I’m interested in everything.
I used to think this was a bad thing. Mainstream society lauds specialism as essential to success. That you need to be really good at one thing and go ever deeper into that. That being jack-of-all-trades (and, with it, master-of-none) is a bad thing.
And if you’re not careful it’s easy to inherit the prevailing flawed thinking that surrounds you.
I have seemingly endless curiosity.
I like the process of learning about something new—so what the thing is doesn’t matter all too much. Some things are more blatantly-interesting to me at first glance than other things, but I love the process of learning about something I don’t already know.
I find the world fascinating.
My skill doesn’t lie in programming, or playing piano, or any other specific task. My real skill is being able to easily and effectively acquire new skills.
Which I’ve learnt can be something of a superpower. It’s endlessly and exponentially beneficial: I’m the genie who can grant a wish of three more wishes.
It does mean it’s hard to pin me into one box. And a lot of people don’t like that, because they find it difficult. I don’t have a clear answer to ‘what do you do for a living’: I have diversified income streams. I can’t answer ‘which programming language do you use’: I’ve probably used over 50, picking up a new one any time it might be interesting or be a better fit for a use case than any I’ve used in the past. I often help people to use systems or tools or languages that I myself have never used: I have an eerily intuitive sense for how things work.
It’s a flawed assumption that being a jack-of-all-trades necessarily makes you a master-of-none. If you only have the capacity to understand one thing intimately then, yes, understanding one thing might be beneficial. But, if you have the capacity to understand many things intimately, something special happens. Your capacity for problem-solving becomes exponential: if you know about 1 thing you have one search space for solutions; if you know about 20 things you don’t just have 20 search spaces: you also have the 190 search spaces that combine 2 things (C(20, 2) = 20! ÷ (2! (20–2)!) = 190), and the 1,140 search spaces that combine 3 things, and so on.
It’s these connections—the edges, not the nodes—that helps me find solutions that seemingly come ‘from nowhere’. In a way this ‘from nowhere’ concept is true: the solutions don’t come out of any discrete thing, but rather from the empty space—the nothing/nowhere—between the things.
In other words I’m often more interested in how things fit together than in the things themselves. That simply isn’t possible as a specialist in one thing.
In the Myers-Briggs personality functions this is described as being my ‘extraverted intuition’ (Ne). A broad intuition: not for how individual things work but also for how the wide range of things interconnects. And how to solve seemingly unsolvable problems by tying together disparate knowledge to craft the optimal solution.
I don’t know whether all this is something that can be learnt, because I’ve been like it since before I can remember. I used to read the encyclopaedia page by page as a small child! Endlessly fascinated by everything the world had to offer.
This also isn’t to say that being a specialist is a bad thing. Far from it. Simply to argue that specialism is not objectively ‘better’ like society tried to tell me it is.
Quotes
A multipotentialite is a person who has many different interests and creative pursuits in life.
Multipotentialites have no “one true calling” the way specialists do. Being a multipotentialite is our destiny. We have many paths and we pursue all of them, either sequentially or simultaneously (or both).
Multipotentialites thrive on learning, exploring, and mastering new skills. We are excellent at bringing disparate ideas together in creative ways. This makes us incredible innovators and problem solvers.
When it comes to new interests that emerge, our insatiable curiosity leads us to absorb everything we can get our hands on. As a result, we pick up new skills fast and tend to be a wealth of information.
– Emilie Wapnick, Terminology, Puttylike
In a world of dogmatic specialists, it’s the generalist who ends up running the show. Is the CEO a better accountant than the CFO or CPA? Was Steve Jobs a better programmer than top coders at Apple? No, but he had a broad range of skills and saw the unseen interconnectedness. As technology becomes a commodity with the democratization of information, it’s the big-picture generalists who will predict, innovate, and rise to power fastest. There is a reason military “generals” are called such.
– Tim Ferriss, http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/09/14/the-top-5-reasons-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades/
