my story + a message for you

For 3 decades, the world kept asking me to narrow down. To pick one dream job to be when I grew up, one college degree, one dream career, one title, one label that is easy to understand. I spent years ashamed for not being able to. I felt scattered, lost, immature, unfocused, always drawn to the next shiny thing, never finishing anything. I was constantly changing career paths. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me and used to dread the question so, what do you do?

Personally, I felt ashamed, insecure, unproductive, always “falling behind”.

Since I had so many passions happening at once and no systems, habits or tools to thrive (because I hadn’t accepted myself yet), I was constantly feeling scattered and unaccomplished. I had a ton of interests, and nothing to show for them. I had created absolutely nothing. I was the eternal student who had a brain full of ideas and inspiration, but when the time came to create and apply, I felt overwhelmed. Every new interest felt like a betrayal of the last one. The joy of being a beginner at something new was constantly overshadowed by "I never finish anything".

Over time, the voice in my head: “This is it, something’s wrong with me. I love many things, yet I will leave nothing behind; unhappy because I’m forced by society to take on a boring linear job, no time for what I truly love, and when I do have time, I finish nothing.”

Professionally, I used to feel everyone was ahead of me. Everybody had found “one calling”, one “dream job”, a direction. Except for me.

“What’s wrong with me?!”, I’d ask. I was envious of my childhood friends who knew what they wanted to be since they were kids and pursued exactly that: doctors, lawyers, vets. Meanwhile, I was changing careers every couple of years and dreaming of many others.

My CV looked like a circus to recruiters: scattered, zigzaggy, impossible to summarize in one headline. A red flag to them. Courses that were meant to help, like “building a personal brand”, used to throw me into a meltdown. I felt pressured to oversimplify my identity, stick to one version of it and run with it online for everyone to see. Thanks, I hate it.

My insecurity would scream as I heard others would talk about their perfectly linear careers, how they were getting promotions, awards, compliments from their managers, and I couldn’t help but feel like an alien. I was just constantly switching jobs and starting from scratch. At the time, I couldn’t see value in that.

One day, I read “How to Be Everything” by the iconic Emily Wapnick. That’s when I said: “Something unleashed within me now, and there’s no turning back.”

I couldn’t believe it. Every word in that book gave me goosebumps (it’s like they wrote it for me!). Suddenly, I realized being a multi was its own special kind of superpower. If embraced and nurtured, I could become unstoppable.

• We succeed at the intersections. We connect dots across disciplines that nobody thought to connect. We bring fresh eyes to problems that specialists may be too close to see clearly.

• We’ve learned from scratch so many times, we already know how we learn best and can learn anything in a heartbeat (learning agility, and “learning how to learn”, are consistently mentioned as top skills of the future).

• Thanks to our endless curiosity and going down research rabbit holes in our free time, we switch contexts without losing the thread. We can talk about anything with anyone, anywhere. Throw us into the corporate world, arts world, a technical environment, and we’ll somehow adapt to the different crowds and find a way to belong (fast!). It’s fun being the person in the room who's also been in every other room and has belonged to many “tribes”!

• Thriving in the in-between: the messy, undefined spaces where nobody has a job title yet, when everything is uncertain. In fact, we might even be relieved to hear there’s no linear career path expected of us. We rarely need a script because we've improvised our way through enough situations to trust ourselves.

• People skills are typically through the roof. We build bridges between people who don't speak the same language, both literally or figuratively. We read the room fast. We can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes instantly, thanks to our versatile experiences and diverse crowds we’ve met along the way.

• Knowing when to zoom in and when to zoom out at work, in our projects, in conversation with others. We can simplify, adapt, or go into comprehensive detail if needed.

  This made me realize something critical: I was denying my essence and living under an unfair system, both external and self-imposed. I was measuring myself by someone else’s ruler and always falling short. When I finally started living by my own principles and systems, I created one of the most interesting lives I know.
  
  my message to yo