Are you left brained, right brained or both?
Decide for yourself
2021 was the hardest year of my life. I was obviously out of career alignment and felt completely lost. Mainly because I felt I could be doing more, feeling more fulfilled, realizing my greatest potential and I wasn’t actively living out these truths.
To me, fulfilling my highest potential meant leveraging as much of my brain/me as possible. In reality, this means honoring my desire to be both creative and analytical — honoring my desire to be called towards people and environments that allow me to be my full multi-dimensional multi-hyphenate self.
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In the past few weeks alone, I’ve met wonderful people in everyday life leveraging a wide range of their skills to uncover their fulfillment:
- A nurse who is ALSO an event planner
- A Business Development professional who is ALSO an actor/director
- A lawyer who is ALSO a private chef
- A finance professional who is ALSO a writer
- A teacher who is ALSO an art dealer
We don’t have to be 1 thing so what are all the things that make you you?
It’s important to give yourself permission to be what you want to be. I went through this long journey myself.
Here’s a reflection I wrote in 2021 that still rings true 3 years later:
I usually go to bed at 10pm — it’s 1am. The occasional insomnia has set in as I wait to catch my first flight in over a year. Here’s what I’m thinking.
Are you left brained, right brained, or both? Decide for yourself.
One of my goals has been to hone skills from both my right and left brain — to balance the artistic and the analytical. It’s taken me years to truly achieve that sweet spot and the confidence along with it.
It’s clear now more than ever that the future of business needs to continue to combine the two in order to innovate.
Anyone who knows me knows creativity is at my core. Sometimes I can’t fully explain how or why I think the way I do, but I’ve been starting to put the words to paper. The first label I ever had alongside my name was “the artist”. Friends reach out when they need creative solutions, a new art piece for their friend, home or business, another perspective on how to approach a problem from a different angle, or even to talk about the latest trends in tech & art.
From winning art competitions as a child, to writing my college essay about how I communicate with the world through creativity and art, to being accepted into Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning — Art and Sasha have been synonymous since the age of 3.
However, I have never felt comfortable with this label alone — I have always felt the need to grow my creativity beyond the canvas and find new applications across the various industries and roles I’ve held thus far.
I had this nagging feeling that I never wanted to be narrowly defined and wanted to balance my creativity with analytical thinking, the qualitative, quantitative and so on. I no longer see these skills as opposites, but complements.
NO ONE would have guessed that I’d end up working at the world’s largest hedge fund after college. It didn’t align with my creative self, but I wanted to practice my quantitative skills and get out of my comfort zone. Since I learn by doing, there was no better way than to be immersed in the world of financial services. While quant doesn’t come as naturally to me as art, I’m at a point now where I continue to find ways to practice, the skills and stay fresh. I enjoy stretching my brain in this way and whenever I feel stuck, I remember the best math teacher I ever had in 7th grade, Mrs. Haseltine at The Unquowa School. She held me to a higher standard — she expected we practice many math problems each night and we didn’t leave the classroom until we each got X amount of answers correct. I had to identify where I went wrong and what I needed to fix.
In her classroom, no one was “the math” person. Everyone was a math person. Many, MANY years later, I still think about this lesson frequently.
I find the world wants us to either define ourselves as one or the other — an artist or an analyst. As someone who constantly bucks the status quo, I’m going to be both. I choose to practice balance.
It’s not easy.
I often hit roadblocks and there’s so much I still haven’t done yet, but I love a good challenge. Honestly, it keeps my brain happy.
I’d love to catch up, book time with me.
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With Love,
Sasha Mack
