The autodidact polymath (how to future-proof yourself)
2 words you probably never heard of.
Autodidact. Polymath.
- Autodidact: someone who learns a skill on their own, no formal instruction required.
- Polymath: someone skilled across multiple fields, not just one.
Fuse the two and you become dangerous, in business and in life.
I’ve spent over 20 years in the system. A degree, then a run of corporate jobs.
Here’s what that taught me: becoming an autodidact polymath isn’t optional if you actually want freedom.
There’s no negotiating that one.
Let me explain.
Why school gets it backwards
I’ve always found it ridiculous that we spend years in school narrowing down to a single skill. (assuming you go to college)
That system costs years and money, and it hands control of what, when, and how you learn to someone else.
Plenty of people end up in a cubicle with most of their skills sitting unused.
No thanks.
My goal is to be a solopreneur, a creator, a writer. If you’re reading this, probably yours too.
A narrow, specialized education rarely maps onto goals like that. That’s where learning broadly comes in.
Da Vinci did it. So did Franklin. Musk does it too, whatever you think of him. None of them waited for someone to grant them permission to learn something outside their lane.
This is a deliberately broad way of learning. Call it specializing in being a generalist, a walking contradiction if you want to get technical about it. But once you’re building things on your own, that adaptability is the asset, not the liability.
The whole point is connecting ideas from different fields into something new, and being self-sufficient enough to pull it off alone.
Want to be a solopreneur? Be a generalist. Hire specialists. Know enough about everything to work alone and not get played when you outsource.
Most people never build that kind of big-picture thinking. School trained them to receive knowledge, not go get it themselves.
Without connecting ideas across fields, you’ve got nothing new to say and nothing unique to offer.
How I actually do it
Make learning a habit
You need a genuine, ongoing hunger for this.
You already have interests and curiosities. You just found them too intimidating to chase, or left them to school to hand you “specific knowledge.”
Read. Listen to podcasts. Watch YouTube. Take a course if you need structure. Doesn’t matter which, just stop outsourcing all of it to school.
The internet made self-education free and instant. You have no excuse.
Don’t stick to one field either. Chase whatever actually excites you.
The wider your base of knowledge, the more dots you can connect, and the more you’ll have to say that nobody else is saying.
Write in public
Learning isn’t enough. Everyone can learn.
Can you teach it back?
As you pick up new knowledge, you need to explain it simply, for other people and for yourself.
The best way to do that is to write in public.
Start a newsletter too. Write the long version there, then cut it into shorter posts for social.
Mix your new knowledge with your own experience, and point it at real problems.
It reinforces what you learned and leaves a record of how you got there.
Build something with it
You need small goals, small projects.
A lot of people get stuck in what’s known as “Beginner Hell.” They keep learning and distilling information, but never actually build anything with it.
Real depth only shows up once you push past that and start iterating on an actual project, whether that’s a SaaS, a personal brand, or a digital product.
“But Brendan, it takes years to get good at anything.”
You’re right. It does.
But spending years mastering one skill is how you become a great employee. That’s not the goal here.
Being great at one thing will make you great at, well…
One thing.
This is also largely the reason why I’ve failed at multiple business ventures in the past. I was good at one part of the business and useless at the rest.
It’s like being the best fisherman in the world with no way to sell the fish.
Things would’ve gone differently if I’d spent less time fishing and more time learning how to set up a shop, market the business, and find other fishermen to trade with.
Find people ahead of you
I’m not telling you to spend money. That’s optional.
Self-education is what I’m preaching, but you can’t learn everything alone.
Find people already doing what you want to do and talk to them. Friends, other creators, coworkers if you still have a job.
They’ve already walked the path. You’re just picking their brain.
This is also how creators with less experience end up learning at insane speed. They form small groups to trade knowledge, which speeds everything up.
Keep a journal
You need a feedback loop.
Keep a log of what you got done and what you didn’t. Daily, weekly, monthly, whatever cadence you’ll actually stick to. I’d skip daily unless you really want it.
Ask yourself how the period went, what got in the way, and what you spent time on that didn’t actually move anything forward.
The growth here is slow and unglamorous. Nobody claps for it.
And you won’t know if you’re headed the right way without keeping track.
If you don’t take charge of your own learning, someone else will do it for you. You won’t build the habit of questioning things and chasing the truth. You’ll just accept the world as handed to you.
I don’t want to sound too philosophical. But that’s the fact of it.
That’s all I’ve got this week. See you in the next one.