Even in this day and age, you can become a "quasi-polymath" if you like learning and are efficient at it. By that I mean, reach 80% understanding of a lot of fi

Even in this day and age, you can become a "quasi-polymath" if you like learning and are efficient at it. By that I mean, reach 80% understanding of a lot of fields with 20% the effort of becoming an expert. You can do that by choosing good learning resources and focusing on conceptual understanding and fundamentals. This is something I wish to do over time, learn about a bunch of fields to, say, about undergraduate level. Right now I'm reading Molecular biology of the Cell (best textbook I've ever come across by the way) and it's rewarding to be able to understand much more of biology research news for example. And when you want to learn about some specific sub-topic on Wikipedia, you have the fundamentals to do that without saying "I know some of these words".