Be Smart — Put your eggs in Multiple Baskets

Do we really need to acquire multiple skills?

This morning when I woke up and saw a tweet from one of my old friends, explaining how he had recently lost his job; how his coding skills are no longer in demand in the region where he resides; in fact how he had put the eggs in ONE basket that lead to his current situation.

At first, I thought it just normal these days however it turned out to be an interesting story. He had been working as a software engineer in the US for several years, everything looked great until his company decided to outsource his role to the east, and as a result he was left with no option. This leads me to think if he could have been saved otherwise; perhaps had a backup skill, OR had he practiced his creative skills in totally un-related fields. Would his situation be different today?

Drivers of Change

To understand the solution to the problems like one of my old friend, as a multipotentialite, I try to study the basis of our own existence. I strongly believe we could even build ourselves to become multipotential over the period of time. Though not all but in some ways each one of us is capable to do multiple things due to our multiple creative interests.

When we were children, our interests were endless, we would like to become pilots yet we wanted to build houses. We wanted to sing and dance yet we were interested in computers. We were like those curious little multipotentialites wanted to do so many things in the lifetime. But it was only when we hit our teen age and adulthood, where we started feeling uncomfortable to discuss about un-related passions and hence we chose to settle for just ONE.

A Bitter Truth

We are living in a technological age where the nature of the work is changing and organizations are constantly innovating to try and do things differently as a result most of the professionals have to keep on making the adjustments to their roles in order to survive; and if they re-call their childhood with multiple creative interests; it could be the time for them to stand up and embrace their multipotentiality and live a altogether different life.

Originally published at www.multipotentialites.com on April 6, 2016.