For much of my career, there has been an overarching debate, generalising or specialising. Early in my journey in the technology industry, this was a semi-constant competing force that I questioned how to structure and focus my learning and growth.
A similar debate has arisen in the content creation and knowledge-sharing space.
Questions like “what is your anchor?” are asked, and statements like “you must find your niché” are constraining and restrictive for many.
Of course, the context under which you pursue content creation and knowledge/growth is essential. If your goal is for a quick win or scale quickly on platforms like Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube. You must constantly be chasing the “trend”. Meeting the content demand as it ebbs and flows through different topics, domains, sounds etc.
If this is what you are after, read no further, as I intend to explore why being multi-passionate is a much more interesting and rewarding path and talk to some strategies to help you on that journey.
Being a multi-passionate person could be seen as pure and simple context switching; we know how ineffective we are at this. The realities are that having a diverse base of knowledge and experiences helps round us out as human beings.
Here are a few strategies to get you started:
- How to create focus
- Work to have a T-shaped skill set
- Creating time and space
How to create focus
I have been asked often “how do you do so many things?”.
Understanding my purpose is the first step to answering this question. Malcolm Gladwell, the expert on mastery, talks deeply about the 10,000-hour rule, i.e. it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill. One of the misconceptions of this rule is that it’s not just 10,000 hours; it is 10,000 focused, purposeful hours, purposeful being the operative word.
What keeps me from spiralling down into a nebulous cloud of disconnected learnings is having a clear purpose and intention in what I am looking to learn and how I want to grow.
In her book Grit, Angela Duckworth asks, “Do you have a life philosophy?”. She goes on to say; that this is crucial to identifying your “Top level goals” in life. Now, these could be different sets of Top level goals for other areas of your life, personal, professional etc.
The important part is ensuring you have something you can align to and create purposeful intention.
One of my Top level goals is to become an amazing guitarist and to create opportunities that will enable me to collaborate with the people that have inspired me over the years.
So, take some time, note down the key areas in your life and start to jot down the long-term, high-level goals you want to achieve and use that as a focal point to guide where you put your energy.
T-shaped skill set
I have spoken about this often and see it as the basis of becoming a whole and well-rounded person. A T-shaped skill set is about having a core set of competencies, in my case, Technology and Leadership, where you spend years going very deep into the domain which represents the “downstroke” of the T. The T’s crossbar is a much broader set of skills that enrich and enhance the core set, making the individual more versatile and adaptable.
This is where the broader topics that I research get covered. Challenge yourself to read and gain exposure to new types of knowledge, i.e. history, philosophy, mindfulness, poetry etc.
Creating time and space
So many of us have used the statement “I just have no time” when we talk about wanting to put time into our growth. Putting aside the notion that we all “waste” time that could be recovered (i.e. watching TV, surfing social media), another powerful method to help with this is creating opportunities in our every day to be able to focus on these things.
Like James Clear’s “habit stacking” (Atomic Habits), the method of grouping habits together to ensure they get done, I see a similar strategy for creating opportunities to align and “make space”.
One of the challenges I have faced around writing and blogging is not feeling like I have content that I can write about. Recently I have started keeping a notebook (or notes on Mac) open, so when ever I have a conversation that has an interesting bent on it, I note it down and flesh out some ideas. This concept was something I learned through a writing course by Johanna Rothman; she called it a “Fieldstone” document, a sandpit of ideas, thoughts, concepts and half-baked posts.
So, instead of waiting to do my writing at a particular moment, it’s something I weave into my BAU day.
Like wholehearted living (Brené Brown), I believe being a multi-passionate person is a much richer way to live one’s life. So, you do not need to feel “bad” about being broad in what you learn or focus on. The important part is to be intentional in that effort.
Yours in learning.
Resources
Content creator on the subject of multi passionate humans
Annie Petsche
T shaped skillsets
https://collegeinfogeek.com/become-t-shaped-person/
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