Being a multi-passionate person is certainty not an easy journey. Learning new skills is always a challenge because all trainers and teachers believe that for one to become good at a skill you have to dedicate your every waking hour to it… for years.
If you don’t dedicate everything, then you’re labelled just a ‘hobbyist’ or ‘jack-of-all-trades’ that will never be recognised as anything more.
No one seems to consider that a multi-passionate brings many different skills and knowledge to the table which can give them a very unique perspective to their current endeavour.
I must admit that some days I do think it would be so much easier to dedicate one’s self to a single skill set because being multi-passionate can bring about some serious challenges. There isn’t a lot of information out there on how to BE a multi-passionate person, mostly because it’s unique to every individual, but this does mean I’m constantly having to experiment.
For me personally, I’m not just dealing with being a multi-passionate, but also navigating Complex PTSD and overcoming chronic health conditions. These all play a huge role in what I can do each day.
Add into the mix that the weather can also have a huge impact. It can impact my moods and the ability to focus on a task, but mostly because we rely heavily on the sun for all things power. For example, if the day is full of rain and clouds then my laptop is instantly off the table and my iPad is the focus. What passions I can do on my iPad vs my laptop is very different.
This brings me to two of my current struggles, how I REMEMBER everything I’m learning across different mediums and how to keep myself focussed and on point week to week.
Remembering
Let’s deal with this struggle before I forget it! Most of my passions involve software, and complicated software at that. Final Cut Pro, Affinity Photo, Blender, Substance Painter, Second Life, Obsidian, iZotope, Logic Pro, Logic Pro for iPad, not to mention the many different AUv3’s, plug-ins and add-ons that I use with these different software, and that’s just to mention a few.
Let’s just say there is a LOT to remember about each software, and most of them I don’t even use to their full potential. Eventually I’d like to change that, but it seems more inevitable that I’d add more software to my plate instead.
So how do I switch seamlessly between them all? Simple, I don’t! Because of my moods I can be fully emerged into just one of my passions which has me improving my skills with some software while the others get completely forgotten.
This has led me to writing my own manuals! Something that can be rather tedious, and not something I ever wanted to do, to the point that I probably hindered myself for a good while. Moving past that, now whenever I learn something new I’ll write it down in my manuals within Obsidian. This includes shortcuts and even a ‘quick start’ for the more complicated software. The ‘quick start’ means I just have to give it a quick read and it brings back the basics of the software and acts like a transition to help my brain switch from one software to the next.
If I find myself facing a problem I can quickly refer back to my manuals to have my brain refreshed (oh how I wish I could create a life manual). This also works well for less used shortcuts and actions and makes it easier to add anything new. Although I must admit that my Blender Manual may need some serious organisation with how big it’s grown.
Focus
The next struggle has been a constant for most of my life, and that’s developing strategies to keep me focussed and on point week to week, month to month.
I’d love to keep it simple and say, ‘Mondays are writing days, Tuesdays are 3D Software days…’ and so on, but unfortunately that just never worked for me.
Why can’t it be that simple? I ask this question of myself frequently but suffice to say that each day is completely unique for me and my moods. I’m incredibly mood driven, and I cannot force myself to do passions I am not in the mood for, if I did I’d simply end up hating them.
This leads me to my current experiment for keeping me focussed and on point. I’ve trialled many ‘weekly’ plans, but due to the above reasons I find them frequently unreachable which leads me down a dark and depressed path. So the last few months have seen me trialling monthly goals, but it’s not about the goals so much.
Monthly goals are all well and good, nothing new really as I’ve played with it before, BUT it’s the ‘how’ I’m trialling it. Understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses are key here, you see one of my pet annoyances is ‘Badges’ on my iPhone (that little red dot with the number of reminders/emails/notifications). As a general rule I have most of them turned off because they SCREAM at me to ‘do something about it’. So I decided to use this to my advantage and put my monthly goals in a reminder so if it doesn’t get done, that dot sits there severely poking me EVERYDAY it’s not done.
Now this only works because I also have this massive principle that means I can’t just ‘tick’ it off WITHOUT having done it. I’ve been using this ability for some time now with my emails; if an email needs my attention and I can’t or don’t have time to deal with it then it gets left as ‘unread’ so it serves as a reminder each time I look at my phone and emails.
So I figured why not try this with my passions. First it helped me figure out what was important, so I don’t go getting lost in all my little passions (another post for another day). But mostly it seems to be serving as a way to keep me focused and on point for what I want to achieve each month and actually achieving it.
Now how this will go in the long run is yet to be seen, but so far it seems to be helping. Of course I’m trying to keep it relatively simple, as I’m trying to also create a positive affirmation in myself, but if all goes well I’m sure it will develop.
Either way it’s another step on the road to self-discovery and I’m sure I’ll report back if it’s a huge success or a terrible failure.
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