Hmm, a fair few rock-doctors move onto other things. In Western Australia it might have something to do with getting on an aircraft and flying for three hours to get to work (and spending 5 days living there away from your family). But it's interesting, perhaps there are some careers that are best to 'start' in, and others that are best occupied by folk who've come from 'elsewhere'. It's always struck me as 'disturbing' that someone could become a psychologist in their mid-twenties by studying 'straight through' without having a chance to accumulate 'life experiences'. But the point of my comment, is that many a specialist is a polymath that doesn't know it (yet).. One of my favourite anarchic pastimes is to bring magazines into workplaces - primarily New Scientist and leave them lying about. Sooner or later some issue will come up in discussion around the photocopier (they're generally more cerebral than the ones in the teamroom - which I attribute to the proximity of the gossip magazines there - or the ozone around the machine..), and I'll hand over the New Scientist saying "theres something in here about that" and they'll go off and read it and inadvertently while looking for whatever it was, they'll find some story about sexual attraction amongst peruvian snails, or possibly one the endless articles on the thousand ways the world will end very shortly. The beauty of New Scientist and the other 'collective ideas' magazines is that they 'lure' the reader into fields they don't entirely expect (much as a non-specialised blog can) . Folk who read 'specialist magazines, or visit web sites for information get pretty much what they're looking for - more stuff about their specialisation. The other beauty of the magazine and the blog is that they are ongoing, once lured, once hooked, the hapless victim's specialisation starts to erode, and we create (just possibly) another person living 'on the boundary" where the capacity for 'interesting things happening" is much greater. Perhaps the polymath is a lonely figure and much undervalued by traditional employers, but that just tells me we need to redouble our efforts to subvert the specialist compartmentalisation model by recruiting more specialists over to our side, and get that breeding program started....