I’m serious about photography. I don’t have to stop writing because I’m learning programming. Learning AI doesn’t mean I abandon physical projects. Running a business doesn’t require me to stop being curious about everything else.

Leatherwork, homesteading, equipment, travel, teaching, cameras, websites, code, and all the rest can and do coexist. My problem is finding the balance. The trick for me is more learning how to keep all of it from turning into complete shitshow.

I'm still working on that part. I most likely will be until the day I die.

The older I get, the less interested I am in forcing myself into some neat little category simply because it would make it easier to describe.

I like learning, building, creating, solving problems, teaching what I’ve learned, and I like seeing where one interest leads me to next.

Maybe that’s enough of a category.

Turns Out My Lack of Focus Has a Fancy Name

So here I am a photographer, woodworker, leatherworker, writer, firearms instructor, homesteader, business owner, website builder, AI student, beginner programmer, traveler, troubleshooter, and whatever gets added to the list next.

Jack of all trades?

Absolutely.

Master of none?

Probably.

I’m starting to think that part matters less than I used to believe.

I know enough now to understand that mastery is a pretty high bar anyway. Every time I get better at something, I discover another layer I didn’t know existed. Photography has certainly taught me that. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still don’t know. I'm certain that’s the point. I don’t have to master everything. Hell, I don’t even have to be great at something. I’ll settle for proficiency.

I just have to keep learning.

So perhaps my brain wasn’t failing to stay in its lane all these years.

Maybe there never were any lanes for me.

All those hobbies, jobs, skills, experiments, mistakes, projects, classes, tools, cameras, computers, and rabbit holes have been feeding the same thing the whole time.

Curiosity.

Turns out my lack of focus has a fancy name.

Polymath.

I kind of like it.

Although Susan is absolutely not allowed to use this as evidence that I don’t need another hobby.

James@august23media.com

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