The Renaissance Man Ideal

Apparently Aldous Huxley wrote:

Know something about everything and everything about something.

I do believe this is an identical goal to my own,

Jack of all trades, master of one.

And this is what I come down to being interested in: being a renaissance man! Here we develop systems thinking, integrative intelligence, abstract thinking, intution, and so on, by saturating oneself with information while practicing constantly. We develop a person that can approach any problem with a diverse set of experiences and thus creative, novel, or "emergent" solutions. He or she is capable, response-able. He or she knows enough about things in general to be able to learn any new thing quickly. By exploring the lay of multiple geographies, one comes to develop an intuition for how geographies function, what the laws are that govern them, how they behave and tend.

Jacob Lund Fisker, in his book Early Retirement Extreme, identifies seven fields in which a person can develop him or herself. These are:

physiological
economical
intellectual
emotional
social
technical
ecological

He provided two illustrative graphs:

A specialists skill set

A Renaissance man's skill set

The original Renaissance ideal of a polymath believed a man should:

• Be able to defend himself with a variety of weapons, especially the sword. 
• Be able to play several musical instruments.
• Be able to paint and output other works of art. 
• Be forever interested in advancing knowledge and science.
• Be able to engage in debates regarding issues such as philosophy and ethics.
• Be a skilled author and poet.

In a school for Renaissance men and women, we might teach:

• basic fitness and meditation (discipline for body and mind)
• gardening or farming (for ecological intelligence)
• a craft such as woodworking or website design
• the scientific method
• money management
• communications, including presentations
• generic problem-solving and analysis

and encourage students to pursue, on their own time:

• a sport or martial art
• music, art, graphic design, poetry, dance, or other "fine" art
• an advanced subject such as higher math or science or literature
• debate

And these meta-subjects:

• strategy and tactics
• critical thinking and analysis