Constructive encouragement for those with multiple interests

The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Much workplace advice is based on becoming an “expert” in one’s field. But some of us don’t have the kind of single-minded devotion required to dedicate oneself to a single field for a lifetime. For years, I worried that my career was hampered by the odd personality bent that led me to pursue diverse hobbies or topics of study, sometimes for years on end, only to drop them later for something else. My jack-of-all-trades nature made single-mindedness impossible, but I sometimes regretted my lack of focus. I carved out a niche for myself as the newsroom factotum, but I felt I couldn’t be considered an “expert,” even at copyediting, because I lacked that single-mindedness.

Then I discovered this book.

Margaret Lobenstine has done us a great favor by giving us a reassuring label for our predilection. Being able to label one’s behavior is to increase one’s understanding of it. Better still, by collecting the stories of other Renaissance Souls -- people like Maya Angelou and Ken Burns -- Lobenstine reassures us that we’re not alone.

Reading this book, I discovered that I’m not odd. I’m not scatterbrained. I’m not a failure. I’m a Renaissance Soul.

Lobenstine proposes a continuum of interest, ranging from the single-minded pursuit of one art from an early age, as we see in Wolfgang Mozart, to the multitude of changing interests pursued throughout a lifetime, as we see in Benjamin Franklin. People will fall at different points along this interest continuum, and knowing where you are on it can help you design a career and a life that will be fulfilling.

Lobenstine gives us another helpful label: focal point. This is her term for any area of interest, regardless of whether it’s a job, a hobby, or a hobby you want to turn into a job. She outlines a variety of career paths, including options such as developing an umbrella title to embraces several interests -- writing, for example, can embody numerous topics -- and pursuing two careers simultaneously that complement one another -- such as banking and financial planning.

The book contains a number of exercises meant to help one identify one’s values and interests and prioritize them. These will be familiar if you’ve worked with a life coach or executive coach before, or if you’ve read life and career design books. But the attitude of this book -- the way it embraces the variety we crave -- distinguishes it from all other such books. Because this isn’t just about career design. It’s about designing a life around your interests and desires, with the understanding that those interests WILL change.

Lobenstine recommends picking four or five focal points to concentrate on in any season, while keeping a notebook filled with ideas for pursuing other interests you may wish to keep in store for the future. Then, when you feel you’ve exhausted your possibilities for one focal point, you can pull your notebook out and choose another to take its place. She offers a structure and plan for the kind of interest-shifting Renaissance Souls will do anyway.

But one of the best lessons I learned from this book is that expertise does not require exclusivity. It may take longer to develop -- In my case, it took ten years in a newsroom -- but that doesn’t make one any less an expert.

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Small changes, consistency, and big results

Guest Blogger: Terri Main

Photo by Kriss Szkurlatowski

I know many writers, myself included, often put ourselves down for small word counts at the end of a day. But those small numbers add up. Here are a few to think about.

• 100 words a day = 36,500 words in a year. That's half a novel or 10 short stories for writing less than half a page a day (double spaced).
• 200 words a day = 73,000 words in a year. That's a full novel or 20 short stories writing a little less than a page a day.
• 250 words a day = 91,250 words in a year. Writing just one page a day gives you a novel and a novella or close to two novels or 30 short stories.
• 500 words a day = 180,500 words in a year. That's close to three novels or 60 short stories or 6-7 novellas. That's two double spaced pages a day.
• 750 words a day = 271,750 words in a year. That's about four novels or 90 short stories or 10 novellas writing three pages a day.
• 1,000 words a day = 365,000 words in a year. That's 5-6 novels, 100 short stories or 12 novellas writing just four pages a day.

It doesn't take a lot of words per day, it just takes some consistency.

I knew a psychologist who had been a Navy commander. One day he showed me a map and marked New York City on one side and the west coast of England on the other.

"If I set course from New York to this place on the British Coast and change it by just one degree..." He paused and took out a protractor to measure off one degree and drew a line. "I end up in northern Africa. Small changes maintained over the long run make a huge difference."

The same goes for small increases in our writing output. Just because you can't write 2,000 words today doesn't mean you should forgo writing. Even a hundred words adds to your total.

Terri Main is the author of Creative Calisthenics: The Ultimate Workout for the Writers imagination. Visit her online: http://tinyurl.com/terrimainauthor, or follow @terrimain on Twitter, where she gives daily "minidevotions" and periodic writing tips.

Giving new meaning to knowledge worker

Photo by Akash Khairate — sxc.hu

How many so-called knowledge workers in today’s office environment know the first thing about computers? Sure, they can save a Word document. But can they do simple chores such as type in the IP address of a network, plug in the Ethernet cable and get connected without help?

Computers are tools and most users today have given up on learning the fundamentals of the machines that dominate their workdays. I’m not saying that every knowledge worker should be a full-blown geek … I’m talking about the basic computer skills…

John C. Dvorak wrote “Know-Nothing Knowledge Workers Must Go!” ten years ago. Yet nothing has changed. If anything, things are worse. Now, we regularly deal with people who not only can’t plug in their own computer, they are proud of it. I’ve known people younger than I am to gleefully declare themselves “Luddites” with no interest in learning any of that geeky stuff. Their usual stance?

“I’ll leave that to you.”

Gee, thanks. But what if I have work of my own to do?

Although it may seem that technophiles and technophobes often break along generational lines, it’s not a clear-cut generational divide. Plenty of Boomers and their elders have made it their business to know this stuff. Heck, some of them invented this stuff. Ethernet was developed in the 1970s.

Educators use the terms “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” to separate those who grew up with technology from those who didn’t. Those Luddite juniors of mine? It’s not that they didn’t have access to technology. It’s just that they didn’t take advantage of the access they had. I, however, learned to program in BASIC in high school. Because I’m just that nerdy.

But that’s why I, though I’m in a generation that’s just a bit too old to be truly native, am still a high-functioning, fluent immigrant. Not quite as fluent as my twenty-ish colleagues who grew up with computers in their homes, but I guess you could say I’ve “gone native.”

One of the main things that will hamper the professional advancement of Luddite immigrants from any generation will be the ability of digital natives and fluent digital immigrants to kick tail in the IT area. Tech-savvy workers will make themselves more valuable, while Luddites will weigh down their workgroups.

It may have been an overstatement for Dvorak to say the Luddites “must go.” They can stay where they are. But they need to do so with the knowledge that they are likely to be left behind.