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The Case for Being a Multi-Hyphenate
Before we get to the article, just a reminder that my new book Stillness Is The Key releases on October 1! I put together a bunch of bonuses I'm offering to everyone who preorders. And if you have the opportunity, PLEASE come out and see me at some of the events I am doing for Stillness across the US (and some international) in October and November! It's always great to be able to meet my fans in person.
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One of the most intriguing things about the ancient world is just how much range people had.
Aristotle was more than a professional philosopher. He was politically active (traveling and advising Alexander the Great). He was an expert on a diverse array of subjects, including biology, metaphysics, agriculture, medicine, ethics, and botany. He was also a great teacher and writer, impressive skills on top of his already considerable genius.
The great Greek physician and surgeon Galen was a doctor with many fields of inquiry. He ended up influencing the development of many scientific disciplines — like anatomy, physiology, and neurology, just to name a few.
Among the Stoics, who I write about, we see incredible range. Seneca was not just the philosopher we know him as now, but one of Rome's most popular playwrights and the emperor's trusted political advisor. Marcus Aurelius was dabbling in philosophy… while he was emperor. Cleanthes was a boxer and a water-carrier… who studied Stoicism under Zeno in his spare time. Posidonius made breakthroughs in natural history, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, geography, geology, seismology, ethnography, mathematics, geometry, logic, history, and ethics… in addition to working as a political advisor and military strategist at the highest levels. Zeno, the founding teacher of stoicism, began his career as a successful merchant voyager.
In the not-so-ancient world, Ben Franklin was an author, publisher, printer, satirist, freemason, postmaster, politician, civic activist, scientist, and inventor. If that wasn't enough, he happened to be one the world's foremost meteorologists and experts on tornadoes! Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence… in a swivel chair he invented! (He also designed his own house.) The physicist Marie Curie, who is most famous for her work in radioactivity and developing mobile X-ray units in World War I, also managed to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields (physics and chemistry).
Of course, part of the explanation for this extraordinary phenomenon is that their fields, at the time, were far less advanced than they are today. The further you go back in history, the easier it was to be a jack of all trades or a Renaissance man — but to stop at this explanation is far too easy.
Because, in truth, many of the greats of our time were or are multi-hyphenates. People forget that Tom Brady was drafted by the Montreal Expos, too — only a few rounds lower than he was in football. Dave Winfield could have gone pro in three different sports. LeBron James is a basketball player and a businessman, film producer, philanthropist, father, and many other things.
Bruce Dickinson, who despite a busy day job as the lead singer of Iron Maiden for the last forty years, manages to find time to also be…
- a professional airline pilot
- an aviation entrepreneur
- a bestselling novelist
- an Olympic-level fencer
- a radio DJ
- and maintain a solo music career.
It's perfectly possible to be good at more than one thing in your life, or to be good at multiple things simultaneously. In fact, I would argue it's easier than people think. Ask any truly transcendent athlete or writer or investor or businessperson, and invariably you will hear them rail against hyper-specialization in one breath and, in the next, tell you how being skilled at many things made them great at the one thing for which they're principally known. Expertise in one domain may help fuel excellence in another.
That's what I've found in my own life.
Although I could comfortably make a living as just a blogger, or as just an author (and a ghostwriter), or as just a speaker, or just with my marketing and consulting business, or just with the investing I've done, I choose to balance all of these things on an ongoing basis. You might think these areas compete for my attention or distract me from fully achieving mastery in any one of them. I would be lying if I said it's not difficult to manage them all. However, I compensate for that difficulty with the additional gains and breakthroughs I accrue by having access to different modes of thinking, different fields of study, and different types of experiences.
Experiences in my business life — the people I meet, the problems I encounter, the habits I need to develop — give me insights that allow my writing to resonate. Writing I do for other people or for clients gives me reps and hours that help me improve my own books. It gives me a better understanding of the market, and the publishing industry (to say nothing of giving me financial freedom to pursue longer term projects myself). The relationships I've developed speaking and consulting help my books find a wider audience. The writing I do online — including this article — builds my platform (and also creates new relationships with fans, editors, and websites).
A meta-example: For my site, DailyStoic.com, I had the opportunity to interview David Epstein who wrote a wonderful new book about the importance of range. Nobody put a gun to my head to start this website. It's not easy to produce an article every single day for it (I did the math, and last year I produced roughly a book and a half of free content for the site). Yet, in having to do that, I got the opportunity to interview David — and many other interesting people — which I wouldn't have had if I'd focused exclusively on, say, producing my next book.
David explained the benefits of this process quite well:
We miss out on wisdom if we're too narrow…Specialists become so narrow that they actually start developing worse judgment about the world as they accumulate knowledge…Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer is your ability to take knowledge and skills and apply them to a problem or situation you have not seen before. And your ability to do that is predicted by the variety of situations you've faced…As you get more variety, you're forced to form these broader conceptual models (in the classroom setting called "making connections" knowledge), which you can then wield flexibly in new situations.
We think pursuing these other interests will come at the expense of our "main thing" — but in practice, it's often the opposite. (That's what those transcendent achievers I mentioned earlier would say, too.) By becoming well-rounded we also become sharper — and not just sharper but stronger, and able to put more force behind the arrow. Wisdom is fungible. The more you have of it — regardless of where you got it — the more places you can apply it.
There's another element of range, of being a multi-hyphenate, that doesn't get enough attention. Mastery, and the specialization it requires, is exhausting. Many talented or promising people burn out before their time. Michael Phelps is a cautionary (and inspiring) tale for all of us. His intense focus on swimming is what made him the best in the world — it's also what made him walk away from the pool prematurely. It was only when he'd balanced his life a bit — adding the multi-hyphenates of sobriety, marriage, and fatherhood — that he was able to find the drive and passion to compete again. Andrew Luck has a similar story: He announced his early retirement this month, in part because of how "empty" he felt having dedicated nearly everything in his life to a single pursuit. We can imagine him eager to add some new hyphenates to his resume post-football.
Having a variety of personal and professional interests — like our farm, running, and swimming — allows me to work intensely without burning out. These seemingly unrelated pursuits have also led to huge advances in my writing. In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene talks about the need for alternating currents — switching back and forth between domains to unlock creativity and discoveries. It's at a "particular high point of tension," he says, when we "let go for a moment" that real breakthroughs happen. We've been working all day, and then we go to the gym. Elon Musk has been working on SpaceX all week and then heads to Tesla for a meeting. It's mid-swim, in the car ride over, or while we're sitting down with a guitar when it happens. "With the feeling of tightness gone," Robert Greene writes, "the brain can momentarily return to that initial feeling of excitement and aliveness, which by now been greatly enhanced by all our hard work."
Archimedes was not the only, or even the first, to make a major discovery while taking a bath — or while doing anything but focusing intensely on a problem.
These breakthroughs are a hidden benefit of range, of being good at more than one thing, of having multiple interests. Variety requires to you step away and step back.
To think about different things. Switch your mind on and off.
We can apply what we've been thinking hard about in one area to another one. We can make a call and ask for advice from someone we'd otherwise never have known. We can use hard-won wisdom from some unrelated failure to prevent a similar thing from happening in another area of life. We can balance the extreme parts of our nature or our work obsessions with something more grounded. We can understand our customers — or the human race — better than we would if we remained the singularly focused, solitary genius in our laboratory.
We learn. We refresh. We explore. We make analogies. We get some rest.
And we are all the better for it.
That is the fate of multi-hyphenates. They're not freaks or dilettantes or scatterbrains. They're pros.
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This is normally the spot where I talk about a sponsor for this Email, but really, I'd just like to ask—if you've ever gotten anything out of my writing and these emails—to preorder the new book Stillness is the Key. I think it's my absolute best work. I think it's more relevant than ever. I put together a ton of bonuses to make preordering worth your time. I hope you check it out and I can't wait to hear what you all think of the book when it comes out!
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Fwd: The Case for Being a Multi-Hyphenate
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On Sep 18, 2019, at 8:04 AM, Ryan Holiday <ryan@ryanholiday.net> wrote:
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