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A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them
by jltsiren 2y ago
A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them.
If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately challenging yourself and striving to improve your skills, you will probably become pretty good at the thing. But because a full-time job is only 1/3 of your waking hours, you'll have time for other pursuits. If there are 50 productive years in a human live, you can probably become pretty good at 20 different things.
From this perspective, a college degree is not specialization, but the first few percent of the work of becoming a Renaissance person.
- from-nibly 2y ago> A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist > an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. How is that not the same thing? The only difference is that you added that they had to be old.
- jltsiren 2y agoFirst, because the "self-educated" part is irrelevant here. But more importantly, the difference is in the degree. Generalism is a matter of interests and focus. A Renaissance person is an ideal and an outcome. The Renaissance ideal was that elite men should strive to be good at everything they do. In the recent history, the people who have been called Renaissance men were typically at the top of their fields, with significant accomplishments in other fields. And those accomplishments take time.