Some Of Us Don’t Have One True Passion (Scanners, Multipotentialites and Dilettantes)

I’m in a dilemma. Again.

I recently purchased a book called Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher and now I know what’s wrong with me.

I’m a Scanner.

A Scanner is someone who is interested in a lot of things. They research these things intensely and when they learn what they want to know about it, they move on to something else and research that intensely.

Scanners drive the people around them nuts. They seem flighty and unfocused. Some people call them a Dilettante. Webster’s definition of a dilettante is, “A person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.

But what Barbara Sher brings to light is that Scanners have a very curious and are highly creative people. They also can get bored easily.

Here are some things I’ve looked up this week (but mostly in one day) and spent anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours researching it this week:

1. Birthstones, specifically blue ones: Aquamarine, Topaz and Sapphires

2. Gamification—how to make learning fun. I even sat through an hour webinar from the VP at Adobe.

3. Different gurus on Scanners: Emile Wapnick—decent TED talk, Tia Sparkles, Douglas Eby, Patrick Ross and Mihaly Csiksenentmihalyi.

4. I made a list of all the cool things I’ve done over the last 10 or 12 years: the birth of my child, places I’ve visited, jobs I’ve had, houses that I’ve bought and sold, college degrees, too many things to list for this post.

5. Lyrical Essays for a possible submission—the “braided essay,” is the type I’m going to use.

6. That got me into looking up things that were related to writing in general and that brought me to Stephen’s King’s On Writing…

7. …which lead me to looking up, “How to submit to blogs for being a guest writer.” Hint: Google “Write for us.”

8. I checked in with this blogger named ViperChill who wrote a really long article on: How to buy Facebook likes for less than a penny each.

And then he described how to make two business pages on Facebook, send out the same stuff as the other one, but link the two together and somehow this gets more people to share your content because Google will index it differently.

9. Then I decided I needed to look up houses on the waterfront here in the St. Louis area, which in case you don’t know, is in the middle of the United States, so…there’s either rivers, creeks, ponds or lakes.

Well, I found a house that’s less than $100,000 on a lake by where I currently live and I didn’t even know it was there. But the bad news, it probably needs another $100,000 in work.

Somehow I let this take me out of the game for at least 45 minutes to 1 hour.

10. Then I got back into writing and found a blog called The Abundant Artist. There was a guest post from a lady named Steff Metal.

11. I went to her blog which lead me down the rabbit hole for another hour because she’s that damn good and what she does. Besides writing her own stuff, she writes SALES LETTERS for other artists and they are just irresistible. No wonder she’s helping so many people make money from their art.

12. So of course I had to look up Bob Marley stencils, because you know? I like to make art. And I like to make money. And I’ve made a few stencil art pieces in the past.

13. So then I went to Ebay and looked up how much stenciled Bob Marley paintings are going for. Answer–$12.00.

So I decided to write this post about Scanners instead of painting a Bob Marley painting to try to show you what it’s like to have this kind of brain.

To some it’s a curse. To others it seems like, “You can never pick one thing and stick with it.”

To me, it’s just what I do and this blog is my outlet for it. I hope to be able to harness the full potential of it one day. Until then, I’ll just keep being curious and keep on writing.