Yes, you can really be a master of many trades!
Fifteen icons that shatter the myth of singular success, and force you to rethink what's possible
The most under documented record in human history is how much excellence one life can hold.
In 1969, three humans traveled 238,855 miles and stood on the moon. In 2009, one human ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds — a number that has refused to budge for 16 years. Twelve centuries ago, someone looked at a mountain and carved an entire temple out of it — 100 feet tall, 300 feet long, top to bottom, with nothing but chisels — removing 200,000 tons of rock without adding a single stone.
These are not just facts but a sense of pride that humanity shares. They are dispatches from the edge of what this species has dared to attempt.
That’s what proof of concept does to a species. It inspires some to attempt to reach the frontier themselves — start training to run, study to be an astronaut or pick up the chisel. But most importantly, it rewrites the world of possibilities for everyone.
There is a frontier nobody has shown you yet. Not speed. Not altitude. The question of how many distinct excellences one human life can hold — simultaneously, seriously, validated by the world — has barely been named, let alone explored.
Did you know that it’s possible to win the Olympic gold in cycling while simultaneously publishing frontier research in differential equations?
That it’s possible to discover a foundational reaction in organic chemistry and compose timeless symphonies — in the same body, at the same time?
That it’s possible to lead one of the biggest tech company, and be a barbecue champion and cookbook author, and a heavily cited paleontologist — concurrently, for decades?
Today we explicitly name that frontier. And celebrate the icons on that frontier!
First, a definition worth reminding ourselves of:
A PolyPath is someone who pursues multiple paths in life as genuine, identity-defining callings. Three things mark a PolyPath —
The pursuit of multiple paths with real commitment.
An intrinsic drive to grow and excel on each one
An identity that requires all of them to feel whole.
You are not a lawyer who happens to dance. You are both, and the subtraction of either leaves something essential missing.
The people in this article are the PolyPaths at an extreme altitude. But altitude is not the point. The point is the frontier.
They come in three varieties.
Meta Masters have one underground source — call it a philosophy, a way of seeing, a foundational obsession — and it erupts across domains the way a single spring feeds multiple rivers. Science and art, to them, are not two things. It’s different manifestations of the same spark.
Multi Masters hold genuinely separate excellences that run in parallel, distinct as two rivers that never merge but share the same mountain. Football and mathematics. Chemistry and symphonies. No explicit connection. But one person, containing all of it.
Merge Masters do something rarer still: they take two domains and deliberately collide them, producing something neither could generate alone. The merger is the method.
META MASTERS
One source. Many eruptions.
1. Nathan Myhrvold Theoretical Physicist | First CTO of Microsoft | Paleontologist | World Barbecue Champion | Culinary Scientist | Photographer
He finished his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics at Princeton at 23, then spent a year doing postdoctoral work with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge on quantum field theory and early universe cosmology. Then he went and founded Microsoft Research, accumulated 900+ patents, and became the company’s first CTO. Then — while still running a $2 billion R&D budget — he took a leave of absence to attend French cooking school, worked nights as an unpaid kitchen apprentice in Seattle, and won the Memphis World Barbecue Championship. His cookbook runs to 2,438 pages and won two James Beard Awards. His paleontology papers have appeared in Science, Nature, and eLife; he has challenged NASA’s asteroid data in Icarus and been vindicated. He built the highest-resolution snowflake camera in the world from scratch. The through-line is not curiosity — curiosity is too mild a word. It is something closer to the conviction that every phenomenon, from brisket to dinosaur locomotion, is a physics problem awaiting the right equations.
2. Mae Jemison Physician MD & Peace Corps Doctor | NASA Astronaut | Chemical Engineer | Dance Student at Alvin Ailey | Linguist
At Cornell Medical School she was simultaneously taking classes at the Alvin Ailey dance school, seriously enough that at graduation she faced a genuine fork: medicine or professional dance. She chose medicine, then the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, then NASA, then space — the first African American woman to get there. She carried an Alvin Ailey poster into orbit. Not sentiment. Philosophy. Her argument, made explicitly and repeatedly: the arts and sciences are not two fields. They are two addresses for the same impulse. She is afraid of heights. She became an astronaut anyway, using the psychological resilience she developed as a dancer to override the vertigo while orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour.
3. Rabindranath Tagore Nobel Laureate in Literature | Music Composer | Painter | Author of Two Nations’ Anthems
He wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. No other human has done that for two sovereign nations. The Nobel Prize came in 1913 — the first non-European laureate in literature. The 2,230 songs he composed constitute an entire recognized musical genre, Rabindra Sangeet, still performed daily across the subcontinent. And then, at 67, he started painting. Not with training or intention — his paintings emerged from his manuscripts, doodles colonizing the margins of crossed-out poems until the doodles became the thing. They were exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, New York. One source, so full it had nowhere left to go but everywhere.
4. Fabiola Gianotti Director-General of CERN | Particle Physicist | Classical Pianist
She spent her youth almost entirely in music, art history, and literature. Very little mathematics, she has said. Then she came to physics late and ran the experiment that found the Higgs boson, authoring over 500 peer-reviewed papers along the way. She now leads the most complex scientific instrument ever built by human hands. Her degree from the Milan Conservatory sits alongside her physics appointments without apparent contradiction, because to her there is no contradiction. Both disciplines, she argues, are built on mathematical proportion and harmony. She approaches a particle accelerator the way a pianist approaches a fugue: find the structure, then find the beauty hiding inside it.
MULTI MASTERS
Several springs. One mountain.
5. John Urschel NFL Offensive Lineman | MIT PhD in Spectral Graph Theory | Assistant Professor of Mathematics
He played 40 professional NFL games for the Baltimore Ravens. During those same years, he was a full-time PhD student at MIT — MIT does not permit part-time doctoral students — submitting assignments between games and practices without fully disclosing this to the team. He published mathematics in SIAM while on an active roster. A theorem from his work is now called the Urschel-Zikatanov Theorem. After a 2015 concussion, he reached for a mathematical structure he knew he knew, and it wasn’t there. His football ability recovered faster than his mathematics. He retired at 26, two days after a JAMA study on CTE landed. Football and mathematics never explained each other. They just both needed him, and both were essential to him (in his own words).
6. Alexander Borodin Professor of Chemistry | Co-discoverer of the Aldol Reaction | Composer of Prince Igor & The Polovtsian Dances
Discovered of one of organic chemistry’s most foundational reactions, still taught in every undergraduate chemistry course worldwide. Co-founder of the Russian Chemical Society alongside Mendeleev. And one of “The Five” — the defining group of Russian nationalist composers — whose Symphony No. 2, In the Steppes of Central Asia, and the Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor are performed globally to this day. His chemistry colleagues barely knew he composed. He called himself a “Sunday composer.” His music friends, he wrote, never said “I hope you are well” — they said “I hope you are ill,” because illness was the only time music could happen. He died at 53, dancing at a costume ball at his own academy. Prince Igor was still unfinished after 18 years. Rimsky-Korsakov completed it.
7. Paul Robeson All-American Footballer | Columbia Law Graduate | Broadway’s Definitive Othello | Bass-Baritone Concert Artist
Fifteen varsity letters at Rutgers across four sports. Two-time consensus All-American in football — Walter Camp called him the greatest end he ever saw. Class valedictorian. Columbia Law. Then: 296 performances of Othello on Broadway, a Shakespeare record that stood for decades. A concert career in 25 languages, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. For a period in the early 1920s these were not sequential chapters. He was playing professional football, attending law school, and launching his stage career simultaneously. The domains never explained each other. They simply coexisted, all of them enormous, inside one person.
8. Greg Graffin Co-founder & Lead Singer of Bad Religion | PhD in Zoology | Evolutionary Biology Lecturer at Cornell & UCLA
Bad Religion has released 17 studio albums since 1980. Graffin has a PhD in zoology from Cornell and teaches evolutionary biology between tour dates. A fossil bird species, Qiliania graffini, was named in his honor in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Punk and paleontology occupy entirely different rooms. Except: his very first Bad Religion song drew directly from the closing sentences of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Perhaps the rooms share a wall after all. Or perhaps the wall was never quite there.
9. Dame Sarah Springman 3x European Triathlon Champion | 5x Hawaii Ironman Finisher | Professor of Geotechnical Engineering | Rector of ETH Zurich
Three European triathlon titles. Five Hawaii Ironman completions. Commonwealth Games competitor. Simultaneously: PhD from Cambridge, first female research fellow at Magdalene College, first female professor of civil engineering in Switzerland, Rector of ETH Zurich for seven years. Her DBE (female knighthood honor) in 2022 explicitly named both engineering and international sport. She was competing at the Commonwealth Games while working as a Cambridge lecturer. Two complete lives, running on parallel tracks, neither one a metaphor for the other.
10. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif Super Bowl Champion | Medical Doctor | COVID-19 Front-line Worker
Super Bowl LIV champion with the Kansas City Chiefs. MD from McGill. In 2020 he voluntarily opted out of the NFL season — walking away from the sport at its highest moment — to work as an orderly in a long-term care facility during COVID-19. Sports Illustrated named him Sportsperson of the Year, shared with healthcare workers. He went from a victory parade before hundreds of thousands of people to the bottom of a medical hierarchy within months, on purpose. Two callings making equal, simultaneous demands. He answered both.
MERGE MASTERS
Where rivers deliberately collide.
11. Sharada Srinivasan Archaeometallurgist | Padma Shri Recipient | Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences | Bharatanatyam Performer
She used nuclear geochemistry — lead isotope ratio analysis — to fingerprint over 130 ancient South Indian bronze icons and accurately date the Nataraja, Shiva’s iconic dance pose back to the 7th century. The finding required something no instrument alone could provide: an embodied knowledge of the 108 classical Bharatanatyam postures. Her dancer’s body read what her spectrometer measured. She has performed at the Royal Academy of Arts and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. She is, by her own account, likely the first person with a background in classical Indian dance elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The merger was not decorative. It was the epistemology.
12. Miuccia Prada PhD in Political Science | Communist Party Activist | Co-CEO of Prada Group | Founder of Miu Miu
She earned a PhD in political science from the University of Milan and spent years as a Communist Party activist, demonstrating in the streets of 1968 Milan — in Yves Saint Laurent. She did not abandon politics for fashion. She continued the argument in a different material. Her “beautiful ugly” aesthetic, the deliberate ugliness she introduced into luxury, is feminist theory executed in fabric. Political science became her design methodology. The runway became her parliament. One discipline, two venues.
13. Anna Kiesenhofer Postdoctoral Mathematician in PDEs | Olympic Gold Medalist in Cycling
A postdoctoral researcher in nonlinear partial differential equations at EPFL in Lausanne. She funded her cycling from her research salary and self-coached using mathematical data analysis. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics she won the women’s road race in what was called one of the greatest upsets in Olympic cycling history. The dominant Dutch team miscounted some stats and celebrated silver thinking they had won gold. A mathematician defeated the world’s best cycling nation by being more precise about numbers than they were. The merge was not background color. It was the weapon.
14. Cédric Villani Fields Medal Winner | Member of the French National Assembly | Mathematical Theorist of Social Policy
Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, for work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. Then: elected to the French National Assembly, where he led the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Assessment. His explicit argument — that the same equations modeling gas equilibration could model the mixing of social systems — was not metaphor. It was methodology. He wore spider brooches to parliament. Nobody told him he couldn’t. Nobody quite knew what category to put him in, which was the point.
15. Pardis Sabeti Harvard Computational Biologist | Time Person of the Year | Lead Singer of Thousand Days
She developed the statistical tools now used routinely to scan the human genome for traces of natural selection — a landmark contribution to our understanding of how infectious diseases evolve. TIME magazine named her Person of the Year in 2014 for her work tracking Ebola. She is also the lead singer and bassist of the alternative rock band Thousand Days, four albums in. She keeps a guitar in her Harvard office. She made one of her most significant genetic discoveries in a creative state she describes as identical to the state of writing a song. Whatever that state is — it doesn’t seem to care which domain it’s visiting.
The point of these examples is not to intimidate you, but inspire you.
When you watch Roger Federer move across a tennis court, something happens that has nothing to do with your own forehand.
When you hear Yo-Yo Ma play, you don’t walk out wanting to practice scales. You walk out feeling viscerally awed on what human beings are capable of!
The record exists. The frontier has been touched. Something in you recalibrates due to that.
These fifteen people are that. Evidence. Not instruction.
They refused to accept that human life must have one mode of excellence. They unequivocally share the audacity to keep pushing the boundaries of what they are meant to achieve.
A PolyPath is someone for whom one path was never going to be enough. They don’t lack focus, they contain genuine multitudes that all need room to grow, to be excellent, to define who they are.
I know this because I am one.
I am in no way close to the prolific icons described above, but I am on my path(s). And that’s exactly why I chose the term PolyPath — we are all walking multiple paths that are important to us, doesn’t matter where we are on the path.
My paths include tech, specifically AI privacy and music and motherhood and most recently, an entrepreneur. The paths don’t always explain each other. They are all an expression of me. They just all need to exist, simultaneously, for the person holding them to feel whole.
And that’s the common thread for all the above examples. These multiple paths make them who they are! Their stories are not told enough. These icons are rarely grouped together, or seen as part of the same phenomenon. That invisibility is part of why PolyPaths exists: to name the phenomenon, build the vocabulary, and invite others to walk on their paths.
If this article stirred something in you, you belong here.
Welcome home.
PolyPaths is a community for multifaceted achievers — people who pursue multiple callings with a genuine drive to grow on all of them, and refuse to be defined by just one.
You forgot Brian May
Absolutely superb article! I feel simultaneously humbled and inspired reading the stories of these people.
Coming across your work has completely changed the way I view my own past (and present). I had always thought of my engineering and software development background as influencing my neuroscience research and motherhood journey, but now I see it more as if that systems thinking is the fountain from which the others spring.
Thank you for this.