Field Note No. 004
From The Cord
For most of my life, I thought my curiosity was a weakness.
Every time I became deeply invested in something, another interest would eventually pull me in a different direction. Engineering led to photography. Photography led to writing. Writing led to architecture. Architecture led to cycling. Cycling led to systems thinking. Systems thinking led to artificial intelligence.
From the outside, it probably looked like I couldn’t make up my mind.
For years, I believed that myself.
We tend to celebrate specialists. Society asks what we do, not how we think. We become known as the engineer, the artist, the teacher, or the entrepreneur. Choosing one lane is often mistaken for maturity.
I kept trying to fit into one of those lanes.
The problem was, I never actually lived there.
Everything changed the day I encountered the word polymath.
Not because it gave me a title.
Because it gave me permission.
A polymath isn’t simply someone who knows a little about many things. A true polymath recognizes that the same patterns quietly repeat across disciplines. The vocabulary changes. The underlying principles rarely do.
That realization changed how I interpreted my own life.
I wasn’t abandoning interests.
I was following the same question through different landscapes.
The bicycle taught me systems.
Photography taught me observation.
Engineering taught me precision.
Writing taught me integration.
Architecture taught me that physical spaces quietly shape human behavior.
Artificial intelligence reminded me that intelligence itself is often less about information than it is about recognizing patterns.
Each discipline handed me another piece of the same puzzle.
Looking back, I don’t think trauma made me a polymath.
But I do believe surviving uncertainty trained my mind to search for patterns.
When life becomes unpredictable, your brain begins looking for signals before they become obvious. You notice relationships. You anticipate outcomes. You search for hidden structures.
Over time, that way of seeing doesn’t simply disappear.
It becomes the lens through which you experience the world.
What once served survival eventually becomes creativity.
For a long time, I believed I had lived several different lives.
Now I wonder if I’ve simply explored the same life from different directions.
The engineer and the writer are not in conflict.
The cyclist and the philosopher are not separate people.
The photographer isn’t taking a break from the systems thinker.
They’re all asking the same question.
They’re simply using different tools.
That realization has quietly changed how I approach almost everything.
I no longer feel pressure to decide whether Bobby Yaga is about bicycles, books, architecture, photography, artificial intelligence, or philosophy.
It was never about any of those things.
Those are simply today’s laboratories.
The real subject has always been pattern recognition.
The invisible threads connecting ideas that appear unrelated until you step back far enough to see the entire tapestry.
Perhaps that’s what The Cord has always been.
Not a story.
Not a philosophy.
Not even a novel.
A thread connecting every discipline I’ve ever loved.
The older I get, the less interested I become in collecting knowledge.
I’m far more interested in discovering why knowledge keeps rhyming with itself.
Maybe that’s the real work of a polymath.
Not knowing everything.
But learning to recognize the same truth...
wearing different clothes.
The Thread
Curiosity is not the absence of focus.
It is focus refusing to accept artificial boundaries.
— The Cord
Robert Heinlein said "Specialization is for insects.." There are ants that hang from the ceiling and specialize in storing nectar. They are nothing more than storage barrels, but boy are they good at it! We see incredible feats by some who have developed one skill to an extraordinary degree but their personal relationships are a disaster. Specialization is narrowness, not that you don't get pretty good at doing something you love, but I have enjoyed being pretty good at a large number of different things. I have found universal principles that apply that mark quality in all of them. Specialization is for insects, and robots, not for Bobby Yaga or Hat.