This blog has gone a long way. It started off as something to do when I was lying in bed after my ACL surgery and had nothing to do. In order to keep myself busy and focused, I decided to start a blog.

I had started blogs before, but they never lasted long. This time, I promised myself that things would go differently. After a month of blogging on a free platform, I purchased my own domain name and hosting and officially inaugurated the blog.

This was the initial text on my About Page:

As a kid I was always pretty skinny. I was athletic (but did need to do some early work to become athletic as well), but wasn’t very big. I did grow to be relatively tall (6’1 or 184cm), but even at the beginning of university I was weighting around 70kg (155 pounds). This is not a lot relative to my height. Usually the rule for ideal weight is your height in cm minus 100 (so for me this would be 184-100=84, so 84 kg). So at university I decided to do something about it. I managed to get up to around 77kg to 79kg (170 to 175 pounds). This is the weight I hovered around for a few years. Then after a few years I decided that I wanted to bulk up and got up to around 85 or 86kg (around 190 pounds). This year unfortunately I tore my ACL and needed to get surgery and during this process I lost a lot of weight and muscle. As I am writing this, I am about a month after the surgery and am rehabbing, strengthening the knee and the quadriceps muscle and teaching myself how to basically walk again. After I get further in the process, I will try again to bulk up. I am writing this blog as a way to keep myself focused and also to gather some information in order to help me. I will try to share some things that I learn in the process and maybe help some other people who are thinking of gaining weight, gaining muscle and living a healthy active lifestyle.

The blog was initially titled “Gain Weight Journal” (hence the domain name) and was meant to be a fitness blog focusing on something that is not often covered, all the skinny guys who want to gain weight.

There are many resources focusing on people who want to lose weight, but the fact that many people have the opposite problem is not acknowledged.

Little by little, however, the blog grew beyond this initial scope. The main turning point came when I incorporated things from some of the other blogs I had been keeping.

After a while, the focus of the blog changed completely. I decided to rename the blog “The Renaissance Man Journal” in order to better reflect the things that I wanted to cover.

The 20th century was the time of the specialist. As knowledge in different fields grew exponentially, in order to rise to the top, people had to start specializing in narrower and narrower fields.

This was in complete contrast to the previous eras, where many great men rose to the top by being so-called Renaissance Men. They worked on perfecting both their minds and bodies and had vast knowledge in different fields.

While the 20th century was the era of the specialist, the 21st century seems to be bringing back some of the qualities that made polymaths so successful in the previous centuries. Many of the most successful people of today are the ones who can take knowledge from different domains, combine it and apply it in different contexts.

This is a skill that is often neglected. While specialists still have their place, and this path will still be one of the paths to success, other paths like that of the expert-generalist are opening up.

This path is something that is not explored enough. In this blog, I want to share some insights on how to follow this path to success. This is something that I am trying to do and have learned many valuable lessons along the way.

I am also a big ancient history buff and it was the rediscovery of Ancient Greek and Roman writings by scholars that sparked the Renaissance period in European history and led us to the modern world.

I feel that these writings still have a lot to say to us in our current era, and their profound wisdom could help guide people who might feel lost in the chaotic lives of today. That’s why one focus of the blog is to bring back ancient writings and put them in context of the modern world, distilling essential ideas from them and applying them to our own lives.

There will be many articles on what we can learn from ancient writings, but these will not be the only sources that I will use. I will combine them with modern research, as well as different areas of the world (Asia, Africa, anything that can teach us lessons), in order to bring you the most helpful information out there.

The idea is to get different sources of information and see how they can be applied in the real world to live a better life. You can use them in order to craft yourself into a Renaissance Man who can not only combine different ideas and come up with creative solutions, but also one who can conquer any hardships that are thrown at you.

3 thoughts on “About”

  1. Finally found what is was looking for. Everything that is important to me in one place. Thx

  2. Wonderful. Simply wonderful. I’ve been reading this blog for some days now and I’m very very happy that I have discovered someone writing about all of this, and beautifully writing, I must say. Even the gain weight part must be great, I haven’t yet arrived there. I discovered the blog when searching for what was a polymath and got surprised by the amount and quality of the things written here.
    Thank you very much, Peter.
    P.S.: english is not my first language, so I’m sorry if I write something wrong.

    gabriel.

    1. Thank you very much! 🙂 I am glad that you find value in my content. One of the reasons that I write is to help out other people by sharing what I have learned on my own journey. This is my own personal blog and so it is always good to hear that other people out there appreciate my writing and the stuff that I am putting out there.

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