There's a real, documented term for people who can't settle into one lifelong specialty: multipotentialite. It was coined by a writer named Emilie Wapnick, who gave a TED talk on it that's been viewed millions of times and translated into 36 languages — so if you've ever felt slightly guilty for having too many half-finished interests and no single "thing" you're known for, you're not an outlier. You're a documented type.
It's worth asking why "pick one thing" became the default advice in the first place. A lot of it traces back to how modern careers got built — narrow job titles, single-skill résumés, the idea that mastery only counts if it's mastery of exactly one discipline. That model works well for some people. It's just never been the whole story, and there's always been a quieter population of people who thrive by doing the opposite — going wide instead of deep, and treating that as a feature rather than a flaw.
A few things tend to be true if this describes you:
- You get genuinely excited learning something new, and the excitement doesn't fade just because it isn't "your thing"
- You're often good at connecting ideas across completely unrelated skills, because you actually have unrelated skills to connect
- You get bored, not incompetent, once something stops being a puzzle and starts being routine
- You've probably been told, kindly, to "just pick one" — usually by someone with the best intentions and the wrong model of how you actually work
- You may have started, abandoned, and quietly returned to the same handful of interests more than once, in a way that looks inconsistent from the outside but feels perfectly logical from the inside
The standard career advice is to specialize — pick a lane, build a niche, defend it. For plenty of people, that's genuinely right. It just isn't right for everyone, and Wapnick's research actually maps out how the rest of us tend to structure work instead. She identifies four common models:
1. The Group Hug Approach
One multifaceted job or business where you wear several hats and shift between domains, rather than separating your interests into different jobs. Think a founder whose one company genuinely needs a designer, a strategist, and a maker, all of which happen to be the same person — the interests aren't separate side projects, they're all feeding the same thing.
2. The Slash Approach
Two or more distinct jobs or income streams that you move between on a regular basis, kept intentionally separate (the teacher/artist, the marketer/podcaster). Unlike the Group Hug model, these don't blend into one identity — they stay as clearly different hats, worn on different days.
3. The Einstein Approach
One stable job or business that fully supports you, leaving room to pursue everything else on the side, for love rather than income. The side interests never need to become profitable to be worth doing.
4. The Phoenix Approach
Fully immersing in one passion for a stretch of time, then reinventing into something new every few years, rather than running things in parallel. Less "many things at once," more "many things across a life," each one fully lived before moving to the next.
None of these is more legitimate than the others. They're just different shapes for the same underlying trait.
Where Stones Unturned Studio fits in
For what it's worth, my own business, Stones Unturned Studio, turned out to be a pretty textbook example of the Group Hug approach, even though I didn't set out to build it that way. Macrame is the thing that became the actual business — handmade macrame jewelry, mostly built around natural gemstones like moonstone, sunstone, and labradorite — and it just kept insisting on being shared in a way my other crafts didn't. Silver's newer, almost accidental: I went to Jaipur to source stones for the macrame work, a class opportunity came up while I was there, and I came home with a silversmithing habit I hadn't planned on. It might end up folding properly into the business too — too early to say. Painting and sketching have been with me since childhood, long before there was a business to fold them into, and I suspect they're staying mine rather than becoming inventory. Crochet's about to come back into rotation, and I genuinely don't know yet which pile it lands in.
That last part is the honest bit: I don't think you have to force every single interest into something sellable just because you can. Some of it needs to stay just yours, or the curiosity itself starts to feel like a chore instead of the thing that got you excited in the first place. I think that's actually the harder skill for people like us — not finding new interests, that part's easy, but figuring out which ones get to become work and which ones get to just stay play.
I'm still figuring out where the lines are — which interests get folded into the "group hug" and which stay separate, private, just mine. If you're a multipotentialite too, I'd genuinely like to know: which model do you run on, or does it change depending on the year? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
More soon — the Slash, Einstein, and Phoenix models are each getting their own post over the next few weeks, so if this one resonated, there's more coming.
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