It doesn’t always work out that way.

In her Unwrapping the Gifted post “Multipotentiality,” K-12 gifted education specialist Tamara Fisher quotes Bryant (a pseudonym), a graduating senior who lists his possible future careers as “applied psychologist, scientific psychologist, college teacher, philosophy, mathematics, architect, engineer.”

He says, “I find it difficult to choose between careers because I fear how large the choice is. Having many options available is pleasant, but to determine what I will do for many years to come is scary.”

Fisher notes, “Multipotentiality is the state of having many exceptional talents, any one or more of which could make for a great career for that person.

“Gifted children often (though of course not always) have multipotentiality. Their advanced intellectual abilities and their intense curiosity make them prime candidates for excelling in multiple areas. This can be both a blessing and a curse.

“On the bright side, they have many realistic options for future careers. But on the downside, some of them will struggle mightily trying to decide which choice to make.”

Fisher adds that having “so many great possible outcomes can be a source of debilitating stress.”

Too many options

In her post Multipotentiality: When High Ability Leads to Too Many Options, Lisa Rivero describes Jason, a college junior, who “is trying to decide what to do after graduation. He is leaning strongly toward graduate school but is unsure of whether he wants to stay in the United States or study abroad. An honors student at a liberal arts university, he has taken a wide variety of courses–from chemistry and calculus to philosophy and political science–and he has gotten As in all of them.

“While he knows he is fortunate to have so many options available, he also sometimes panics that he will make the wrong choice and end up in a job he doesn’t like. If he gets a Ph.D. in political science, will he be tracked into being a college professor? If he pursues a master’s program in economics, will he regret not continuing with political science? And what about all of those classical languages he has studied? Were they just a waste of time?”

She adds, “This frustration can continue past adolescence as adults with multipotentiality may find themselves drifting from job to job, unable to settle in any spot long enough to know if it would satisfy over the long term, feeling that their lives and careers are a hodge-podge of failed attempts.”

Too little challenge?

In the case of Jason, Rivero writes, “Rather than indicating that he is equally good at everything, his college career thus far might instead be an indication that he is not being challenged at a level to show relative passions and aptitudes. Perhaps he would continue to thrive and be engaged in graduate-level math but find post-college classical languages more frustrating and less interesting.

“Alternatively, he might excel in a job that allows him to use his knowledge of Latin and Greek and Sanskrit but find that his interest in political science wanes once it becomes more specialized or practical. In addition, his temperament may determine whether the pursuit of research, teaching, or field work is the most comfortable fit.

RIvero explains, “The authors of the Journal of Counseling Psychology article describe this good fit as ‘optimal adjustment’ – a match between personal abilities, personal preferences, and requirements and rewards from the workplace environment.”

Parts of this article were adapted from Lisa Rivero’s book A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Teens: Living with Intense and Creative Adolescents. [The image is also from the article.]

And that can be true for adults too. Of course many people are able to realize multiple talents.

In my Psych Central post Amber Benson on Writing: Creating is Kind of Intoxicating, I wrote about actor Amber Benson (Tara on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) who also has multiple credits as a novelist and screenwriter, director and producer.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was often referred to as a renaissance man.

An obituary noted, “In addition to his photography, film work and poetry, he composed a symphony, sonatas, concertos, film scores, and wrote novels, instructional photography manuals, essays and three memoirs.” (From my post Being “scattered” and proud of it.)

But having advanced potential and exceptional capabilities in many talent areas also means, almost by definition, you are underachieving: you can’t do everything.

One of the pleasures of my life has been pursuing serial interests in often radically different fields: being a research assistant in genetics and later in left/right brain wave research; a visual effects camera operator, and multiple other jobs and pursuits.

But one of the ‘costs’ has been a life unmoored to any career, and many periods of anxiety and self-doubt.

Thankfully this series of sites I have created is not only creatively rewarding, but also of some value to other people.

Related:

Underutilized talents, too many aptitudes

The Too Many Aptitudes Problem, by Hank Pfeffer
“Most people have about four or five strong talents… Most jobs require about four or five. As many as 10% of the population has double that number of aptitudes… There is evidence that people with too many aptitudes (TMAs) are less likely to obtain advanced education and/or succeed in a career than those with an average number of talents.”

Adult underachievement – not living up to our high potential
In a very real sense, everyone may be called “underachieving” regardless of whether they are gifted or not. One short definition is “Performance below potential.”

Are you a scanner personality? Maybe all you need is a good enough job.
Barbara Sher writes about and leads retreats for Scanners – “also known as renaissance men and women, eclectic experts, happy amateurs and delighted dilettantes.”

Book: Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement
- by Kenneth W. Christian, PhD.

Related post: Adult Underachievement: Kenneth Christian, Ph.D. on living up to the “gifted” label – or not

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Book: Developing Multiple Talents – The personal side of creative expression
- by me, Douglas Eby
“Part book about creativity, part compendium of useful tidbits, quotations and research, and part annotated bibliography, this is a wildly useful and highly entertaining resource.” – Stephanie S. Tolan, fiction writer and consultant on the needs of the gifted.

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Program / ebook: Renaissance Business – “Specifically for the Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur”
Author Emilie Wapnick notes, “My resume reads like it belongs to ten different people. Music, film, web design, law, business, personal development, writing, dance, sexuality, education– all of these are or have been interests of mine. They come and go (and sometimes come again).

Video: A Disturbing Trend in the Blogosphere…
“Why are all these successful multipotentialite entrepreneurs telling us to “pick one thing” when they themselves USED their diverse background to build their business?!”

Related: The Productivity for Multipotentialites Course – “Ah, isn’t it lovely having so many different interests? Being a multipotentialite is wonderful, except when it comes to actually getting all of those great projects done.”

Productivity for Multipotentialites is “a complete productivity system for multipotentialites. Throughout the classes, you will be introduced to a number of practices and rituals to help you integrate all of your passions into your life, without the stress.”

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Divergent thinking can even come into play when promoting creative projects.

The photo is writer Sherrilyn Kenyon, who has some interesting comments below about influences on her work.

What made me aware of her was a recent newspaper article about how book publishers (including hers) are using professionally produced 30-second commercial spots or book trailers to promote titles.

Maybe you could create your own videos as creative projects on their own, or to promote your music, play, visual art or book. That’s what I did for one of my books Developing Multiple Talents; the (definitely non-professional) video is titled People With Multiple Talents – you can see it at my YouTube channel here or on the book site here.

Sherrilyn Kenyon writes Urban Fantasy and the Dark-Hunter vampire series, plus historical novels with paranormal elements, under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor. There are over twenty million copies of her books in print. [Wikipedia]

On her site, she comments “There are actually writers whose works have influenced my writing. But not the way most people think…”

Continued: Creative Paths and Influences: Everywhere and Unexpected

From the program site:

“As author of The Artist’s Way, The Vein of Gold, and The Right to Write, her bestselling works on the creative process, Julia Cameron is credited with founding a movement that has enabled millions to realize their creative dreams.

“Julia eschews the title creativity expert, preferring instead to describe herself simply as an artist.”

She says about her online teaching program, “Artists have always mentored. I just do it on a wider scale.”

Learn more about Julia Cameron Live

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More information from the site:

“The Artist’s Way began with Julia sharing her ideas with a few artists in her living room. Now after selling almost 4 million copies of The Artist’s Way and teaching her creativity tools around the world in lecture and workshop form, she’s taking her teaching online.

“The online course will complement The Artist’s Way, offering unique insights into the 12 week program from Julia, who has more than two decades of experience teaching the creativity tools.

“Artists taking part in the creativity workshop at Julia Cameron Live will have the intimate experience of watching Julia teach from her home in Santa Fe. The web-based creativity workshop will give users the flexibility to watch video lectures and join discussions from their living room, kitchen table or morning commute.”

Julia Cameron Live

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“I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming, or brooding.”  Joyce Carol Oates

How do you use your time to encourage creative imagination and expression?

In her post If you don’t value your imaginative life, no one else will, author and writing teacher Lisa Rivero notes that some of how she uses her 24 hours each day “might look to the outside world like frivolous fun, downtime, anything but work: reading the writing of others, making notes for future projects, networking with other writers, staring out the window, taking a walk while listening to the latest New Yorker fiction podcast (something I highly recommend), even writing blog posts.”

She explains this is all “part of what Joyce Carol Oates calls the imaginative life” (from The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art):

“All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming, or brooding…”

Continued: Developing Creativity by Staring Out the Window

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The understanding of creativity as a mysterious external force with which you carry on “a peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation”6 (to quote Gilbert’s vivid characterization of the inner relationship) redefines the customary view of things in our contemporary culture and endows the artist with new gifts and responsibilities.

This insight is fundamental to the whole outlook I’m presenting here. It’s also paired with a corollary proposition: that a conscious, working knowledge of the intertwined histories of the daimon and the genius in religion, psychology, and philosophy is indispensible. //

Both the idea of the daimon and the idea of the muse come to us from the ancient Greeks, who in addition to worshiping the gods and goddesses familiar to all of us through the stories of classical mythology believed in spirits they called daimones or daimons (known more commonly today by the variant spelling‚ “daemons”…

In fact, if we are to believe classical scholar Reginald Barrow, worship of the daimons made up an underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion: “Because the daemons have left few memorials of themselves in architecture and literature, their importance tends to be overlooked…

“They are omnipresent and all-powerful, they are embedded deep in the religious memories of the peoples, for they go back to days long before the days of Greek philosophy and religion.

“The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons.”7

In one respect the daimons weren’t very different from the animistic spirits that have populated the belief systems of all peoples throughout history.

They were thought to be local, limited spirits who inhabited certain places, affected the weather, brought good and bad luck, and so on. But the Greeks also held a more distinctly spiritualized or psychologized view that eventually outstripped the first.

In this second version, the daimons were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions.

References:

6 Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity – a TED video.

See excerpt of the video in my post Elizabeth Gilbert on fear and creativity and mental health.

7 Quoted in Stephen A. Diamond’s book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity.

Also see my interview with Dr. Diamond: The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons.

Diamond comments in another article that the goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals is “not to eradicate the daimonic, to drug or rationalize the demons out of existence. Not only is this not desirable; it is not possible, at least not in the long-run. As Rollo May put it, the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.” From my article Learning to befriend our demons.

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Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD (pronounced me-high chick- sent-me-high) explains in his article The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality (from his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) that “Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.”

He says that “a core of general intelligence is high among people who make important creative contributions,” but according to the studies of Lewis Terman, “after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated with superior performance in real life” – including level of creative expression.

From my book Developing Multiple Talents – The personal side of creative expression
Facebook   //  Website

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In his Demon Muse post A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius), Matt Cardin presents a rich overview of concepts related to creative inspiration and entities such as muses.

He writes, “In Hellenistic Rome (circa 4th – 1st centuries BCE), the word genius, like the Greek daimons, referred to spirit beings in general — and also, tangentially (and interestingly), had a direct connection to the word genie, which itself came somehow from the ancient Persian desert demons known as djinnee.

He notes the idea of the personal genius evolved to mean “the individual attendant spirit that accompanies a person and represents his or her divine intelligence and inbuilt life pattern.”

With “the outburst of Renaissance-style and Enlightenment-style humanism in the 15th through the 18th centuries… genius as a guiding and inspiring separate spirit morphed rather suddenly  into a perceived quality of extraordinary intellectual intelligence and/or artistic giftedness possessed by only a few titanic and heroic people.

“This was a significant reversal, since it meant the idea of genius went from referring to a separate force that guided and, in effect, occasionally possessed people to referring to a special inner quality that people themselves possessed.”

Painting: Kiss of the Muse by Paul Cezanne [From Art.com]

Video: Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love”) made a presentation for a TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) on these ideas, and the video description notes she considered ‘the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius.’

For more of her quotes, see my post Just Show Up, With or Without Your Muse.

It takes practice

Writing in his New York Times Op-Ed Column on “Genius: The Modern View,” David Brooks declared, “The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark.

“It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess.

“Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.”

Genes and serendipity and hard work

In his article Is genius genetic or is it nurtured?, Joe Smydo includes comments by Christopher Beard, who received a MacArthur Foundation grant, and is curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

“Dr. Beard said he had his parents’ guidance, along with their genes. He’s worked industriously to make a mark in his profession. And he believes that serendipity has been on his side. “Some people would call it luck,” said Dr. Beard.

“The question of whether high-performers are born or made long has captivated the scholarly community, whose search for answers has led to studies of chess players, musicians and leaders in various fields.

“In the 1980s, Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a ground-breaking work proposing multiple kinds of intelligence. Dr. Gardner, a 1981 MacArthur grant recipient, also proposed multiple kinds of creativity.

“In Dr. Gardner’s view, “Picasso probably could not have been Mozart and Mozart probably could not have been Picasso because they had different kinds of intelligence,” said Kenneth Kiewra, professor of educational psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“In recent years, the mystique of high-performers has been grist for popular books, such as Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How,” Geoff Colvin’s “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success.”

“The books downplay the notion of genetically predetermined greatness and suggest that other factors, including many hours of strategic practice, differentiate high performers.”

Just Do The Work

In her post “Creative Inspiration vs. Creative Resistance,” Jenna Avery asks if it is necessary to be “creatively inspired” before pursuing creative projects, “or is waiting for creative inspiration a pitfall that trips us up?”

She adds, “Another way of saying this is: Do you have to be in the ‘right mood’ or ‘right energy’ in order to be creative? Steven Pressfield would call this ‘resistance,’ and say instead that what we need to do is show up and ‘do the work’ no matter what pain, doubt, terror, or mood we might encounter in the process.”

Jenna Avery is an intuitive coach who works with clients to enhance their creativity and life purpose. Learn about her programs at JennaAvery.com.

Steven Pressfield is author of The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

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Related :

Genius: The Modern View, By David Brooks, New York Times

It takes more than talent.

Grit and perseverance mean more than talent.

Outliers and developing exceptional abilities

Audio podcast interview with creativity researcher James C. Kaufman, PhD

R. Keith Sawyer on developing creativity with time, risk, love and hard work

developing multiple talents, self-exploration, developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type

The photo is John Dabiri, a Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship last year for his work that “draws on a wide range of fields—including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics—to unravel the secrets of one of the earliest means of animal locomotion,” according to a profile on the MacArthur site.

The bio notes, “Dabiri’s research has profound implications not only for understanding the evolution and biophysics of locomotion in jellyfish and other aquatic animals, but also for a host of distantly related questions and applications in fluid dynamics, from blood flow in the human heart to the design of wind power generators.”

The Connected Mind

That profile reminds me of creativity researcher Shelley Carson’s idea of ‘brain set’ as a take-off on ‘mind set’ in her book Your Creative Brain, particularly the ‘Connect’ brain set.

She explains that “in this brain set you are generating multiple ideas, you’ve activated numerous associational networks in the brain and one idea seems to lead to another to another to another.”

From my post Shelley Carson on Brainsets and Creativity.

Her book: Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.

Innovation-nurturing environments

In a post on his blog about his book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Johnson notes part of why he wrote it was “to grapple with the question of why certain environments seem to be disproportionately skilled at generating and sharing good ideas.”

In the book he considers “human environments that have been unusually generative: the architecture of successful science labs, the information networks of the Web or the Enlightenment-era postal system, the public spaces of metropolitan cities, even the notebooks of great thinkers.”

In addition, he also looks at “natural environments that have been biologically innovative: the coral reef and the rain forest, or the chemical soups that first gave birth to life’s good idea.”

The book has dozens of stories about incubating creativity “from the history of scientific, technological and cultural innovation,” including how Darwin’s “eureka moment” about natural selection “turned out to be a myth; how Brian Eno invented a new musical convention by listening to too much AM radio; how Gutenberg borrowed a crucial idea from the wine industry to invent modern printing; why GPS was accidentally developed by a pair of twenty-somethings messing around with a microwave receiver.”

His post: Where Good Ideas Come From.

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson.

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These videos are also in the post Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From, by Maria Popova on her excellent blog Brain Pickings.

Sparks of creative genius are rare

In his interview article Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’ (The Guardian 19 October 2010), Oliver Burkeman comments on the book and notes that Johnson thinks good ideas “are built out of a collection of existing parts”, both literally and metaphorically speaking.

Burkeman concludes, ‘What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking.

‘Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine.’

He adds, ‘This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”‘

Less static

But creatively connected doesn’t mean endlessly stuffing ourselves with sensory and cognitive input.

As author and intuition consultant Nancy Rosanoff notes, “Because our culture bombards us from every side to keep busy, we really do have to make an active effort to do nothing.”

Rosanoff suggests encouraging the incubation period of the creative process by finding activities that will “take your mind off the problem: “Take a day off, get some exercise, cook a nice meal. In addition, there are some things you can do to help access your intuitive side: playing an instrument, meditating, doing yoga, and yes, even sleeping. You can’t force an illumination; don’t even try.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses, points out there is a “commonly held view that meditation is a way to shut off the pressures of the world or of your own mind, but this is not an accurate impression.

“Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.”

From my post Living more fully without so much inner static.

Also see articles on Meditation and mindfulness.

The image is from article: Centerpointe Research Institute mental fitness technology.

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We believe in the goodness of people. We believe in the power of the internet. We believe that Maya Angelou was absolutely right when she said “when you know better you do better.”

We need your help. We need your support. Learn more. Spread the word. Post our badge on your sites to show that you LINK with love.

From LINKwithlove.org by artist Kal Barteski – I learned about her site from the post by Brené Brown, PhD: Link With Love.

“I’ve designed Dream Boogie with SARK to be a fabulous, sparkly dream disco, where your dream can let loose and become REAL in your dazzling dance from dreaming to DOing. We’re going to have a blast!

“And while we’ll be emphasizing lots of laughter and play, this is also a comprehensive, effective study program for those who are truly ready to make change, based on techniques I’ve developed in my 25 plus years as a transformational teacher, business leader, bestselling author, and artist.

“In this innovative dream productivity program, you’ll be working directly with me and getting to connect closely with other like-minded souls who are also dancing with dreams, projects, businesses, and other great ideas. I’m delighted to utilize state-of-the-art technology to provide a happy abundance of multimedia tools and resources that gently facilitate ALL learning styles in the dazzling dance from dreaming to DOing!

“It takes place on the phone and online, making it easy for you to commit to your dream in a highly focused, deeply JOYfull, and wonderfully integrated way, without the challenges of traveling or paying for airfare or lodging. YES, that means that you can attend classes in your pajamas, and complete your assignments while taking dream-filled walks…”

Part of the program: “Dream DOer Inner Views – Enjoy a delicious collection of 18 interviews on different dream-building topics, to inspire and motivate you in fabulous new ways.” Here are some of them:

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SARK, developing creativity, psychology of creativity, nurturing creative mind, nurturing creativity, creativity program