Haunted by Unfinished Projects
I used to feel a pang of shame whenever I glanced at my “graveyard” of unfinished projects. A half-coded app, a guitar riff with no song, a 3D printer gathering dust next to half-soldered PCBs. Leftovers of passions that flared brightly then faded. In a world that praises finishers and specialists, having too many interests (and too many abandoned endeavours) felt like a personal failing. The mantra “jack of all trades, master of none” echoed in my head. Was I sabotaging myself by not sticking to one thing?
But a subtle shift in perspective changed everything. What if those scattered projects and diverse hobbies aren’t evidence of failure, but of a different strategy for success? What if having many unfinished projects is actually part of building an unconventional advantage? Gradually, I realised my shame was misplaced. the graveyard of past pursuits was the training ground for what I now call the M-shaped mind. And I’m not alone [2]. In truth, the very experience of chasing multiple interests (even those we don’t fully “complete”) can be strategic, not shameful.
The Tyranny of Specialisation and Its Limits
From grade school through grad school, we’re taught to specialise. The modern ideal is often a T-shaped professional: one deep area of expertise supported by broad but shallow familiarity with other fields. Specialisation brings focus, efficiency, and depth. It’s reassuring to introduce yourself with a single title: “I’m a software engineer” or “I’m a biologist” and be taken seriously. Entire career paths, academic departments, and industries reward those who drill deep into one niche. We’ve all heard that to be the best at something, you must give it 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Conventional wisdom warn that spreading yourself too thin means you’ll never excel at anything. No wonder a shelf of unfinished projects feels like evidence of scattered mediocrity.
Yet, this single-minded specialisation has serious limits. Complex real-world problems often ignore disciplinary boundaries. Meanwhile, the specialist runs the risk of becoming fragile; if your one domain goes obsolete or hits a dead end, where do you turn? Research in organisational science suggests that adding breadth to your expertise can boost creativity, especially as your career progresses. In one study, scientists who expanded their knowledge into additional domains saw higher creative output, indicating that venturing outside one’s narrow field can spark fresh ideas that pure depth alone might not yield [1]. In short, being too specialised can box you in. The world is dynamic; entire industries rise and fall within a decade, and interdisciplinary innovation is increasingly where the big breakthroughs happen. The shame you feel about your roaming interests is largely a byproduct of an outdated mindset that prizes staying in one lane. It might be time to update that mindset because the road ahead has many lanes, and some of the most exciting destinations lie at the intersections.
What Is M-Shaped Mastery
So what exactly do I mean by an M-shaped mind? It’s a metaphor for a polymathic profile: imagine the capital letter “M,” with multiple vertical pillars. Each pillar represents a deep skill or domain of knowledge you’ve built up over time and the pillars are connected by a broad base of general understanding and curiosity. An M-shaped individual is someone who has multiple areas of mastery, not just one. It’s like being T-shaped in not one but several different fields, forming a comb-like shape of expertise. Crucially, those pillars aren’t isolated; they connect and reinforce each other at the base. In practice, this means the person finds creative ways to integrate insights across their varied skills.
How do you build an M-shaped profile? Typically through serial mastery. This isn’t the same as multitasking or being scatterbrained; you don’t try to build all pillars at once. Instead, you focus deeply on one discipline at a time, long enough to achieve a meaningful level of skill or fluency, and often to complete a significant project or two in that area. Then, driven by either curiosity or the desire for a new challenge, you pivot – not resetting to zero, but moving your focus to the next domain, where you again dive deep. Over years or decades, you accumulate a set of specialties. In my case, I can trace a path: I spent my early twenties immersed in programming and computer science, later switched gears to immerse myself in music and guitar technique, then dove into electronics and PCB design, and most recently picked up 3D design and printing. Each time I “quit” one field to explore another, I was really adding a new leg to my M-shaped profile.
Unlike a dilettante, an M-shaped polymath does finish things, just not all the things. I finished some software projects and even published a small open-source library before moving on; I gigged with my band and recorded a few songs before the next interest took over; I completed several electronics builds (and yes, a few fried prototypes) on my journey to learning circuit design. Every pillar is built through genuine engagement and often formal or informal accomplishments in that area. The unfinished projects along the way weren’t failures; they were stepping stones and experimental forays that ultimately fed into a larger mastery. This approach is organically built which is guided by personal fascination rather than a preset curriculum. It’s not always neat or planned, and it can certainly confuse people around you (and even yourself at times), but it’s a very real mode of development. In fact, it’s increasingly recognised in career advice circles: some call it a “portfolio career” or a “multipotentialite” lifestyle. Here, we’re dubbing it the M-shaped mind.
To put it simply, M-shaped mastery means having several deep competencies that you’ve built over time, and a mindset that finds connections among them. It’s the opposite of having one single superpower; it’s having a toolbox of superpowers, each honed through effort. And it turns out this toolbox can be far greater than the sum of its parts, yielding strategic advantages that traditional specialists often lack.
Strategic Redundancy, Far Transfer, and Resilience
Why embrace the M-shaped path? What do you actually gain by cultivating multiple specialties (besides a folder full of unfinished drafts and schematics)? As it happens, multiple deep interests can make you more creative, innovative, and resilient in several ways:
Cross-Pollination and Far Transfer: Having diverse skills means you’re constantly cross-pollinating ideas between fields. You start seeing analogies and patterns that a single-track specialist might miss. Empirical studies back this up: creative influences often come from outside one’s main domain. In one experiment, people who listed influences on their creative projects showed that cross-domain inspirations were more common than within-domain ones. In fact, creators drew ideas from different fields even more frequently than from their own field [3]. In my own experience, a coding problem might be solved with a metaphor from music theory, or a design idea might arise from something I read in a science fiction novel. Psychologists call this far transfer: applying knowledge from one context to a distantly related one. It’s difficult by nature, but being fluent in multiple domains makes those leaps more likely. There’s evidence that excelling in one domain can boost creative performance in another: one study of high school students found that the quantity of creative activity in, say, music or art correlated with the quality of accomplishments in completely different areas [4]. Your “graveyard” of side projects is actually a rich compost heap, fertilising your next big insight.
Strategic Redundancy: An M-shaped polymath has overlapping competencies that provide backup and synergy. This is strategic redundancy. While redundancy sounds inefficient, it can drive innovation. Management research shows that overlapping knowledge isn’t wasted at all; it can spur novel combinations. For example, a study on organisations found that a certain level of knowledge redundancy (having multiple people or teams know similar things) significantly improved innovation outcomes [5]. By analogy, when you personally “overinvest” in learning beyond one specialty, you give yourself a safety net and a creative edge. If one of your pillars starts to crack – say the job market in that field dries up or you hit a creative block, you have other pillars to lean on. During the 2020s, we saw entire industries transform virtually overnight; those with versatile skill portfolios could pivot more easily, essentially future-proofing their careers. Moreover, redundant knowledge means you can approach the same problem from different angles. As a coder and a designer, I can troubleshoot an issue with both algorithmic logic and user-experience intuition. The multiple perspectives aren’t redundant in the negative sense, they’re reinforcing. In engineering, redundancy provides reliability; in an M-shaped mind, it provides both reliability and inventiveness.
Antifragility and Resilience: Some systems not only withstand shocks, they gain from them. Think of how our muscles grow stronger from stress (up to a point) or how biodiversity flourishes after a forest fire. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this quality antifragility: the ability to thrive on volatility and disruption. A specialist’s career is often resilient at best (able to endure stress without breaking). But a polymath’s career can be antifragile and actually benefiting from changes and chaos. When something breaks, there’s material for growth. The concept of antifragility, originally developed in risk analysis, emphasises that a bit of disorder and error can spur higher performance later [6]. The M-shaped mind embodies this. Each “failure” or unfinished project in one domain teaches you something that makes you stronger in another. You become highly adaptable: new technology on the horizon? You’re excited, not scared, to pick it up because you’ve been a newbie many times before. Big disruptive problem in your company? You’re likely the one who can connect the dots from different fields and propose a creative solution. Rather than shattering you, shocks and shifts feed your growth.
Polymath vs. Dilettante (Depth, Integration, Productivity)
It’s important to address a reasonable skepticism: having many unfinished or varied projects could also be the mark of a dilettante. someone who dabbles without ever digging in, who chases every shiny object for a week and then gets bored. How do we distinguish the M-shaped polymath from the dilettante? The difference comes down to three things: depth, integration, and productive output.
Depth: A polymath might roam across fields, but in each field they commit to real learning and achievement. By contrast, a dilettante stays at shallow waters. If you learn a little Italian, paint two amateur watercolors, take one coding class, then drop it all, you’re collecting hobbies at a surface level. The M-shaped mind builds deep pillars maybe not world-expert level in everything, but enough to speak the language of the field and create within it. This typically requires years of engagement per pillar. In practice, polymathy is often a mid- or late-career phenomenon, because it takes time to develop multiple expertises. One analysis noted that true creative polymathy tends to appear in mature creators after they’ve spent significant time in their domains [2]. In fact, when researchers looked for polymathy among teenagers, they found it to be quite rare [4] which makes sense, since adolescents haven’t had the years needed to attain depth in more than one area. So, ask yourself: in the areas I care about, have I gone beyond the basics? Do I have at least one or two domains where I’d consider myself highly proficient or where I’ve created something meaningful? If yes, you’re on polymath territory; if no, it may be time to choose one interest and dive deeper before hopping to the next.
Integration: Polymaths integrate their knowledge; dilettantes compartmentalize or scatter it. An M-shaped polymath doesn’t treat their interests as isolated pastimes – they cross-pollinate them. The key advantage of having multiple pillars is using them together. The dilettante often lacks this integration; their attention hops around too quickly to make connections. So, being a polymath isn’t just having many interests, it’s weaving them into a cohesive personal knowledge network. It might be as subtle as using your literature background to write clearer scientific reports, or as direct as a biotech expert also mastering sculpture to design better medical devices. The test is whether your domains inform and enhance each other. If you find that what you learn in one arena frequently gives you insights in another, you’re likely practicing polymathic integration.
Productivity: Finally, there’s the matter of output. The M-shaped mind tends to produce tangible results in its various endeavours, perhaps not a best-selling novel and a tech startup and an art exhibition (we don’t all have to be Leonardo da Vinci), but at least some concrete accomplishments in different areas over time. The dilettante, on the other hand, often has little to show beyond enthusiasm. Productivity here isn’t just about career or money; it could be finishing a major DIY project, publishing a research paper outside your main field, or releasing an album on the side. A study of creative polymaths argued whether a polymath must be formally productive in all fields or can some pursuits remain purely personal [2].
In summary, the shame-laden image of the “master of none” begins to fade when you ensure each of your passions gets its season of depth, your knowledge streams intersect, and your pursuits yield creations (big or small). Then you’re not just dabbling; you’re multiplying.
Reframing the Graveyard as a Treasure Trove
Standing amid the “graveyard” of my past projects now, I no longer see a wasteland of failure. I see fertile ground. A personal library of experiences and skills that I can draw on in novel combinations. The M-shaped mind reframes a scatter of unfinished endeavours as the scaffold of a resilient, creative life. In an era of rapid change and complexity, having many legs to stand on is not a weakness; it’s a superpower. So if you’ve been berating yourself for not sticking to one thing, consider this a friendly invitation to rethink that narrative.
The next time you feel shame about abandoning a project, remember: you’re not abandoning knowledge gained. Those skills and insights go with you, ready to be resurrected when needed. In the story of the M-shaped mind, no learning is truly wasted, and no passion is ever pointless. Eventually, you’ll find yourself using “failed” experiments as fuel for successes. So embrace your inner polymath. Give yourself permission to build your mastery in chapters. Let people call you a jack-of-all-trades and know that you’re quietly becoming anti-fragile, collecting the pieces for something they won’t see coming.
References
[1] P. V. Mannucci and K. Yong, “The differential impact of knowledge depth and knowledge breadth on creativity over individual careers,” Academy of Management Journal, vol. 61, no. 5, pp. 1741–1763, 2018.
[2] M. Root-Bernstein and R. Root-Bernstein, “Polymathy among Nobel laureates as a creative strategy—the qualitative and phenomenological evidence,” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 116–142, 2023.
[3] V. S. Scotney, S. Weissmeyer, N. Carbert, and L. Gabora, “The ubiquity of cross-domain thinking in the early phase of the creative process,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, Article 1426, 2019.
[4] A. M. A. Alabbasi, M. A. Runco, and A. E. Ayoub, “Creative activity and accomplishment as indicators of polymathy among gifted and nongifted students,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, Article 1255508, 2024.
[5] Y. Duan, W. Liu, S. Wang, M. Yang, and C. Mu, “Innovation ambidexterity and knowledge redundancy: The moderating effects of transactional leadership,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, Article 1003601, 2022.
[6] T. Aven, “The concept of antifragility and its implications for the practice of risk analysis,” Risk Analysis, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 476–483, 2015.