“Multipotentialite” means your wandering mind is valuable
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I happened upon this TED Talk by Emily Wapnick last night. She talks about being a multipotentialite—someone who loves to learn new things and do a lot of different stuff. That’s me. Maye that’s you?
It’s terribly inspiring for those of us who have had a hard time “focusing”—and have often judged ourselves as being less than, or “afraid of success” because we kept wanting to learn new things. We were often seen as “weird” by our easier-fitting-in peers (it’s easy to be superior).
In my own life, it’s taken a very long time for all the threads to start to come together, and see how it’s all interconnected. Spirituality, marketing, business, ecology, anthropology, coding, design. It has required courage to show up and craft ways that weave the threads together.
She makes some very good points about the strengths of being a multipotentialite. She breaks them down as:
- Idea synthesis
- Rapid learning
- Adaptability
When you learn things in one area, they often transfer over to other areas. Sometimes, it is not possible to see certain things from within a particular domain, that are nonetheless essential. When you can’t see the synthesis between considerations, you silo your understanding in ways that can miss something important.
When I look at the services I am offering now—business consulting, marketing and branding, web development, writing, even mind and consciousness training—sometimes I am afraid that people will think I am not “focused enough”. But in truth, I love them all, and they all interconnect. A lot of the value I provide lies in the intersection of these things. This is why I am good at strategy and seeing how one thing connects with another.
One of the trends I love in society now is the ever-broadening openness to different ways of being. Autistic people claiming their right not to be “fixed”. People who don’t want to be defined by gender pronouns, and choosing to opt out of a central continuum of our civilization. And so on.
She lovingly points out that the specialists of the world have a very valid place too. And in fact, that specialists and multipotentialites often make good teammates.
Let’s say we are entering a time where all the talents, sparks, and inspirations we are called to give have value and cannot afford anymore to be wasted. Let’s say this is the time when we show up with all we have to give. Let’s say it’s time to have the guts to give all we have and love and feel and care about, to a world that desperately needs our special and unique genius.
