This week's reminder: you don't have to choose!
If you're pulled in many directions, follow them all and discover your personal legend.
This week’s reminder
Most of us feel like something is wrong with us if we have multiple interests.
If you’re someone who constantly takes up new things, goes deep, and then abandons them… chances are you were told you’ll never be successful.
That without discipline you’ll waste away your talents, or that you just don’t have what it takes to succeed.
In this day and age, unless you master one thing and make a socially celebrated income from it, it doesn’t count as success. So we tend to postpone or ignore our multiple interests and force one direction to become our vocation, our calling in life.
I did that.
It turns out that if you’re like me, you’re not alone. And more importantly, you’re not a failure!
I recently read Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose!, and that book helped me change my perspective. If you’re pulled in many directions, going deep and then swerving, Barbara’s insight is that you already got what you came for from that project.
The intent was never to go all the way. That one idea is so refreshing.
If you got what you came for, and every interest doesn’t need to be a five-year career plan, that’s a relief.
And more importantly, it becomes a magical puzzle to follow towards discovering your personal legend (as Paulo Coelho would say).
Your curiosity and intuition are carrying you through these interests to discover something new about yourself, to learn something that will make sense later when all the dots connect.
This is you becoming the full, uninhibited expression of life you were meant to be!
So trust your intuition, follow your curiosity, and do it all. Prioritize, sequence, time-cap… do what you must, but follow it all. It’s there for a reason.
The dots will all connect in hindsight!
Moment of wonder
I recently read the biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Turns out he was a “scanner,” as Barbara would say, a man of multiple interests, plenty of abandoned ones too, who followed his curiosity in an age where that was celebrated.
His notebooks are what struck me!
From birds to flying machines, to human anatomy, to using ‘fire mirrors’ for welding, to water, light, and the movement of muscles, he let his curiosity wander, go deep, and switch freely.
He was a polymath of the first order: artist, engineer, anatomist, inventor, scientist. How exciting!
He gave the world some of its most iconic paintings, but he let his whole life unfold uninhibitedly, and that’s something we can all learn from.
Follow your curiosity even when it wanders onto the most unconnected things. Go deep where you’re called, then switch. You never know how the dots will connect for you.
Walk the path of your own personal legend.