Q If I’m reading this thinking, ‘yes that’s me! I still don’t know what I want to do’, am I normal? Or am I a failure?
That’s a pretty natural response when you are raised in a culture t hat h olds u p t his i dea o f s pecialisation a s a shining example of how we’re all supposed to be – it’s natural to feel that if we don’t have that ‘one true purpose’ in our lives, then we’re failures or something’s wrong with us. The way you can start to unpack this and get over it, is to begin to see your complexity and multifacetedness – your multipotentiality – as the strength that it is.
Start to look at the world through a new lens; you will see that there are people out there doing meaningful work, who are really successful and making a massive difference in the world. A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It comes from the word ‘multipotentiality’, which is a term in psychology that refers to people who display aptitudes across multiple disciplines.