The Renaissance Worker

Just finished Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci biography. Six hundred pages about a man who couldn't decide between being a painter, engineer, anatomist, architect, botanist, mathematician, or theatre designer—so he did all of them.

The book treats this as genius. Today, we'd probably tell him to focus.

Leonardo designed flying machines while painting portraits. He dissected corpses to understand how muscles create smiles. He studied water flow to paint better hair. His notebooks jump from military fortifications to cloud formation to the mechanics of the human eye, sometimes on the same page.

What struck me was his refusal to separate his interests. He was all of these things simultaneously, and each interest fed the others.

We've spent the last century trying to become specialists. One job title. One LinkedIn headline. One professional identity.

That model is dying. The economy is starting to reward Leonardo-like behaviour again.

Everyone's already doing it

People are maintaining parallel careers everywhere. Teaching while consulting. Building products while working corporate jobs. Writing while running businesses. These aren't side hustles waiting to become real jobs. They're equally valid pursuits, deliberately maintained.

The pattern is clear: people who refuse to choose between their interests are finding ways to do both. Or three. Or five.

My own scattered CV makes more sense through this lens. Music production, e-commerce, marketing, creative direction—I used to see these as false starts. Maybe they're just different facets of trying to understand how things work.

AI forces the issue

Everyone talks about AI replacing jobs. The more interesting shift: AI makes single-function humans redundant.

AI can write code. AI can write copy. AI can analyse spreadsheets. The value now lies in connecting domains that AI processes separately.

AI can paint and it can engineer, but it struggles to use engineering insights to revolutionise painting. It can write poetry and analyse markets, but it misses the poetic truth that explains market behaviour.

Leonardo studied optics to paint better eyes. He dissected hearts to understand emotional expression. He watched birds to design machines. Each discipline informed the others in ways that weren't logical but somehow worked.

That synthesis between unrelated domains—that's what remains uniquely human.

The infrastructure hasn't adjusted

Universities still force you to choose a major. Companies hire for specific roles. LinkedIn wants one job title. The entire system assumes efficiency comes from specialisation.

Meanwhile, biotech companies hire philosophers. Finance firms need anthropologists. Tech companies employ science fiction writers. The interesting work happens at intersections.

We train engineers who can't write, writers who can't code, designers who can't think systematically. Then we wonder why innovation feels stuck.

The cost of hiding

Most people have multiple interests. The challenge is the pressure to hide them.

Every career advisor I've met suggested I "focus my narrative" or "clarify my positioning." They want me to hide the music background when talking about business, or ignore the business experience when discussing creative work.

But the mixing is what makes it interesting. The music background changes how I approach business. The startup experience shapes creative projects. Each domain adds perspective to the others.

How compound knowledge actually works

Leonardo never finished most of his projects. He'd get distracted by some new field of study, some question that demanded investigation. His clients complained constantly.

But those distractions weren't random. His study of anatomy made him a better painter. His engineering improved his sculpture. His understanding of water flow influenced his architecture. Every tangent was research for everything else.

When I studied music production, I learned about frequency and resonance. That taught me about attention and emotion. Which informed how I write. Which shaped how I think about product design. Which influences how I structure businesses.

None of these connections were planned. They emerged from following curiosity without demanding immediate relevance.

Finding the others

There's something isolating about refusing to specialise. Specialists have communities, conferences, clear progression. Multi-domain people have confusion.

You don't fit into professional categories. Industry events feel slightly off. Networking becomes awkward when you can't give a simple answer to "what do you do?"

But more people are in this position than admit it. Usually hiding their other interests, trying to appear more focused than they are. Once you admit to being multiple, others reveal themselves too.

We need better language for this. "Generalist" sounds unfocused. "Polymath" sounds pretentious. "Renaissance person" sounds like historical cosplay.

We're professionally plural. Multiple perspectives in one person, each making the others more useful.

The Leonardo method

Leonardo painted portraits while designing war machines. He studied horse anatomy while planning ideal cities. He invented musical instruments while investigating the nature of light.

We'd tell him he's spreading himself too thin. Diluting his impact. Confusing his market position.

But being hard to categorise might be the point. The future belongs to people who bring multiple perspectives to single problems.

That means cultivating all your interests, even the unprofitable ones. Reading widely. Building bridges between your different domains instead of keeping them separate.

What changes when you stop pretending

I'm done apologising for having multiple interests. Done presenting a simplified version that makes sense to algorithms and recruiters.

The AI age rewards synthesists—people who connect unlikely domains, who refuse to be reduced to a function.

Leonardo didn't know he was being a Renaissance man. He was just following his curiosity, letting each interest inform the others, refusing to separate art from science because he understood they were the same investigation.

Five hundred years later, that refusal to be singular looks prophetic.

We're all multiple people. Some of us have just stopped pretending otherwise.

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Still Wandering explores what work becomes when you stop choosing between your interests.