Multipotentiality

I am not quite sure which is a more daunting question:

1. What do you want to be when you grow up? 

   or when you’re grown up:

2. What do you want to do with your life?

No matter how much time I’ve spent with myself, a pencil and paper, no matter the exposure I’ve gained, and no matter the depth of my self-discovery work, these questions have always left me fumbling over my words like a monkey on rollerblades. A life where I have a concise answer is much too otherworldly for even my imagination.

From the first encounter, I had with the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up”, I have felt cornered and suffocated with judgment and condemnation. I have felt cornered not because I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but because I’ve never been able to pick just one path. As a child, every time someone new asked me that dreaded question, I would give a new answer just to see how it felt rolling off my tongue. I thought that maybe if I found one that felt good enough, that would be the sign I was looking for. I tested racecar driver, ballerina, scientist, and the kind of person that finds dinosaurs; I tested doctor, astronaut, and chef; I tested writer, poet, and artist. The outcome of my little experiment was finding that they all felt good rolling off my tongue.

And now that I am grown, and the question has transitioned to, “what do you want to do with your life?”, I typically evade the question by saying that I want to own my own business (which is not a lie but rather a lackluster truth). Their eyes widen in an attempt to reveal approval, and I hold my breath hoping that I won’t be asked what kind of business.

This dance is one I’ve performed time and time again, learning over time how to hold a professional smile and keep the armpit sweat at a minimum under the glaring, scalding stage lights. However, I never mastered feeling “other than” in comparison to my friends who confidently know they want to be an accountant, an oncologist, or a coffee shop owner. How do they just know? Why is it that I can’t decide what it is I want to be?

These friends and peers are what you call specialists - someone who has one true calling. I, on the other hand, have no apparent true calling. I have interests that run far and wide and I want my career to connect to each of them like a web that grows more intricate as new interests present themselves. Not dissimilar from my desires as a child, I want to be everything and do everything - I simply cannot imagine my life in one discipline nor can I imagine telling someone that I want to be a neuroscientist-product expert-home builder-chef-writer-CEO-designer-rock climber.

I thought the formal term for what you call someone like me is a mess, someone who cannot assimilate to a more or less linear career path and has divided focus across multiple disciplines, but recently I was introduced to a word that gave me the vernacular and toolbox to perceive my interests and skillsets differently:

Multipotentialite [multi-potential-ite] - someone with many interests and creative pursuits. The word stems from the word multipotentiality – a psychological and educational term used to describe people who display aptitudes across multiple disciplines.

What I feared about my disposition towards a career before learning this word proved to be true: in the modern day - call it a post-industrial capitalist society - the perceived value of a specialist is often greater than a multipotentialite. However, in certain periods of history, this was not always the case. The ability to have expertise in multiple disciplines was considered ideal - for example, in the Renaissance period (hence the term renaissance man) - and in the modern day only considered ideal in certain contexts or cultures.

What surprised me is that despite the challenges that come with exhibiting multipotentiality, there is a surfeit of benefits. The more I read, the more I fell into a war of love and challenge with being a multipotentialite; I questioned how I can build a world in which I can thrive, a world in which someone of my nature is not seen as a Jack-Of-All-Trades, Master-of-None but rather a Jack-of-Curiosity, Master-of-Learning. This is what I learned:

A War of Love and Challenge Called Multipotentiality

• What does it mean to be a multipotentialite:

  Being a multipotentialite means that you are talented in multiple disciplines but are likely paralyzed by your potential (ironic). Your peers around you will be experiencing success from specializing in one niche while you are juggling multiple projects trying to decide which will be the most impactful and fulfilling.

  Multipotentiality insinuates that you are a rapid learner and highly skilled in idea synthesis. You are often seen as a person who deeply understands the correlation between topic A and topic B: it is easy for you to find the point of intersection where there is value. You are adaptable and therefore thrive in ambiguity with the ability to see the bigger picture when it might not be clear to others.

  At the same time, focus and productivity can be difficult for you. It might seem that you dive deep into one topic until you get bored and move on to the next topic indicating that you need a balance of variety and stability in your work. This behavior can be perceived as flippant or lazy by others.

• How to flip the narrative from Jack-Of-All-Trades, Master-of-None to Jack-of-Curiosity, Master-of-Learning

  As a multipotentialite, it is common to have an unconventional background - the kind of background that makes someone’s forehead wrinkle wondering how you got from point A to point B. Wait you mean you started as a gardener and now you are a doctor? Those kinds of backgrounds. Your superpower lives in your non-conventionality.

  1. Focus interests at their intersection point to find deeper meaning.

  2. Draw from and integrate a web of multifarious ideas to solve layered and complex problems.

  3. Raise your hand and volunteer yourself! If you don’t know how to do it, there’s a good chance you will learn it quicker than anyone else. Follow your interests and if you get to a point that interest no longer suits you, be honest with your peers and gracefully exit that line of work.

  4. You are great at navigating change and unafraid of being a novice. Lean into that skill set. Your curiosity will generate more ideas and allow you to see more possibilities and opportunities.

  5. Become a learn-it-all. Don’t be afraid to lean into your fleeting interests, in doing so, you will expand your worldview and make you a more understanding and compassionate human being to others.

  6. Find your zone of genius - this means who you are when you are operating at your absolute peak. This peak might feel like a flow state where your creativity is firing off on all cylinders. Your zone of genius fills you with energy. Zone of genius is not to be confused with zone of excellence. In your zone of excellence, you might be doing an activity you have mastered, but it will not speak to you on a soul level; ultimately, this activity will drain you instead of fill you with energy.

  7. When building with others, find a specialized partner. You don’t have to boil the ocean on your own; choose to work with others who respect and complement your strengths.

• Let the magic happen

  I’ve been using the word synchronicity lately because it is very relevant to my life. It seems that almost overnight my multiple passions have flowered from interests into real opportunities - more on that to come in another blog. In reality, my scattered and eclectic interests have taken quite some time to manifest from nothing into something. If I have learned one thing from this process, it is to not shy away from being multi-interested and sooner, rather than later, find the intersection point. Anybody can be interested singularly in any topic, say agriculture or blockchain, but you find something uniquely captivating when someone can find deeper meaning and connection between the two.

  The magic lies in the process - slowly become a learn-it-all and watch the world come together in a beautifully interconnected way.

If you found out in the last 5 minutes that you too are a multipotentialite, I hope you found this information helpful and encouraging. If you are anything like me, at the very least, I hope you feel better knowing that the formal term for your disposition is indeed not a mess.

Thank you for reading and following me on this journey, talk to you next week!