Are you a multipotentialite?

A multi what? Multi-potential-ite.

A multipotentialite is a person who has many interests and creative pursuits

In How to be Everything, Emilie Wapnick talks about how people with lots of different interests don’t fit into the traditional career framework of specializing in one thing. I’m energized because I didn’t know there was a positive identity for this thing that I had thought was a flaw. Throughout my life, I have felt badly for not sticking with a single focus while others followed a straightforward path to becoming an expert.

Typically, once I master a subject, I get bored and move on. I’m not good at maintenance. Throughout my career, I established a pattern that after about 5-7 years, I usually reinvented myself, even if it was within the same institution. I have worked in several different spheres of community college administration, I have taken classes in a bunch of different things and I love to read about different subjects. When I walked out of a bookstore yesterday, I lamented that there were too many books and not enough time.

Wapnick identified the superpowers of multipotentialites in her book and they deeply resonated with me. We are continually learning. We can do many things and switch dexterously between activities, which makes us resilient. We are big-picture thinkers and natural connectors. We like to help people connect. We like to connect ideas and we have intense curiosity. We are also able to effectively facilitate multidisciplinary teams and speak the language of the different specialists on the team.

My curiosity and love of learning have shown up in the hobbies I’ve explored (but never did a deep dive in)

As a kid, I took classes in painting, guitar, macramé, and tennis. As an adult, I’ve taken classes in painting, photography, yoga, tai chi, pottery, ceramics, scrapbooking, indoor and outdoor rock climbing, golf, cooking, HTML, project management, and design thinking.

Professionally, while I worked in community colleges for 26 years, I reinvented myself every 5-7 years. Higher education is an industry that reveres specialization. Faculty are experts in their field. Many administrators are faculty who follow a linear career trajectory from faculty to leadership.

I often felt like an outlier with the myriad roles that gave me a generalist status

When I started working in higher education as a graduate student, I worked for a community-based center that consulted with police departments and nonprofit agencies. When I began working within the community college system, I developed a mentoring program for high school students. Then I managed community education programs, created dual enrollment and early college programs, developed transfer articulation agreements, created new academic programs and modalities, and developed professional development programs for high school, college, and university faculty.

I worked on accreditation efforts, strategic planning processes, and statewide change initiatives. I’ve hung out with technical writers, artists, computer programmers, and scientists. All of the skills I developed along the way were transferable and provided a unique perspective.