Good evening. I’m feeling a little more human but not fantastic, so I will probably keep this pretty brief tonight. I wanted to talk about being multi-passionate. I read a book many years ago by a wonderful woman called Barbara Sher, oops, pronunciation, called Refuse to Choose. Then a few years ago, I saw a great Ted Talk by Emilie Wapnick, I think as the correct pronunciation, talking about this topic.
Many, many people discuss being multi-passionate entrepreneurs, multi-passionate business people, multi-passionate in life, but a lot of people poo poo it and look down on it. Well, I actually think it’s a really good thing. You can be called many things in this arena. You can be called a scanner, multipotentialite, multi-passionate. Some people say you’ve got ADHD and you can just be called a generalist. What it means is that you have talents and passions in lots of different areas. Good evening. You might have, for example, you might be a astrophysicist with a passion for baking cakes and you want to work out how to combine those two things in your life. Evening.
Other examples can be your an accountant that likes pole dancing. You might be a French teacher who would actually prefer to be teaching history. There was so many different things, but a lot of people look at it and think, and we get taught early on that we need to choose something. That’s what you do for your life. You’ve picked that yellow brick road that you will go down for life.
I disagree completely. I think we choose a road that has many forks and twists and turns in it. As that saying goes, life’s about the journey, not the destination, that eventually gets us to where we are meant to be in life. A lot of the times when you have lots of different passions in different areas, you can think you’re suffering from multipotentialitis. Such a good line. Such good word, rather, is you’re suffering from shiny objects syndrome or mirror ball syndrome and you might start something and then your focus goes over there.
You actually can’t help it if you are built this way. There are very many people that aren’t and they can absolutely stick to one thing and stick to it forever and I take my hat off to them because sometimes I wish that was me, but I’m not. I am a scanner or a multipotentialite or multi-passionate. I have many different projects and passions and talents and skills and I used to actually pretend I didn’t. I’d say I was focused on one thing because that’s what I thought you needed to be. Whereas now I try and combine all those things that are of interest to me into what I do and into my life without it feeling so haphazard and almost schizophrenia going away I guess.
No, I don’t have multiple personalities, but a lot of people with true multiple personality disorders, gosh. I don’t believe in one true calling in life. I believe that your life can include everything you love and that becomes your calling. When you’re talking about being a scanner, what it might involve, which you might be at work for example, and you’re working on really hard on a particular project for someone and someone might come along and they say, “Oh, we’ve got organize this Christmas party.” You immediately will switch and do that because your brain can switch focus like that and your interest goes to that. Whereas someone who’s not that way and like, “Sorry I’m doing my project, this is what I’m working on, this is what I’ve got to work on.”
Consequently, if we don’t watch out for ourselves, we can tend to have too many balls in the air at the same time and they do fall over sometimes and we end up with mud our faces and not getting what we actually need to get done done, which is the danger of being a multipotentialite because you spread yourself too thin on too many things.
Another danger is also trying to encompass all those skills and talents and passions in your job or your business because they don’t actually have to be. If you have passions in other areas, you can actually do them outside your working hours. You can read more books on it. You can have a little side project that’s a wood working wood. How many wood chuck wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Woodshopping workshop.
They don’t all have to be money making things. You might like tapestry. You might like baking. You might like singing. Anything. Tap dancing. In a business arena, you might be working in a computer department and IT department of a business for example, but your real passion is actually strategy.
You might ask to get involved in some projects at work that have more to do with strategy so it’s not your core part of work but you want to get involved more in that area and you expand your skills in that area because you are showing the scanner attributes on that. I do recommend both those books Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher and How To Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick. I have read both of them. I think they are really good.
Follow them on social, etc., As well. Don’t be afraid. If you look at my … I look at my life for example, and my three things are entertaining, educating, and empowering. They’re the three things I want to do every single day. I think my skills of strategy, coaching, singing, talking on stage, etc., all of those things I really love and I’m really passionate about and my learning, my continual drive for learning is such a huge passion of mine. I get to bring that into what I do every day, which is awesome, but it’s taken me years to figure out how to put all those together.
Don’t be afraid to try and put them together. It is, I won’t say easily done, but it can be done. Now I’m going to love you and leave you. I am on the road to recovery. I’m going to go back to my soup from Harris Farm and I will see you all tomorrow. I might even feel good enough to put a face on tomorrow. Yay. You bought the best self words? Oh, send me a picture of what they are. Johnny, I’d love to see. Have a great night.