I’ve gotten a bunch of book recommendations lately, and they all seem to be in a very familiar theme. Apparently I give off the vibe of someone who likes to do a lot and might have a career of doing a lot of things. Which, well, in the past decade I have been a community manager, retail employee, author, full stack developer, UX analyst, jewelry maker, zinester, product designer, and… no, I think Youtube was more than a decade back at this point. But they may have a point, so let’s check out some of these career books!
How to be Everything is a book for something called multipotentialites, or people who have a lot of interests and are still trying to decide what they want to be in a world where the expectation is that there is only one answer to that. The argument here is that it’s okay to have a lot of different interests and there are different ways to make that work for you.
What I found really interesting is that there is much acceptance that some people just don’t need their main source of income to be that thing that is fulfilling and you can use that as your source of income while you pursue your interests on the side without the money stress that might cause, which has been the thing that has ultimately made many of these kinds of books fall flat for me. It is only one of the four directions that is talked about, alongside a few other things I don’t often see such as building a career by pursuing several interests separately at the same time as a collection of part time jobs that add up to a full time income, or just letting yourself completely change careers as your interest wanes. It’s just not something that I see that often.
I really enjoyed this book and I always appreciate a book that will acknowledge that it is not the one answer. The addition of nuance to the conversation and that different people are different was refreshing and, given I’m at a strange point of my career where I want to make some bad choices, I am going to actually try out some of the exercises in here to see if I can figure out what works well for me.
Hi, I’m glad I kept your card from when my mother and I met you at the crafts fair at New West and she bought that pendant for me. I like reading your blog. Last year I borrowed Wapnick’s book from the library and enjoyed it a lot, on the recommendation of a friend who is also a multipotentialite like me. I wore your pendant in a couple of my YouTube dance videos. I used to read romance books a lot, and I’ve read a lot of Stephen King when I was younger, although most of the other writers who are horror-adjacent that I’ve read, like Neil Gaiman and China Meiville, I discovered through their more fantasy-adjacent fiction.
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