A very well written article, however I would have to disagree with the premise that you can’t be a Renaissance Man in today’s society. Although I guess I would have to disagree since I named my own blog Renaissance Man Journal, and try to write about how being an expert-generalist is actually an advantage for the future.
The key to being a successful expert-generalist in today’s society is to go deep in the different disciplines. Granted, you are likely not going to become a world leading expert in any one of these disciplines, but you would be surprised by how far you can go.
The advantage of this approach is that if you have a good knowledge of different disciplines, you will start seeing overlaps between them, which will make it easier to go deeper. Plus it will give you a better perspective on things, as you will be able to draw analogies between them, and that way solve problems in unique ways.
For example, one interesting overlap that I have found is that between the ancient Stoic (well not originally Stoic, but Pythagorean) practice of daily questioning, and the way you plan your projects in agile software developments. This insight has made me more productive in both, at little cost.
There is one drawback in this however. Sometimes, you will have insights that your more specialist colleagues will not understand. For example, in my job, I had made different types of suggestions for how to do things, which were ignored.
The problem is that these suggestions were ahead of their time. Now these suggestions became trendy, so everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. However, nobody remembers that I had suggested similar things a few years and we could have already been way ahead of the curve, if these were implemented.
The key to being a Renaissance Man is to have the ability to switch between the goal-seeking mode, and the systems mode. In the goal-seeking mode, you pick one or two goals, and you go deep on those. For all the other things, you are in systems mode, and keep everything in maintenance. When you think you have gotten deep enough in one discipline, you switch. Put that one in maintenance mode, and go for another goal.
By the way, I love how you were able to combine your cartoons, with your writing! :) I think it is a good example of the approach to become a Renaissance Man. You went for a goal of cartooning, and one you got deep enough, you switched to go for the goal of improving your writing. You got deep enough in both, and then combined them, just like a real Renaissance Man! :P
