How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up

How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up

by Emilie Wapnick

Overview

What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a familiar question we're all asked as kids. While seemingly harmless, the question has unintended consequences. It can make you feel like you need to choose one job, one passion, one thing to be about. Guess what? You don't.

Having a lot of different interests, projects and curiosities doesn't make you a "jack-of-all-trades, master of none." Your endless curiosity doesn't mean you are broken or flaky. What you are is a multipotentialite: someone with many interests and creative pursuits. And that is actually your biggest strength.

How to Be Everything helps you channel your diverse passions and skills to work for you. Based on her popular TED talk, "Why some of us don't have one true calling", Emilie Wapnick flips the script on conventional career advice. Instead of suggesting that you specialize, choose a niche or accumulate 10,000 hours of practice in a single area, Wapnick provides a practical framework for building a sustainable life around ALL of your passions.
You'll discover:
•  Why your multipotentiality is your biggest strength, especially in today's uncertain job market.
•  How to make a living and structure your work if you have many skills and interests.
•  How to focus on multiple projects and make progress on all of them.
•  How to handle common insecurities such as the fear of not being the best, the guilt associated with losing interest in something you used to love and the challenge of explaining "what you do" to others.
 
Not fitting neatly into a box can be a beautiful thing. How to Be Everything teaches you how to design a life, at any age and stage of your career, that allows you to be fully you, and find the kind of work you'll love.

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062566669
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 05/01/2018
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 316,188
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Emilie Wapnick is a speaker, career coach, blogger, and community leader. She is the founder and creative director at Puttylike.com, where she helps multipotentialites integrate all of their interests to create dynamic, fulfilling, and fruitful careers and lives. Unable to settle on a single path, Emilie studied music, art, film production, and law, graduating from the Law Faculty at McGill University in 2011. Emilie is a TED speaker and has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, The Financial Times, The Huffington Post, and Lifehacker. Her TED talk, “Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling,” has been viewed over 3.5 million times, and has been translated into 36 languages. She has been hired as a guest speaker and workshop facilitator at universities, high schools, and organizations across the United States and internationally.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Letter to the Reader ix

Part I Everything?: Welcome to the Tribe

1 There Is Nothing Wrong with You 3

2 Multipotentialites: Slackers or Innovators? 17

3 The Components of a Happy Multipotentialite Life 33

Part II The Four Multlpotentialite Work Models: Different Strokes for Different Folks

4 The Group Hug Approach 63

5 The Slash Approach 87

6 The Einstein Approach 105

7 The Phoenix Approach 121

Part III Common Multipotentialite Stumbling Blocks: Slaying Your Dragons

8 Your Personal Productivity System 145

9 Fear, Confidence, and Dealing with People Who Don't Understand 179

10 Conclusion 199

Appendix A Famous Muitipotentialites 205

Appendix B Examples of Interdisciplinary Fields 209

Acknowledgments 213

Notes and Selected Further Reading 215

Index 217

About the Author 229

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