The Polymath Edge

One of the reasons I decided to do an Erasmus exchange program in 2021 (which, by the way, is one of the miracles of the European Union in terms of cultural exchange) is how difficult it was for me to follow the apparent fixed path ahead in my own academic career.

My bachelor's degree was extremely restrictive: I barely chose any semester subject, and the availability of extracurricular activities was very limited compared to other campuses. Don't get me wrong, I was very grateful for the opportunity given, but I've always been very curious, open-minded, and eager to experience new things.

After three years in France, my intuition told me that the best thing to do is to follow my heart and take the leap. That's how I ended up in Madrid at Carlos III University. The environment was immediately different: such a cosmopolitan, vibrant and diverse ecosystem where any student was free to explore apparently distant fields of knowledge and activities (across science, arts, sports, and many more). At this point in life, I could see clearly the value of being a generalist.

Before that, I judged myself a lot for being so eager to explore more outside of what I was experiencing at the moment. Now I could tell my 20-year-old self that I was a better fit to become a polymath.

A polymath is someone with genuine competence across multiple unrelated fields who uses the intersection between them as their primary problem-solving method. Leonardo Da Vinci is the clearest example: he studied anatomy to paint better, physics to sculpt better, and optics to understand perspective better. Each domain he mastered made every other domain more useful. He observed directly instead of inheriting knowledge from authority, thought visually before thinking verbally, and treated the boundaries between disciplines as mere illusions. The result was a compounding system where each new field of knowledge made every previous one more powerful.

Da Vinci's advantage was not access to information. It was what he did with it. That distinction has never mattered more than it does right now.

AI is the equalizer in information retrieval. Everyone with access to the internet can interact with a professional in any domain in seconds. What AI cannot do, at least not yet, is ask the right question, from the right angle, informed by the right combination of seemingly unrelated fields. It is also remarkably poor at crossing domain boundaries in unexpected ways: it excels within a field but rarely sees a problem the way a chemist-turned-biologist or an economist-turned-product-designer would. Furthermore, the only thing that AI cannot replicate is you: the set of specific experiences, background, personality, and knowledge acquired you possess is extremely unique.

As a result, openness, integration, and transferability of knowledge are the ultimate competitive advantages.

What I mean by openness is being ready to overcome any challenge, being adaptable, and not attached to the past. Flowing dynamically like water. Also, it means curiosity to explore, consistency to learn and willingness to fail (well).

Integration is taking concepts and abstractions from experience and intellectual knowledge to accumulate and interpret them consistently. This capacity increases more than proportionally with the volume, variety, and quality of information that you are exposed to every day and how willing you are to teach it in simple terms to other people. In the long run, the probability to come up with useful ideas increases.

Finally, transferability is taking that integration into creative thinking using knowledge from one field to another apparently distant. The most important lesson from this habit is the realization that unity is a fundamental feature of reality. Like Da Vinci, you must realize that the apparent separation of fields is just an illusion from our own minds.

Here is what that looks like in practice: while I was working at Deale while finishing my master's degree in public policy and development simultaneously, I realized that most client calls and meetings followed a pattern. Churn was a persistent problem at that time (and my primary Key Performance Indicator). Since I was hired, I managed to drop the churn rate from 28% to just 5% in 6 months. Unfortunately, the trend was not sustainable, and the churn rate started to increase steeply afterwards. As the first Account Executive in an early-stage startup, I basically did not have any procedure or brochure to follow. No one before me had done my job and that empowered me to be creative and follow my instincts.

During my Political Economy class, we studied the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, a former head of the National Intelligence Service (SIM) during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A well-known public figure for researchers worldwide due to all the records of bribery and human-rights violations that we can publicly find (including the "Vladi-Videos" secretly recorded tapes showing Montesinos bribing officials which led to a national scandal in the 2000s). During that class, I imagined how difficult it must have been for the Peruvian population to trust institutions from that time on (actually, politics is still a hot topic in Peru: they had 8 presidents in 10 years). Then something clicked in my head: companies are institutions as well. You could say the same for families, NGOs, banks, and even individuals. The key ingredient that keeps everything running is trust. If our clients do not believe that we can solve their pain, they will leave, no matter how charming, handsome or kind you are to them. So, I decided to create a whole new playbook to retain customers as a last resort and build a system to manage churn risk from the beginning. Everything I wrote and built was based on three principles: radical honesty, expectation management, and accountability of results. After a couple of months, churn dropped and stabilized consistently.

At the end, Montesinos taught me more about customer retention than any sales playbook.

How many fields are you genuinely curious about? When was the last time you learned something outside your domain and applied it inside it?