So I didn’t set out to raise a Renaissance person. But here we are. Watching my oldest son last week — pitching terrariums he’d co-created with friends at a the Kidovate Youth Entrepreneurship Experience, anchoring our defence and making clutch plays in a basketball tournament, then stepping up his trombone game at his school’s Night of Music — I realized something quietly remarkable was unfolding. Across every one of those moments he brought different intellectual, emotional, and physical capabilities with him. He also showed up with a different crew for each experience: entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians. As a dad, that kind of range fills me with a pride that’s genuinely hard to put into words.
What makes Renaissance People?
The term “Renaissance Man” (or more precisely, uomo universale or “polymaths”) was born in 15th-century Italy during one of European History’s great intellectual explosions. It described someone who had cultivated mastery — or serious fluency — across multiple, often unrelated domains: art, science, philosophy, engineering, music, and literature. The ideal wasn’t specialization; it was synthesis and generalism. Breadth was a form of depth.
The word “Renaissance” itself means rebirth, and these polymaths embodied it — people who refused to be confined to a single lane and whose curiosity was in its own right a creative force. Here are some known Renaissance People (also 50% of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles):
Leonardo da Vinci: Painter, anatomist, engineer, geologist, and inventor — perhaps history’s most complete polymath.
Michelangelo: Sculptor and painter, but also a gifted architect and accomplished poet.
Ibn al-Haytham: Mathematician, astronomer, and father of modern optics — centuries before the Italian Renaissance.
What united them was a refusal to stop learning. They moved fluidly between disciplines because they understood that knowledge in one field illuminated another. Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings made his portraits more human. Galileo’s musical ear sharpened his measurement of rhythm and time.
Why Renaissance People Matter Now More Than Ever
The problems we need to solve today are complex if not intractable. They don’t fit neatly inside any one discipline — and neither should the people solving them.
We live in a world defined by volatility, complexity, and rapid change. Entire industries are being reshaped in years, sometimes months. The skills that matter tomorrow may not even exist as job titles today. In this environment, narrow expertise is a liability as much as an asset.
What organizations and communities urgently need are people who can move between domains, translate across teams, and adapt when the ground shifts. Renaissance people don’t just do many things — they connect many things. They’re the ones who notice that a solution from ecology might fix a logistics problem, or that a lesson from music theory clarifies a negotiation.
And critically, modern Renaissance people aren’t just multi-skilled — they’re multi-networked. They build and belong to diverse communities: different disciplines, cultures, backgrounds, and lived experiences. Solving complex problems requires diverse networks just as much as diverse skill sets. My son didn’t build terrariums alone, score baskets alone, or play music alone. He did it all alongside different groups of people, each bringing something he didn’t have. That is the modern superpower.
How to grow Renaissance people
Cultivate a growth mindset. The foundational shift is believing that abilities aren’t fixed — they’re grown. When you approach a new skill as a learner rather than a novice who should already know, failure stops being shameful and starts being instructive. Every domain you enter makes the next one easier to enter.
Experiment, then experiment again. Renaissance people aren’t born eclectic — they try things. Sign up for the improv class. Join the committee outside your expertise. Say yes to the project that doesn’t fit your resume. You will sometimes stumble. That’s not a detour from the journey; it is the journey. Experience — even imperfect experience — is a teacher that really sticks.
Invest in diverse relationships. The modern Renaissance person isn’t a lone genius — they’re a connector. According to Marissa King, our loose connections across myriad networks have a profoundly positive affect on our career and long term wellness. Seek out communities unlike your own. Collaborate across disciplines. The person who can hold space at the intersection of different worlds is invaluable, because that’s exactly where the most interesting problems live.
My son probably doesn’t think of himself as a Renaissance person. He just thinks he sold some cool terrariums, played a solid game of basketball, and nailed a few notes in his musical performance. But watching him move between those worlds — curious, capable, and surrounded by people different from himself — I see something pretty darn inspiring and useful. The same spirit that lit up the studios of Florence is alive and well, and apparently thriving in middle school.
The world needs more of it. Go try something new.
