Brilio.net/en - Some people have the faculty to be passionate about something. It can be rather a physical, cultural artistic or manual activity. Those people are able to dedicate years of their lives to this particular activity they chose. The lucky ones even manage to build a career out of it.
On the other hand, some other people didnt receive the call: those are people with many different interests and creative pursuits. The American blogger Emilie Wapnick calls them the multipotentialite and explains during her last TED conference, the difficulties they are facing in their daily lives but also the great potential of this kind of profile, often underestimated in our society.
Image via ted.com
It all started with that question everyone heard at least once, says Wapnick: What do you want to be when you grow up?. After asking the audience, the majority raised his hand to admit that this particular question is a source of anxiety.
She explains through her personal path the different steps a multipotentialite is going through all along his youth (if not his all life). This is not a person who is not interested about anything that we are talking about, but on the opposite about someone who has way too many interest. At school, a multipotentialite might be really good in one particular field, but once he would have acquired the necessary knowledge about this specific field, after having put a lot of energy and sometimes money in it, there comes the stage of boredom. Most of the time, he would then give up and move on to the next interest and the process will repeat over and over again, until the right interest shows up. Or not.
What Emilie Wapnick explains in her conference is that our modern culture is in somehow forcing us to believe that there is only one true calling per person, when its actually a matter of profile. In a very general sum-up, there are two main profiles: the specialist and the multipotentialite. One is no better than the other, and they can both perfectly match together. According to Wapnick and other intellectuals of the same school of thought, here are the three most superpowers multipotentialite should be proud of instead of trying in vain to fit in one only category:
1. Idea synthesis or the capacity to synthetize his ideas: multipotentialite have the capacity of combining two or more of their interest, and to create something new at the intersection of those interests. It is from this intersection that innovation comes from.
2. Rapid learning: because he learned a lot before, the multipotentialite is never really starting anything from scratch and is not afraid by newness. He is used to get out of his comfort zone and will thus start the learning process faster.
3. Adaptability or the capacity to face unpredictable situations: Wapnick mentions the magazine Fast Company, that stated that adaptability is the number one quality one should have to survive in our current century characterized by permanent mutations.
As a conclusion, Wapnick encourages all those who recognise themselves in this definition to embrace their multipotentiality because those out of the box thinkers are widely needed to save todays problems.
Source: ted.com
(Reported byCelia Tholozan)