There are no Will Huntings or Hal Incandenzas in reality. There are no people who combine phenomenal verbal dexterity/fluency, with an inexhaustible curiosity for knowledge and military reading habits, with phenomenal specific retention of the books they read, with literary erudition and musical erudition and fine-art erudition and a fine aesthetic sense, with a phenomenal natural mathematical ability and military mathematical-training habits, with charisma and charm and wit in social contexts. Real humans have to specialise; real humans have niches. Know your strengths, love your strengths and nurture your strengths.
Now, sure, some of us, like me, have irresistible and overpowering polymathic dreams and struggle to focus our attention on one thing for more than a few months. Nothing is going to make me hunker down to a specialty at this point in my life, and I don't think it would make sense for me to do that. Many young academic-types, like me, aspire to be C.P. Snow- or Cosma Shalizi-type (http://bactra.org/) figures, people who can bridge the "two cultures" (even if they do not come close to the impossible polymath ideal represented in fiction), and I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with this either.
And, leaving this art stuff aside, it does seem true that those who can actually reach a high level of skill across several academic disciplines - those who manage to steer between the Scylla of being "jack of all trades, master of none" and the Charybdis of being a total specialist may be in a unique position to make groundbreaking advances in the higher-level sciences. Jared Diamond needed to combine his knowledge of botany, ethology, anthropology, linguistics and history to make such a strong case for the thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel (as he himself immodestly notes); Peter Turchin's possibly groundbreaking work in identifying similar-looking complex cycles in "empires" throughout time and space and creating a mathematical theory thereof took full advantage of his very strong mathematical background as a leading mathematical ecologist while also requiring massive historical research and a strong starting place of historical erudition; Noam Chomsky couldn't have written Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax without a combination of a fairly strong background in new discrete mathematics and a very strong background in grammatical analysis; philosophers of biology like Elliott Sober or Peter Godfrey-Smith have made significant contributions to the modern theory of biology on account of their unique combination of skills; and as John Maynard Keynes famously remarked of his own discipline,
"The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician." [1924: 321-322]
But two points: i) the fact is that everyone with academic ambitions needs to reconcile themselves to a career involving far humbler achievements than these, because even if you are freakily smart with wide-ranging interests and multiple talents, you most likely won't make any great advances, because great advances are chancy things; ii) (reinforcing previous thesis) none of the people mentioned above even remotely approach the fictional geniuses I mentioned, and the advances they made required a great deal of specific formal knowledge which required hundreds or thousands of hours of specialist training.
If you ever get to thinking, "Oh, how I wish I had this [cognitive attribute]. What a boon it would be to be like [academic figure you admire] in this respect," you should try to think of skills or knowledge you have and they don't. There are probably some. Or maybe you're just way dumber than the person you admire in literally every respect; but that doesn't mean you can't be a very useful workhouse.
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