How to Thrive as a “Multipotentialite”
7 key lessons on how to make your curious nature work for you
Lately, I’ve been spending more time daydreaming about my future than I’d care to admit, and those daydreams shape-shift every time. Sometimes I see myself running my own business, other times I see myself working the bar in a hut on an island, daiquiri in hand. Sometimes I’m a guitarist in a band, other times I’m a wildlife ranger in Borneo. Sometimes I’m a neuroscientist (ha, as if) and other times I’m a film director.
The only consistent aspect of these daydreams is that they always look different. I always see myself armed with different levels of passion and skills than the last time.
As you can imagine, life can get pretty confusing. How am I supposed to get anything done and work toward some sort of end goal if the dot on the horizon keeps moving around?
Multipotentialites Unite
If you recognize yourself in my internal battle, there’s a good chance you might be a multipotentialite. Multipotentialism was first coined by Emilie Wapnick in her TedX talk, “Why some of us don’t have one true calling” and she describes it as follows:
Multipotentialites are people with many different interests and creative pursuits in life.
Multipotentialites are often misunderstood and labeled as scatterbrained, chaotic, or unfocused, but I believe it’s a superpower once you figure out how to get it to work for you.
It’s like living 10 different lives in the course of one lifetime, which in itself is pretty neat. That is if you know how to best approach managing all your different interests to make the most of it.
Wondering if you might be a multipotentialite?
There’s a pretty good chance you are if you relate to the following statements:
- You are easily excited and passionate about new ventures and projects but are likely to get bored of something as fast and easily as you became obsessed with it.
- You can’t possibly fathom why you should only become one ‘thing’, master one skill, or embody just one job title.
- You have a hard time visualizing your future and it looks different every time you think about it.
As you can imagine, navigating through life and your career can feel a bit like finding your way through smoke and mirrors. It’s like a never-ending internal battle between different alter-egos all shouting in a different language.
The trick is to learn how to filter out the noise.
I definitely don’t have it all figured out but I did learn some valuable lessons that help in my quest to best-practice living and juggling dozens of passions and curiosities.
1. Let Go of the Idea That You Should Have “One True Calling”
Because you don’t. Well, you might. Some people just instinctively know what they want to do, and some of those people have known ever since they could talk. But my answer to the question ‘’What do you want to be when you grow up?’’ as a child was always either ‘tiger’ or ‘fairy’ so if we’re measuring by those standards, I’ve failed.
If you do feel like you have one true calling and you feel a strong urge toward a particular career or lifestyle, good for you! Navigating to a destination is easier when you actually know your destination.
If you feel like you don’t, you have multiple callings or you haven’t found any sort of calling yet, that’s fine too. Even though this world goes nuts for experts and specialists, there aren’t any rules you’re breaking if you decide to become both a painter and a doctor.
Let’s take Leonardo Da Vinci as an example. You might know him from his paintings, but that was just a tiny fraction of his identity. Besides being a legendary artist (as if that wouldn’t be enough), he was also a high-skilled scientist and inventor. His areas of interest included architecture, music, mathematics, engineering, painting, sculpting, literature, anatomy, geology, botany (plants), paleontology (fossils), and cartography (maps).
“Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
He didn’t have any formal education but somehow conceptualized flying machines, parachutes, and solar power long before that was even remotely possible. Just thinking about that absolutely blows my mind.
He is one of my favorite stories of fellow multipotentialites — just casually comparing myself to Da Vinci — as he was a versatile man before it was cool.
2. Spend Time Getting to Know Yourself
I think the whole point of a calling is that it comes from within and external forces have little to nothing to do with it. That means that you’re going to have to spend some time getting to know yourself.
Don’t be afraid to get confrontational with yourself and ask some questions:
- What are my core values?
- What do I really like doing? (If you’re having difficulty answering this, ask yourself: What do I naturally spend more time doing than the average person? Which activities boost my energy?)
- What do I not like doing? (Which type of activities drain my energy?)
- How do I want to add value to the world within my limited time on this planet? (What is my mission?)
- How well do my interests, skills, values and mission align?
Once you’ve taken note of your answers, you might get a clearer picture of which interests are worth pursuing more intensely than others.
Another fascinating thing I’ve learned since consciously making a big deal out of getting to know myself is about how I think. I’ve started to recognize patterns in my behavior and way of thinking that are — now that I know of them — easier to deal with.
For example, I’ll fall in love with the idea of anything. The idea of living in the jungle, or the idea of running a breakfast cafe. Realistically, I don’t want to be living off the grid far away from civilization where I’m constantly eaten alive by mosquitos, nor do I want to get up at 5 a.m. every day squeezing oranges and being bound to one place.
Ask yourself what a typical day of your daydream-life would be like and then see if you're still interested. Truth is, every kind of job or lifestyle will have its downsides. But if the downsides outweigh the positive points consistently, it might just be the idea that excites you, not the reality of that idea.
Once you figured out which of your ‘callings’ are attractive to you without their downsides, and which are attractive to you despite their downsides, you’ll have a clearer picture of which roads to take seriously.
3. Find Patterns
More often than not, two different passions, activities, or interests that seem totally unrelated at first glance usually do have a thing or two in common.
Examples:
→ If you’re a fantastic street artist and you’re also a great chess player, that might point to a greater ‘umbrella skill’ of strategic thinking.
→If you’re a great listener and you feel drawn towards volunteering or charity work, that might point to the umbrella trait of being highly empathetic.
You might have felt clouded by the chaos caused by your many different interests, but find patterns like this and you might end up with a concise list of clear interests and traits of yours. Breaking them down and connecting the dots might give you a better overview of what exactly it is that sparks your interest.
4. You Don’t Have to Turn Every Passion Into a Career
I mean, you can. But it may get messy. Being an ambitious person myself I tend to think big and that often includes planning a business around whatever new shiny hobby I’ve found. This often doesn’t work (for me) for two reasons:
- I tend to abandon a passion project as fast as I fell in love with it. Doesn’t exactly make for a good foundation for a business.
- Sometimes (many times actually) it’s just more fun to do something for the sake of having fun.
Doing things just for fun is good for you. I like Mark Manson’s view on doing things just because you like it:
“Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, ‘What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?’ You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster. Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement.”
We, humans, just love overcomplicating things to the extent where we are too paralyzed to take any simple action.
That’s not to say that my future business won’t revolve around one of my passions, because I’m certain it will. It’s just the question of which one.
Remember that you’re not married to any of your hobbies or curiosities and you’re allowed to not follow through with something.
5. The Best Thing You Can Learn Is How to Learn Things
We’re getting meta here but it’s the truth. The best skill to learn to set you up for success in any of your new ventures is how to educate yourself most efficiently and effectively.
I think we tend to forget how privileged we are to be living in a time where you can literally look up anything you want to know in a matter of seconds. Just thinking of the amount of effort people had to put in to figure out how to do anything 100 years ago makes me exhausted. For us, everything is just a quick Google search away.
The preferred way to self-educate will be different for everybody as everyone is a different type of learner, but the learning opportunities in this day and age are endless.
There are videos, blog posts, communities, online courses (my favorite), workshops, webinars and let’s not forget about a simple search. If there’s anything that will guarantee your success, it’s making it a habit to Google literally everything.
6. Be Okay With the Fact You’ll Never Know It All
I have a nagging desire to learn everything but I am also very okay with the fact that I’ll never know it all. I believe that that is truly the sweet spot.
I love the chart here on the left and once you’ve wrapped your head around the truth in it, it’s easier to accept you’ll never know it all.
The bright side in this is that there will always be new things to learn and explore.
Sometimes I have this epiphany that the world is full of unexplored knowledge that I’m not even aware of and it just makes me so excited for the future.
Yes, you have many interests and curiosities. Your first instinct may tell you to learn everything there is to know in a certain area, and you might often find yourself drowning in wormholes of information on that topic. Honestly, indulging myself in new information feels like some sort of twisted therapy sometimes.
Just make sure you won’t be too hard on yourself if you just scratch the surface of a topic and then decide to move on again. Be okay with the fact you’ll never know it all and feel the weight on your shoulders dissolve.
7. Monitor and Prioritize Your Time
Much like an all-consuming summer fling, new curiosities or interests have the power to suck up more of your time than you may have initially intended. Therefore, it’s crucial to be conscious of how much time you’re spending on every passion and if the distribution of your 24 hours each day is balanced out the way you want it to be.
Find out what’s important to you, rank those things in priority, and make sure the time spent on those things more or less match the importance they have in your life.
A simple way to do this:
- List all your projects/hobbies/passions/things you’re working on.
- Give them all a “Time Spent” score between 1 to 10 (1 meaning you’re spending very little time on it, 10 means that all your time currently goes into that one).
- Now rank them on importance. Which ones are most important to you? Which ones contribute the most to your long-term goals?
- Now compare your “time spent” score with their place on your importance ranking. Do those scores align per project?
The idea is to make sure that not too much of your valuable time goes into projects that actually don’t mean as much to you. Remember: everything has an opportunity cost. Time spent on one thing could also be time spent on something that’s more important to you.
In Summary
Your multipotentialism can be your superpower if you know how to manage it well. Again, here are my seven keys to handling your curious nature:
- Let go of the idea that you should have “one true calling.”
- Spend time getting to know yourself.
- Find patterns in your interests.
- Know that you don’t have to turn every passion into a career.
- The best thing you can learn is how to learn things.
- Be okay with the fact you’ll never know it all.
- Monitor and prioritize your time wisely.
I do not have it all figured out yet — far from that. I still struggle with commitment and dedication to some projects, and many hobbies or projects have died a slow death as a result of that. But as long as I’m intentional about what I spend my time and energy on, I’ll always pursue the things that I know make me happiest.
That’s all that matters in the end anyway.
