The Meaning Behind “Stoic Polymath Studios”: What’s in a Name, Part 3
This is one of my entries into the 2024 Capital Palette painting competition. It earned a finalist pin.
As part of the self-discovery process, when I began to understand myself as a polymath, I came across and began reading The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine. The book includes several exercises, including one entitled “Five From Fifty,” in which you must select your five most important values from a list of fifty (with the option to add your own value if needed). This can actually be a challenging exercise. A couple of terms, learning and excellence, were easy to identify and would make the cut. Several others, like risk-taking and socializing, could be easily eliminated. Winnowing the list down to five values after that took a while, but I eventually had my initial list: achievement, approval, expertise, learning, and challenge. I didn’t know how I felt about those at the moment. I didn’t know if achievement and approval, in particular, were values I wanted in my top five (eventually, my studies in Stoic philosophy would help explain why, more on that in a future post).
I spent the next six months continuing through the book, working on identifying where I wanted my life to go, and revising the values list over time. During one discussion with my coach at the time (my agency has an excellent coaching program that was game-changing for me), an epiphany hit me. I had been talking around one of the values all the time, and it finally clicked that it really was one of my top five, something important to me: creativity.
Creativity (a.k.a “Studios”)
One important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily need to be naturally talented or extremely good at something for it to be an important value. I’ve always enjoyed writing and visual arts, but I never seemed to have a true talent for them (academic writing, though, is a very different story). Thus, I hadn’t really thought of myself as a creative person. Two realizations helped me recognize the importance of creativity to me.
First, I realized that I often could not stop talking about the one hobby that had seemed to last longer than any other: painting miniatures. When I got into the wargame hobby—tabletop, miniatures, board wargames, serious games—I never thought I’d take on painting, but once I started, I was absolutely hooked. My painting bench had transformed over three years from a small part of the overall bench with a few paints to a workspace that took up the whole bench and several nearby shelves. My paint inventory had gone from about 10 pots to approaching 100. Not only that, but I was seldom content to paint with the standard color schemes for Warhammer. I wanted to create my own color scheme, my own chapter, and a whole lore behind it. Over time, my creativity has combined with my polymath personality. My favorite part of the hobby is often learning more through classes at the NOVA Open convention each year, and color theory is not absolutely fascinating to me. I’m trying to make the transition from a hobby artist to a more developed display and competition painter. The challenge is that I don’t necessarily have a natural affinity for it, so developing my skills will be a long road.
Second, I came to realize that creativity can express itself in a variety of forms. I may not be the most naturally artistic person or creative writer, but when it comes to intellectual pursuits and academic writing, I excel at creating ideas. Often, I express these ideas as models, frameworks, or theories. When I was focused on systems analysis at work, I established novel methodologies and typologies for the field to help teach analysis to others and improve my office’s performance. In my graduate work, I took the deterrence debates and practices I had seen at work—debates that frustrated me to no end, eventually forcing me to say that I’d I needed to come up with a better approach to the central concepts—and build an entirely new spatial model of aggression and escalation. In my most recent work at NIU and on the Joint Staff, I had the intellectual freedom and mandate to create entirely new ways of thinking about the warning mission.
Eventually, I realized that I wanted to have my own website to display my artistic creations. That’s where the idea for this started. However, over time, the intent of this site has morphed from being almost entirely a miniature painting-focused project to a much fuller creative pursuit. That brings me to where I am today. The “Studios” part of Stoic Polymath Studios represents my creative self, expressed through ideas, theories, and my pursuit of painting excellence.