Stop Telling Multi-Passionate Entrepreneurs To Specialize!
All I can say in my defense is — I was triggered.
Last year, in the misery of Covid19 lockdowns, I came across a video on Instagram of a business coach helping her multi-passionate client choose a niche…
My trigger? The horrible advice the coach gave her client.
It’s the same advice multi-passionate people like me receive from well-meaning people like her all the time. That advice tells us to choose one talent or passion of ours to focus on for a while…Then do other things we are good at later.
At first glance, “choose one thing to be your thing” seems like a piece of sound advice, especially in the business context. It does make it easier to:
- focus your marketing efforts on one problem you can solve for people who need your help,
- find the right words for your marketing campaigns,
- and connect with the right audience…
But, it’s the worst.
As a polymath myself with expertise in art, technology, and filmmaking, I’ve heard it all. Not just choose-one-thing-now-you-can-do-other-things-later, but also:
- Pick a horse and ride it.
- Jack of all trades, master of none
- What are you up to now? (with the side of an eye roll, not meant as a compliment, btw)
- Why can’t you pick one thing to be your thing, like a normal person? (I am normal. Do you mean average?)
- …And my personal favorite…Do you have an off switch? (No. No, I don’t.)
I don’t know why this time was any different from any other times I’ve heard this, but I had enough. It was the final straw, and my cup ran over. I had to say something about it. And in my case, I do it through art.
Before I share my painting with you and the discovery I made in the process of creating it, let me explain why this advice is terrible for us.
There are several beliefs, misconceptions, and misunderstandings:
First, in our society, we overvalue specialization. We have a collective need to put every single one of us into a box. We also condition ourselves and our children from a very early age to specialize…And we pay specialists more. So, there is that.
Second, in our society, we confuse multitasking with being multi-talented. The common belief is that you will be mediocre if you do many things. But if you specialize and do just one, you’d be exceptional. This is not true for truly multi-talented individuals. We can be outstanding in more than one field at once, by definition.
The direction to choose one specialty, and the question of which thing to choose, assume that somehow we keep our talents, passions, expertise, etc., separate and can turn each one on and off at will.
I hate to disappoint you, but that’s not how it works. At least not for people like us.
As a polymath, I don’t react to something by switching the proverbial hats of an artist, technologist, and storyteller sequentially and keep my thoughts and reactions separate in their little buckets. I look at things as an artist/technologist/storyteller in an integrated way because I am all those things simultaneously.
It’s like being in a quantum superposition… Or like living inside a cubist painting, observing a multitude of viewpoints simultaneously.
The “pick one thing to be your thing” approach imposes linear thinking on the non-linear thinker.
It’s just not compatible.
We work off of integrated circuits. All these talents and interests, and expertise…exist in an integrated circuit. And if you try to pluck one component out of it, you will break it, and the more you try to do it, the more you will break it.
That’s the moment that I wanted to capture in my painting. The moment of truth for The Multipotentialite when she realizes she’s in a no-win situation.
I say her because, in the painting, it’s a female figure. Me.
On the one hand, if she continues on the path of selecting one talent to focus on, she runs a risk of remaining broken because she’s trying to pluck that one component out of an integrated circuit. And at that moment, the way that she sees herself is like looking in a broken mirror and seeing different parts of herself reflected in shards of glass…of that broken mirror. The pieces don’t quite connect because there is a hard fracture in the mirror. There is space between the fragments, and regardless of how small, the pieces will never touch. And so, if she continues on this path, she will remain broken.
On the other hand — she can abandon searching for that one thing to focus on and try to find a way to integrate herself into a unique expression of her to present to the world, which runs the risk of not fitting in anywhere.
So she’s in this no-win situation — a Kobayashi Maru. And for the life of her — she cannot figure it out.
What you see in the painting is her frozen at this moment, And you see her sitting there, very emotional. There are many blues and many different colors to symbolize these emotions; it’s very turbulent, which is her state of mind… She is nude, representing her vulnerability... She’s hunched over, she’s looking down, and her forehead is on her forearm. She’s depressed and frustrated because as smart and talented as she is, she cannot figure out which way to go.
In the painting, you can see those shards of mirror reflecting pieces of her. You can see the yellow of her elbow reflected in different places. You can see her legs echoing. You can see the shards of glass going into her back to symbolize the pain she is going through and suggest that she doesn’t know what is hurting her — what the real problem is. It’s behind her back. The new question the painting poses is, “where does she go from here”?
Even if we finally choose one thing to go with — we feel incomplete. Feeling incomplete causes us to change to the next one because the first — we know now — wasn’t right. And off we go — spiraling down into an abyss of another no-win situation that we are uniquely unqualified to rescue ourselves from.
For people looking from the outside in, what they see is somebody who is flaky, somebody who changes their mind all the time, who can’t stay on task, easily distracted, and not focused. This whole discussion always starts with focusing on marketing and branding in a business context. And everybody latches on to the word focus. The truth is that this has nothing to do with focus. This has everything to do with integration; how do we integrate all of the beautiful talents that we have, that we’re good at, in a way that the world understands? So it’s not about focus; it’s about integration. Completely different questions separated by time and space.
The sad part is that people giving the advice are doing it with the best intentions and utterly unaware of the consequences. And we take the direction with the best intentions and utterly ignorant of the consequences.
But we are not broken, nor unfocused, nor lazy.
We have a different but equally valid way of experiencing the world.
Since we don’t live in a vacuum…A better question is how to keep us whole to share our gifts in a way that can be appreciated and valued by the world we live in. And how do we actually do that?
While I was creating The Multipotentialite, I had a chance to reflect and meditate on my own experience of crawling out of the abyss.
I looked at my painting when it was done. I couldn’t leave her — the Multipotentialite in my painting—stuck in a no-win situation. In my imagination, I wanted to grab her by the hand, put my arm around her, and show her the way. I wanted to offer her a different path, one that uses her strengths to her advantage and not tries to break her.
So, in true polymath fashion, I wrote The Multipotentialite Guide, a simple guide for multi-passionate entrepreneurs to integrate all their skills, talents, and passions without compromising or leaving any behind.
As I was going through making the painting, I distilled what I did for myself, which made me figure out my niche as a polymath and codify a new approach for selecting a niche that allows her to:
- Embrace and use her multitude of talents uniquely and expansively,
- Integrate all her abilities, interests, expertise, etc. to work in concert with one another towards all her goals, and
- Feel whole, and stay open to possibilities without the overwhelm.
You can download it for free here.
I love how this came about in the continuation of the creative process. A random video on Instagram inspires artwork that inspires an entirely new way of solving one of the most common problems: picking a niche for multi-passionate entrepreneurs. Creativity never stops.
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