Multi-passionate, Multi-hyphenate, Multi-potentialite?

Have you ever seen someone’s online bio use the term “multi-passionate”? How about “multi-hyphenate”? (in reference to the hyphens connecting different titles). Well I’ve got a new one for you today:

Multipotentialite.

This term was coined by Emilie Wapnick in her TED Talk: Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling.

What is a multipotentialite?

Think of the people you know who are constantly working on wildly different projects, have a wide array of interests, seem to be good at everything, unable to commit to any one thing. Highly creative, extremely curious, uncategorizable.

Yes, me. I am one of these people. Primarily that whole “wildly different projects” part with an emphasis on too many.

When I had to make the dreaded college decision, I chose to attend William Jewell only because I had a scholarship. At the time, I didn’t see the point of college when I had no idea what I wanted to do.

It was in an afterthought, elective art class that we did some sort of branding exercise and I was hit with the epiphany “I should be a designer.” Designing things is the core of everything I’ve ever loved to do, so in retrospect, this seemed obvious.

I got a full time job in printing to learn design in the real world, transferred schools, and switched to night classes. Before long I was doing a lot of freelance work, so I quit school entirely.

That freelance work is what eventually became cyclone press, first as a branding/print agency, now as a website agency. But after a decade of working with startups and small businesses I had another epiphany: it was no longer design I was most passionate about.

It was entrepreneurship.

Turns out that multipotentialites are natural founders.

We do not excel in a J.O.B. We push the boundaries, we ask too many questions, we threaten the status quo. A career path that fits our interests often does not exist. So we have to chart our own path, and the best vehicle is entrepreneurship.

This is why so many of my thoughts revolve around being a founder, supporting founders, building a business. You’ll never find a job application for tech-facilitator-inventor-of-musical paintbrushes-performance-artist, but she’s a real person. People who follow their curiosity often follow it right into a domain name, an operating agreement, a business plan.

I believe that the best possible career choice is to find the intersection of what you’re good at + what people need¹ and develop a business around that.²

The first website I ever built? It was actually all the way back in high school, when I coded a basic HTML site to share my guitar chord charts. Just for kicks.

I didn’t set out to create a website agency. I just built stuff. And when other people saw I could build stuff they wanted to pay me to build stuff for them. I refined, iterated, improved, found my sweet spot, and here we are.

In the TED Talk, Emilie lists three multipotentialite superpowers:

1. Idea Synthesis
2. Rapid Learning
3. Adaptability
   

I would suggest that these are also the top three traits that make a good entrepreneur.

Those wildly different projects and wide array of interests are the source of the creativity you see on an easel, or a new business idea.

The inability to commit to one thing means knowing how to learn a new thing quickly, whether it’s a painting technique or a novel marketing approach.

And the desire to constantly learn more, do more, be more, becomes the ability to adapt to the constraints of time and a word limit, or a tight budget and an industry grappling with change.

Entrepreneurship is itself a form of art, one that lends itself to the highly creative, extremely curious, uncategorizable. It becomes the container that makes those unwieldy traits a valuable asset.

It’s why my tagline for this newsletter is “on the intersection of art and entrepreneurship.”

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Are you a multipotentialite? How long did it take to embrace this facet of yourself, and how does it impact your work?

Maybe you know someone who fits this definition? Pass along the TED Talk or Emilie’s book. If nothing else, remember this concept when you choose to ask (or not ask) a kid what they “want to be when they grow up.” Instead of pushing them to fit in a box, let’s teach them how to build their own.

1. As an aside, there should also be an addendum of “what the market will pay for,” but I’d like to point out that this is a unconscious capitalist mindset, and what a radical idea to imagine a world where we do NOT tie the worth of our creations to wealth creation. What would it look like if we could just build things for people, because we love it, because we’re good at it… completely divorced from the constant push toward commerce? ↩︎
2. Yes, I know this is the concept of ikigai. But I refuse to talk more about that word because the zeitgeist has ruined it. And yes, I have added Ikigai Zeitgeist to my running list of good band names. ↩︎