Are You A Multipotentialite?
What I read: How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up by Emilie Wapnick. Published May 2, 2017.
My long stint with my current corporate job notwithstanding, I have never really stuck with any one professional pursuit for extended periods of time. I credit my long stay at my current job to a great manager and management chain, great team members, and a company that’s treated me extremely well. I like what I do and the people I do it with, but I’ve also been honest with friends when I call it my “fancy waiting tables.” It’s a great job that pays the bills and allows me to have a life outside of the workplace. I’ve been able to do some really cool things as a result. At 68 I don’t know how long I’ll remain employed there, but for now it’s a great gig with great people. They’ve treated me superbly.
However, if you look at my lifetime history of jobs, it’s all over the map. Here is an excerpt from my book The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling.
My life then followed a fantastic journey from that point on that included careers as a dancer, actor, singer, model, bartender, waiter, retail clerk, designer of windows for a high-end department store, makeup artist, word processor, Hollywood script reader, script doctor (improved other people’s scripts), aerobics instructor, Hollywood film researcher, administrative assistant, corporate trainer, software specialist, instructional designer, network administrator, freelance writer, owner and President of a book publishing company, internet talk show producer and host, business policies and procedures writer, technical writer, business analyst, marketing writer, information developer, project manager, corporate manager, corporate senior manager, and eventually corporate director. And of course an author and blogger.
I published that book in 2014 and I’ve done quite a few new things since then. That doesn’t read like the life of a man who has a single passion or calling, does it? And those are just my jobs. If you added in the plethora of avocations and areas of interest I’ve pursued outside of my jobs, the list would easily double in size.
For years I bought into the notion that perhaps I just couldn’t stick with something. Maybe I was flawed in some way. Culturally we receive messages constantly that we should find our one true passion. Entire books are devoted to the notion of finding your purpose (almost always presented as singular, not plural).
I’ve never felt that I have a single passion or purpose in life. Never. Often, I would succeed at something only to be drawn away into a new area of interest, learning, or work. It’s just how I seem to function best.
Even though I perhaps arrogantly consider myself a self-aware person, I still fall prey to the social programming we’ve all dealt with since childhood.
Do you remember being asked, as a little kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up? How did you feel? When I think back to when I was five or six, I don’t remember my specific answer. But I do remember what happened after I answered: the face of the adult who had asked took on a look of approval and pride. It felt good to declare an identity. The world (well, my little world, at least) approved.
Language can help us in this regard. Often language evolves to accommodate the collective cultural development of humanity. New words and terms get created. Sometimes they’re controversial or otherwise met with resistance. Most of them eventually become a standard in our lexicon and some fade into disuse.
One helpful word I’ve run across and that’s used as a central organizing idea for Emilie Wapnick’s book is multipotentialite. Although often used to describe people with potential in multiple fields, Wapnick considers multipotentialites as simply people with many interests and creative pursuits. Other similar terms are polymath, Renaissance person, jack-of-all-trades, generalist (that’s the word I use most often), scanner (term coined by Barbara Sher), and puttylike. All these words have slightly different meanings but are all in the same ballpark of people who prefer to explore multiple areas of study, work, and creativity rather than just one.
It might seem like a logical thing that many of us would prefer to not pursue only one narrow area of interest, but the repeated messaging we get to specialize is a difficult thing to challenge. We often ask those 18 years of age and just entering college to declare a major, as if most people at that age should start to focus on just one main thing. That’s kind of bonkers when you think about it. I sure didn’t know what I wanted to do in life when I was 18 and none of my friends really did either, at least not for the long haul. Yet, those who pursue a liberal arts education or explore more wide-ranging learning are frequently seen as nothing more than dabblers and not really serious about their education.
Of course, no two multipotentialites are the same nor are how their multiple interests manifest. But Wapnick helps us wrap our heads around some possibilities by explaining a few general types of multipotentialites.
As a generalist myself, I think one of my great skills is the ability to connect the dots between various domains.
While specialists excel in a single domain, multipotentialites blend domains together and work in the intersections. This allows us to achieve a deep level of knowledge on the relationship between domains—our own form of expertise.
People like me have a skill set that allows us to synthesize information and ideas, learn quickly, adapt easily, see the big picture of situations, and connect and relate to others well. There is definitely a place for specialists in our world, but there is also a place for us multipotentialites.
Wapnick surveyed and interviewed hundreds of self-described multipotentialites who considered themselves happy and financially comfortable. Wapnick determined that they all shared a few important similarities.
They had all designed lives that provided them with three common elements: money, meaning, and variety—in the amounts that were right for them.
This makes a lot of sense because it honors the uniqueness of individuals to create their own recipe of these three things in ways that bring them joy and fulfillment and that best align with how they want their life to function. Multipotentialites are inherently experimenters, and we play with the amount and flavor of all these ingredients to see what we can cook up that works for us.
Wapnick helps us frame how multipotentialites create career paths for themselves using four multipotentialite work models.
The Group Hug Approach: This is having one multifaceted job or business that allows you to wear many hats and shift between several domains within the same job or business.
The Slash Approach: This is having two or more part-time jobs and/or businesses that you regularly alternate between.
The Einstein Approach: This is having one full-time job or business that provides you with all of your necessary income while leaving you with the extra time and energy to pursue your other passions.
The Phoenix Approach: This is when we work in a single industry for several months or years, then move on to start a new career or business in an entirely different industry.
Wapnick offers lots of great ideas and strategies for how each of these four styles of work might be configured. Throughout it’s clear that the very nature of being a multipotentialite is that firmly codifying anything that we do is a tenuous activity. But the discussion about these four styles definitely helps the reader hone thinking about how being a multipotentialite might happen in their own life.
One of the important things I needed to read was addressing the idea that multipotentialites like me are “quitters.” We’re not. We simply meet a challenge, learn enough about something to satisfy our curiosity, or define success in ways that allow us to move on to new things.
Multipotentialites don’t quit when something becomes too hard; we quit because something has become too easy.
Throughout the book Wapnick offers some great advice on how to best function as a multipotentialite, but nothing was more personally useful than the section on how to deal with people who don’t understand us.
But the third, most subtle and often most stifling challenge for multipotentialites is the self-doubt we sometimes experience living in a world that doesn’t recognize our strengths (or even our existence). We can be our own worst enemies. We put our ideas down. We second-guess ourselves. We let the fear of being judged keep us stuck in careers that no longer serve us and identities that no longer fit.
The voices of self-doubt we hear in our minds aren’t innate. We aren’t born with those doubts. They are imprinted upon us, and all walks of life add to this damage. Family. Partners. Teachers. Career counselors. Friends. Things we read or watch. Everywhere the single-path approach is heralded, and the multi-path approach is discouraged.
Guilt and shame can occur when this messaging it taken to heart. We might have the childlike beginner mind squelched out of us and fear being an ongoing beginner as we pursue new things. We buy into the notion that we all must be the “best” at whatever we do when in reality few of us will ever be the absolute best. Impostor syndrome runs rampant among multipotentialites.
If you are at all like me and see yourself as a multipotentialite, or you might be one, read this book. If it does nothing but validate that you’re fine just as you are, it will be more than worth the book’s price.
You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.