re: the renaissance man.

The term “renaissance man” is one of those labels that someone is not allowed to give themselves, I think.

A renaissance man is a term for someone (man or woman, I think, gender identity aside) who cultivates a broad and expansive interests and expertise in many areas, creating a skillset that reaches into both diverging and overlapping crafts, fields, technical abilities, and other uncategorized fields of knowledge such that they are adaptable and malleable to create, produce, support, or teach many different complex things.

Someone with lots of smarts, a PhD or other advanced degree maybe hella intelligent, but it doesn’t automatically make them a renaissance man if they are highly focused on a narrow speciality, say.

But a Youtuber craftsman, who produces their own videos, markets their own work, composes their own theme music, does complex woodworking on screen, writes a blog about it, and then goes on tour to speak and teach about it all, she could be considered a renaissance man.

You can’t call yourself that, but other people can recognize it in you and bestow that label upon you, and I think I see it as an aspirational goal if that kind of broad and expansive life is interesting to you. Reach for it.