A polymath in an age of specialists

“You need to be more focused, less mystified,” Hugh MacLeod said to me recently after a long conversation about the possibility of earning money from my blog. It's a message I've seen echoed around the web time and again. Every discussion about blogs becoming revenue streams for the writer, usually via ads, makes that same point: Be focused.
Old advice
'Pick one topic and stick to it' is a familiar refrain, one I first heard some 15 years ago.
At 18 I decided that it would be fun to take a year off and go over to stay with my relatives in Australia. I hopped on a plane the day before New Year's Eve 1989 and 28 hours later was partying in Sydney with my cousin Leonie and her then boyfriend Nigel. They were ten years older than me, and I held them in awe.
One evening a few months later we were sitting around, glass of wine in hand, talking about Nigel's degree. At 29, he was only just coming round to finishing it after having had to take time off to earn enough money to study, and after repeated changing his mind as to what he wanted to do. The lesson he had learnt from this, he told me, was that you have to be focused.
“Don't make the mistake I made,” he said. “Pick one thing that you're good at and stick to it.”
Those word struck cold fear into my heart because I knew I did not know what that 'one thing' was. I had signed up for a degree in Geology purely on the basis that is was quite a varied syllabus and I liked pretty rocks and gemstones. My entire future career was chosen because of a childhood memory of a bunch of illustrations of precious and semi-precious stones that I'd seen in my Dad's old Reader's Digest Atlas of the World.
It rapidly dawned on me at uni that I was not cut out to be a geologist. I hated traipsing up mountains, for one thing, and sadly much that is geologically interesting is to be found up mountains.
Finding the thing
So, if it wasn't geology, what was my one thing? I tried, with varying degrees of success and financial reward, a whole bunch of different things: publishing, stand-up comedy, music journalism, photography, being in a band (bass and vocals, if you're curious, and no, you will never have heard of us), lecturing on the history of British popular music since 1980, admin, web design, project management, teaching people Welsh, film making…
When I use the word 'career' I tend to use it in the sense of to 'move or swerve about wildly' rather than to indicate 'advancement through life, esp. in a profession'.
It's taken me this long to realise that if there is a 'one thing' that I love, it's writing, but that writing cannot and does not preclude a rapacious curiosity about almost everything. (Even football at a push.)
I am, I'm afraid, a polymath. Specialisation is simply not possible for me, because there are too many interesting things in the world for me to get distracted by. It's almost like a form of long-period ADD: Ooh! This music journalism lark is fun! Wait! Wanna make a movie? Ooh, I know, I know, I'll start my own business! Yeah baby!
Advising me to focus on one subject would be like asking a painter to only use one colour. Yes, it can be done, and I'm sure some people really get off on it, but for me it would be dull, tedious and not at all productive.
Polymaths vs. Specialists
So why be a specialist? Why are specialists so desirable?
There is an obvious answer: With so much information to be digested for any one given subject, one has to specialise in order to understand that topic thoroughly. There simply isn't time enough to thoroughly explore more than one area of knowledge. And if one wishes to be taken seriously, and to speak with authority on a subject, one must not only specialise but be seen to specialise.
The obvious answer, though, is misleading in more than one way. Firstly, it assumes that specialising increases understanding, but whilst a specialist has a deeper knowledge of a subject, unless they can also put that knowledge into context, they risk becoming blinkered. You can only put your knowledge into context by looking outside your specialisation, both at the topics abutting yours and those further away, i.e. you can only really become a good specialist by also incorporating a degree of polymathy into you work.
Secondly, there is the misconception that new ideas come simply from details knowledge of your field. In fact, most creativity comes from around the boundaries of a discipline where fields of expertise overlap, it comes from the edges of the known not the comfortable centre. These days that overlap seems to be achieved mainly by the coming together of specialists at those boundaries – a sort of collective polymathy. But however you do it, innovation requires polymathy.
Once, though, polymathy was not so unusual. Scholars studied astronomy, biology, natural history, literature, art, whatever took their fancy. From Ptolemy to Leonardo da Vinci to Erasmus Darwin, the terminally curious felt free to explore the world around them without having a set of artificial boundaries foisted upon them.
Scholars then knew that there was inherent value in polymathy, but that attitude now seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. Specialisation is seen as far more desirable than polymathy. Indeed, most people don't seem to know what to do with a polymath when they come across one, searching for a way to squeeze them into their regimented and compartmentalised view of the world, trying to find them an appropriate pigeonhole instead of letting them flit from perch to perch within the dovecote.
Yet polymaths bring their important abilities to the table – the ability to see the big picture, to juxtapose previously incongruent ideas, to create new relationships between disparate data sets. These skills are essential to the development of everything from science and technology to literature to art, yet often the kinds of people best suited to such innovative roles are stifled by the pigeonholers rather than being encouraged to spread their wings and study a multiplicity of subjects.
When I was at school, I was reasonably good at everything, but not really talented at anything. I remember still a session with the school careers advisor, whose advice boiled down to 'Well, you can do anything you want really. I don't know why you think you need me'.
The fact that I had no direction was precisely why I needed a careers advisor. Perhaps I would have got to where I am now a little faster had I received better, more pertinent advice back then. Instead, I was shuffled into the sciences because not only was I capable of passing the exams, but I was also a girl and I made their stats look good.
Instead of having my polymathic tendencies encouraged, I was steered towards the sciences and a life of increasing specialisation. By the time I graduated from UWCC, having a BSc in geology was not enough. The industry wasn't hiring many graduates anymore and you really needed a doctorate to get a job. I contemplated doing a doctoral thesis for about a nanosecond before realising that studying just one thing for another three years would quite likely drive me off the edge of the cliff of sanity.
A polymath's blog
Now, getting back to my blog, I'm not saying that Chocolate and Vodka is some sort of hotbed for innovation or the synthesis of new ideas, but it is illustrative of how one can juxtapose seemingly unrelated posts and later on realise that there are not as unrelated as you thought.
Take the subjects of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Duran Duran's gig and their inability to secure a record deal. At the very least they are apposite – both of them are in part about the way in which the creative industries have turned against the very creativity that they depend upon because their concepts of how to secure revenue are too narrow-minded.
(Lessig makes the case against over-zealous application of copyright law; Duran Duran's example illustrates how the music industry is fixated on young, malleable bands which will turn a quick buck and not demand anything expensive, like a reasonable contract.)
So if you think of it in terms of each field of expertise (or each post) being a node in a web (or blog), instead of encouraging polymaths to explore linkages, our culture prefers specialists who drill down into nodes. Specialisation implies knowledge which implies authority which is seen as the most desirable outcome. Implicit in polymathy are all the opposite qualities – ignorance, powerlessness and undesirability.
When you look at it like that, it's blindingly obvious why people advise me to specialise. Now, add into the mix the idea of advertising on one's blog. It gets even clearer, right?
Why advertisers love specialists, and why they are missing out because of it
Advertisers are obsessed with demographics. They want to know exactly who their ads are reaching. They want to know income, status, location, interests, buying habits, favourite colour, inside leg measurement… Are you an A, B, C1, C2, D or Eccentrica Galumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six?
Because accurate demographic data about blog readers is not usually available, the assumption is that the readers of a blog are defined in their interests by the topic of the blog and the interests of the blog author. This is the only assumption that advertisers can make about blog readers, and the only information, apart from traffic stats, that they can use to decide which blogs should carry their ads.
This assumption forms the basis of a model of blog specialisation: If you write a blog about mobile phones, you can safely assume that people who are interested in mobile phones will come to your blog, and that therefore it might be a good place to advertise mobile phone products.
I am not arguing that this model does not work, but I think it's flawed, because people who need mobile phone products do not visit only blogs about mobile phones. Mobile phone users are everywhere, online as well as off, and they have more interests than just which mobile phone they're going to get next.
The key is not so much in the content of your blog, but how the people reading it found it in the first place and what they were really looking for. Anil Dash touches on this in a post about targeted personal ads, but the same holds true for all ads.
For example, this blog gets a lot of visitors who have searched for the words 'chocolate' or 'vodka', or some combination of the two, despite the fact that I rarely blog about either. This makes my blog an obvious place to advertise both chocolate and vodka products. But if a potential advertiser looks only at my content, and not at the Google searches that people use to find my blog, they are going to miss that bit of information. They are failing to make the connection between what people were looking for (information on chocolate and/or vodka) and what they found (my blog) or might find (ads for chocolate and vodka products).
There's an opportunity here that the 'content = demographic' assumption misses.
A final argument against focusing Chocolate and Vodka
I could specialise, I suppose, if I really had to. I wouldn't enjoy it, and I don't think my readers would either. I don't know much about my readers, but I do know a little about where they come from, and it splits down like this (in no particular order):
1. Friends and family who want to know what I've been up to lately
2. Welsh learners who know me from my other sites/mailing lists
3. Fiction/script writers who know me via Zoetrope.com
4. Fellow bloggers/blog readers who have found me via links, trackbacks and other blog tools
5. People I know from IRC
6. People who have seen my profile on Orkut, LinkedIn, etc.
7. People who have found me via a keyword search
8. Everyone else
Although I go through phases with the blog, sometimes concentrating on metablogging, or writing, or myself, my content remains fairly varied and thus, hopefully, these disparate groups of people each can find something that strikes a chord once in a while.
I have been told that I write 'about random things in an interesting way', a compliment that warms my cockles quite completely, because that is what I try to do and what I enjoy doing. It also tells me that I have an audience not because I focus, but because I entertain.
If I focus, I fear that I may alienate people who don't share the same interest. As it is, people can skip posts they're not interested in, but remain fairly confident that they will later on come across something that will catch their eye and that it is therefore worth popping back tomorrow or next week.
There is no requirement for every visitor to my blog, or any blog, to read every post, or read it every day. Instead, we can cherry pick, reading just want interests us and ignoring the rest. That's exactly what people normally do with all media – TV, film, radio, newspapers, magazines. Blogs are no different. You don't have to consume everything, you can just take the bits you want and leave the rest.
The way forward
I must admit, I would like to make some money out of my blog. I put so much time into writing it and, although I would do that for nothing anyway, it would be cool to get a bit of a return on all this effort beyond the warm glow of a trackback or comment. I would not expect to make much, but every little bit helps. If my blog paid for just one bloggers' meet-up, well, that'd be cool.
When I come round to implementing advertising on my blog (I'm biding my time whilst my stats on the new host stabilise), I do hope that the fact that I don't specialise won't be a sticking point.
Instead of getting hung up on content, I'd like to see advertisers giving more attention to exactly how ads and blogs are married up. They need to look beyond the content and beyond the numbers into the realms of what the people reading my blog were really looking for.
We need a sort of Googlerati, a way to quickly and easily create a cosmos of key words and phrases for which a given blog gets a high ranking in Google. Using your url as a starting point, the app would go off and maybe grill your blog and then grill Google and come back with a list of search terms for which you rate highly.
Advertisers could then find out which blogs do well for the keywords they are interested in and bingo, you marry up the intentions and interests of the reader with the ads without having to make dodgy assumptions about content defining the demographic.