What’s Your Multipotentialite Origin Story?

I was always encouraged as a child to try new things and I witnessed my parents trying new things. Now that I look back, I think my dad was a multipotentialite stuck in a specialist tract. He hated his job but in his own time I watched him engage in a wide variety of activities everything from electronics to cobbling shoes! I never felt like there was a problem until I got into my twenties when I discovered I didn’t like my chosen career path. I started changing jobs, doing wildly different things and the adults in my life started questioning me. As an adult I also found a much bigger world with more interesting things. I found that for me, being self employed was more of an ideal situation because I could control what I was doing and taking on more than one type of endeavor at a time. People were still questioning me but somehow being independent legitimized things for them. Now I look back at all the interests and jobs that I had as a kid and a young adult and I can see the foreshadowing….all the pieces started coming together. I look at it as an embryonic multipod!

Things that characterized my early childhood until 2. grade was

1) My parents were both school teachers and very interested in all kind of knowledge about history, art, literature, science and so on.
2) They were divorced as I was 3 years old and until my second grade, my mother with whom we children stayed, moved four times.
3) Both my parents – especially my mum – had a humongous library of all kind of books, we were free to use at any time.

I believe that the divorce and the many locations and situations difficult to understand for a little boy may have triggered my lifelong obsession with attempts to find and comprehend meaningful connections between all things I met on the path in my life.
As soon as I could read i started running through the comprehensive encyclopedia in the library, jumping form article to article in the search of the complete connection. I found it was impossible – it just opened up new questions and presented an endlessly connection between uncountable numbers of interesting articles.
My mother was always eager to help answering weird questions. Either by explaining or by experimenting or by illustration how to search the local library for answers, encouraging us to seek deeper into all matters. Or she just pointed out a book on a shelf circling around the matters of Russian language, human sexuality or classical poems.

In school i was average, but in the later grades (7th-9th) I experienced high respect for “out of the box” work including lesson long talks over details in the function of Nuclear Power plants and a two lesson comprehensive talk over the inner structures and life of microbial organisms in a drop of water.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage well in High School neither (well, here in Denmark it’s called “Gymnasium” and is a three year preparation for university studies.). I had this diabolic obsession luring inside, craving an explanation: “Why is it essential for me to learn THIS?”. If the teachers were not able to answer this, I regarded the lessons “non-reasonable”.

I excelled in computer programming, starting a computer business, NATO approved for level “Secret” stamped in my forehead – and ending up as programmer and system manager at the central Danish news medium (like AP in the US or TASS in Russia), but still without any “proper” education (tried art school, architecture and computer science … it just didn’t ad up). I was almost 40 years old, CEO in a local branch of Danish Inventors Association, had written articles on innovation, virtual reality and energy related ecology, produced a short movie on the life of an inventor, established family and businesses and had a good house and job when I realized I had been lured onto the wrong path!

I quit my job, divorced, sold the house, bought a tiny VW-autocamper and went West (or more like “all over the place”!).

These days (16 years later) I have a tiny, cheap house, a tiny, cheap car, no job for the moment – but I’LL BE BACK!:-) Because in these 16 years I have developed into a designer, welder, craftsman in metal, plastics and wood, writer, blogger, rocket scientist, backyard chicken expert, automobile service man, product designer&developer, sign making professional, school teacher, CNC-programmer & CNC-operator, inspirational Wizard for CEO’s in deep crises and historical reenactment adviser in middle age siege technology and all other kinds of interesting stuff my own, small pathetic excuse for a country, seems to have no need of!

Being a multipotential multipolite multipot (or .. actually, I’m just me!) I believe I have a LOT to learn from all of you out there in the same situation!

And Thanks!
Jorgen Skyt
Denmark

I always wanted to be a musician and composer from age 4 on, but I also wanted to be a scientist and a baseball player and a hockey player and an actor. So when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was a long list. The sports went away, but music, science and acting are still here.

KK

I never thought of myself as a multipotentialite until I saw Emilie’s TED Talk. I knew that I didn’t “belong”. In my generation, I will be 69 this year, women were supposed to be teachers, secretaries, nurses, hairdressers, etc. I was curious because I wanted to be something “different”. I wanted to be a doctor. I ended up becoming a medical librarian. I became the “arm charm”. I could speak on many subjects, but I was still a “woman”.

Going to an an girls’ school helped. Girls were the leaders. They went into the sciences. They were the heads of student government. Have you noticed that the female leaders went to girls’ schools? As a friend of mine once told me, who was a teacher, “I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up”.

I explored different avenues, and I was told that a woman didn’t do that, only men did that. I think that many of us were searching. We wanted to do things that were unconventional.

As a child growing up in a strict religious household there was a lot that I did not get to participate in, particularly extra-curricular activities. For the most part I challenged myself with reading as much as possible, although I also sought out different ways to be involved during school hours (my parents would not allow any after-school activities unless they were church-related). The main effect of this strictness today is a feeling of frustration with very regulated forms of teaching and learning, as I prefer to learn and explore at my own pace, and ask questions as I see fit.

Reading opened my mind to so many different areas of knowledge and perspectives (my 7th-grade science teacher gave me an entire encyclopedia set for which I am eternally grateful for). I discovered a burgeoning interest in anything related to space, linguistics, earth-related sciences, history and the occult. I was part of Reading Clubs throughout my elementary school years and also volunteered at the school library during lunch after a failed stint at knitting club. I learned to read and write in Portuguese on my own, and improved my grammar with the help of my Grandma who was a schoolteacher back in Brazil – but I had no interest in taking classes. Listening to music in different languages has improved my ability to pick up Spanish and French, and I love exploring the roots of music and how different sounds, rhythms and melodies from various cultures influence each other. My music interest has also helped me look for interconnectedness in other areas of knowledge, which served me well in university and influences how I think, perceive and interact with the world around me.

Despite my extreme shyness, I nurtured my deep passion for music and dance by learning to play piano by ear, performing in a couple plays in Grade 5, joining the school choir and the city choir in Grade 7, band, belly-dancing and salsa dancing in high school, and playing samba in university. Although my mom did enroll me in private piano classes I would always lose interest due to the strict nature of the lessons. Going into high school (and subsequently being old enough to work) definitely made it easier for me to explore my passions, and at that point I was also independent enough to participate in the things I was interested in without parental approval.

I went to a university that was very inter-disciplinary in its approach, and so I was able to take a slew of electives in a variety of different subjects to supplement my psychology degree. I fed my desire for less academic forms of learning and knowledge-sharing by participating in and facilitating diy workshops, conferences and roundtables. Being a more independent adult in university allowed me to re-visit old passions – I tried knitting again (without much success), took up journalling + collage-making, and went back to salsa class. It was in university that I became more in touch with my spirituality, particularly astrology, and in the past year I have begun working with tarot as a journaling tool, and exploring my family’s roots as practitioners of Candomble (an Afro-Brazilian religion/form of spirituality).

In my work experiences I’ve dabbled in workshop facilitation, planning, implementing and evaluating training programs (which I love doing), bookkeeping (which I thought I would like but changed my mind – too routine), event planning, research, volunteer management, preparing contract bids, and most recently launched an online resource portal for the sales reps of the company I worked for. That experience helped me realize that I have another passion – web development + multimedia design! I had done a bit of html coding in my teen years (I had a website on the now-defunct piczo and a wordpress blog) and I catch on pretty quickly when using new software. At my most recent gig I quickly became the go-to person to do everything from making form fields on adobe to working with app developers on the company’s seating customization app. As grateful as I am for that learning experience, I discovered very quickly that being a corporate worker rat is not for me!

Now I’m in a bit of a quandary – do I go to school to gain a formal education on web development or do I attempt to use Udemy or CodeAcademy to teach myself? Unfortunately the city I currently live in does not have a big coding community and since this is a new-ish area for me I might benefit from a more structured learning environment where I have colleagues and instructors to use as resources if I’m stuck. Now that I’ve graduated and need to join the working world, I am quickly realizing that I need to have the autonomy to decide what I want to devote to my energy on, and it’s also very important that I do not feel stifled or trapped in any way. I need challenge, the satisfaction of knowing that I have learned something new and that I can apply it (or not) in my life however I want!

Interesting take, Neil. Very interesting to read the other responses.

For me, curiosity was key, plus having a lot of aptitudes made everything easy to take up. Nothing seemed too difficult to learn or get moderately good at or better than average. (Except for swimming. I suck at swimming.)

Was my multipotentialism like other kids’? I don’t think so. I could and did span more activities than anyone else I knew. My best friend, who is also a multipod, was a dancer from age 3 to about 23 and a Dean’s List student in every subject from Grade 7 to university, widely read, and a puzzle freak. But she sucks at every sport except long-distance running. She also has no idea how a computer works or even cares beyond being able to do the few things she needs to do with a computer.

Interacting with a lot of other people at that age — and even seeing kids of my friends now — I don’t believe that every kid’s multi-activeness is really multipotentialism. It’s necessary exploring to see what they like and don’t like, what they can and can’t succeed at. But most kids figure out pretty quickly after trying something whether they are ever going to do that again. Once most kids quit something, they quit it for good, convinced that, since they’ll never be good at it, there’s no point continuing to try.

Multipotential exploring is different — or, at least mine is. It’s based on genuine curiosity of the thing or activity itself, rather than simply testing to see if I’m good enough at it to continue pursuing it. I’m not interested in outcomes, but in answering questions, discovering how something works or why it does. What’s the best way to do something and what makes it the best way? Once I learn these things, I lose interest and move on to something else. Usually, while learning, I get pretty good at a skill, but my pursuit isn’t really the skill itself.

I fear this doesn’t make sense or get to quite the point I’m trying to make. But from where I was as a kid, I could totally see that my interest in everything was in no way similar to how other kids tried things — or didn’t try them, usually.

Perhaps this isn’t true for all Multipods. Perhaps others here will contradict this and say they wanted to excel and perfect whatever/everything they pursued. Surely everyone has a different story.

~

As for “WHERE Did Multipotentiality Come From?” I found out that I got it genetically after my father, a mechanical engineer his entire life, retired. Can’t say my parents nurtured all my various interests — they downright opposed my becoming a competitive gymnast and joining the intramural volleyball team (but my mother’s not sporty, so she never got my competitive streak), plus tried to discourage me from becoming a pro photographer.

I’m an only child and left to my own amusement quite a bit when young. I was also given a lot of freedom to go off and explore. Partly, as an only child, I never had to compete with anyone to have my one “thing” that made me unique in the family.

I think it’s the curiosity and questioning and wondering about everything that makes us different from other kids and adults.

I broke my toys to observe and understand the mechanism that made them move. I was born in Latin American, in a country with chauvinistic traditions and if I asked for a more interesting toy than the Barbie toy, they looked at me weird. But my extreme curiosity did not go out for anything and I managed to do many different things: production, music, advertising, invented a food brand, administration, travel, new and alternative psychology, extreme sports or not, and if I have to repair something at home I will find out and do it. But for the other hand, there is a frustation feeling cause sometimes you wanna do one thing and be in the security of that activity brings you, but luckly, is sometimes. All those diverse activities bring moments and persons that I like to keep o learn from, because I always think if I reach old age I will have many stories to tell that will make me a happy older and will keep doing things. Meanwhile I will go where my curiosity goes. Cheers everyone!