About Me

My name is Michael Wells Ferguson.  I was born on March 29, 1950 in Minneapolis Minnesota.  I lived there until October 2010 when I relocated to Miami, FL.  I am married to Nadezhda Pavlovna Ferguson (nee Azanova), the most wonderful, sexy, intelligent, funny and loving woman on the planet (Ferguson, 2001).  I have three children by previous marriage and Nadezhda has one by previous marriage.  I have eight grandchildren, so far.

I spent the majority of my career in various professional, management and consultative roles in the fields of Accounting, Financial Analysis and Strategic Planning.  However, I have also been compensated in the capacities of waiter, taxi cab driver, quality control inspector for the Lunar Excursion Module, professional game inventor, musician, tutor and writer.

However, I consider the traditional CV to be more misleading than elucidative.  Am I formally educated?  Some.  However, I am dispositionally an autodidact.  To be honest, most university classes actually anger me with their snail's pace.  My natural reaction is to say, 'Just give me the book and then I will take the final exam.  If I have questions, I will ask.'   Simply put, if I can learn Accounting in one night, why should I drag it out over the course of a year?  Furthermore, Universities do not teach in the question first Polymathic Method.  So, for the simple sake of efficiency, I have become an autodidact and have, as much as possible, eschewed formal education.

Which brings me to what is important 'about me.'  I have Compulsive Learning Disorder (CLD), a malady I have personally described in an effort to understand myself.  I ought to write it up and publish it in The Polymath.  Wait, there is no such journal.  Well, we, the Founding Members of the Polymathic Institute and the Culture of Affluence, Polymathica, will create the infrastructures, such as the peer reviewed journal, The Polymath, that should, but do not exist.  

Compulsive Learning Disorder is a condition where one's curiosity and thirst for knowledge interferes with one's life.  I would argue that it is not truly a psychopathy, but rather is simply a trait that is incompatible with the contemporary social, economic and cultural milieu.  But that is for another day.

I refer to myself as a Polymath, though I redefine the term, from a person with extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, to someone who asks questions and then finds the answer without respect for subject boundaries.  Take for example the following question.  All mammals have hair that stops growing at the length  that is evolutionarily adaptive for them.  Human hair if not cut will grow down to or past our derriere.  Why?  To what are we evolutionarily adapting?  Now that is generally taken to be a question in Evolutionary Biology.  I, as a Polymath, see no benefit in naming it and bounding the question.  In other words, if I wander into Physics, Psychology, Mathematics, etc., as I do, in an effort to find the answer, well then, so be it.  That is where it took me.

If you prosecute your life in this manner and you have CLD, by midlife you will know a whole lot about a whole lot of things.  You will have become not just dispositionally a Polymath, but also one in depth and breadth of learning.  I, on average, read about 300 pages of graduate texts, peer reviewed papers and government white papers per week and I have done so for the past 40 years.  Actually, that is not intended to be a quantitatively accurate statement.  I've probably read more than that. 

So, I am an autodidactic polymath.  I guess.  However, that is obviously, only one aspect of me.  It is probably the most relevant to my readers, but not to me.  I would be most inclined to define myself as pleasant, refined and scrupulously ethical. 

I am about 6'2" and 195#.  I am physically unusual with many physical traits well outside of the norm.  For example, my upper body is XXL and my lower body is M.  Funny looking in my opinion.  My estimated cranial capacity is 2,007 cc (male mean is 1,406).  My usual body temperature is about 2°F below the mean for humans.  My lung capacity is above +3σ and my heart rate is naturally over 90 bpm, even when I was a long distance runner.  There are other oddities, but I will leave it at that.

Nadezhda and I live in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and Minsk, Belarus.