How to succeed when you want to do everything

I received another insight while reading The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine over the past few days. I am enjoying this book – I really enjoy a book that makes me think.

Anyway, to the description of this insight! Well first I’ll explain what is a Renaissance Soul (described by Barbara Sher as a Scanner Personality). Renaissance Souls are the people who love to do many things with our lives. We are not happy to do just one thing, whether it be a career or a hobby, to the exclusion of other life experiences. We want it all, we want it yesterday, and we’re happy to be constantly learning and trying new things, and changing to a different activity if it all becomes too routine. We have passion, but may annoy people out of our seemingly lack of stability in what we want to do with our lives. We learn new skills very quickly, but soon get impatient and bored if we feel like we’ve mastered a skill.

So, as you can see from the description of what is a Renaissance Soul, we can at times have a problem with focus. This is different from having ADD or ADHD, where the person has a physical inability to concentrate. In the case of the Renaissance Soul we suffer from both overwhelm and over-excitement – either doing nothing at all because we’re so overwhelmed with the myriad of choices that we don’t know where to start, or doing lots of things in a scattered fashion and never finishing anything. Basically we have trouble applying focus to one activity because other activities steal our attention when they look just as interesting.

An example of a Renaissance Soul who has this issue could be described like this: Bettie is a Renaissance Soul – she plays guitar, sings on weekends at a local pub, is learning french, loves preparing gourmet salads, works as an office manager, and is creating a website about toy poodles. If she had the time she’d like to take up painting, make a documentary about animals, learn German in addition to French, take up yoga and do a fitness class, oh and put in some vegetables in the garden, and…. you get the picture. I know that I’m a Renaissance Woman, because even though I made up that list on the fly and don’t have any talents in most of those areas, I’m starting to dream about what it would be like to do those activities, LOL! For those of us who are Renaissance Souls, having such a long list of things we want to do can be exciting, but frustrating at the same time. We probably also have to put up with frustration from our family and friends if they don’t understand… my husband for example just likes tinkering with and learning all about computer hardware, and driving a fast car. He is very skilled in what he likes to do best. He orders only his favourite food if we go out for dinner and enjoys it every time. If I listed all the things I’d like to do I believe he would think I was insane!

So that’s the intro, now that you know what a Renaissance Soul is we can get down to the nitty gritty of this insight I was mentioning earlier. Given that we primarily have a trouble with focus, we Renaissance Souls need to find a way to focus on just a few activities at a time without the misery that ensues if we try to make ourselves into single interest people. Trust me, that just won’t work, we just need more variety and that’s all there is to it. But being able to focus for longer periods like the single interest people can mean being able to actually finish some projects or achieve success in some activities, rather than chopping and changing all the time and never amounting to anything. Success in any area requires some level of focus.

So Margaret Lobenstine suggests treating our life like a huge icecream parlour with every flavour imaginable. If you are only allowed to choose one flavour well that just sucks. My husband might choose chocolate every single time and be extremely happy with his choice, but how am I supposed to choose… they all look good! Well could you imagine if you had to try every single flavour before settling down to your favourite? The person who already chose chocolate would be vowing never to buy an icecream with you again. You still be trying them all after a few hours and you’d be feeling bloated and miserable.

Instead, Margaret suggests going for the four-flavour sampler. This does not mean eating icecream until you feel ill – each item on your sampler is only a small serve, but the point is you can have all four at once. You can choose four flavours now, try them out properly and savour the moment. Then next time you’re in the shop, you can choose the same four flavours again if you want, or choose another totally different four flavours, or maybe keep two the same as last time and try another two flavours. You can change your four flavours as often as you like, and you can even make all four in your sampler the same flavour if you really want to.

So analogies aside, I thought about what that would mean in my own life. What would that mean for you? Well it means choosing four activities (Think of an activity as something that ignites your passions and meets your values – it doesn’t mean doing the laundry. That is just a chore.) and focusing on them to the exclusion of any other activities until its time to change. With only four activities on our plates we can avoid being so scattered, and make some real progress!

Wow, I love the idea. What four activities did I come up with?

I am thinking that for the rest of May I will focus on (in no specific order):

1. Writing for this website
2. Reading for this website (well, for me really, I love to read)
3. Spending time with my friends in Canberra before I move to Melbourne
4. Keeping up-to-date with current macroeconomic issues, and planning some investment strategies

So that means that this month I won’t be trying out a yoga class or learning to run, I won’t be growing vegetables or seeing lots of movies, I won’t be reading War and Peace or learning how to make iPhone apps, I won’t be fasting and I won’t be trying indoor rock climbing. I won’t be perfecting my recipe for moroccan flax seed crackers. And that is all fine. I can try some of those next time and so for now I don’t even have to think about them because I don’t have to miss out. Guilt-free progress!

One thing that Margaret did not really explain was how to choose your timeframe for your Renaissance Soul activities. I am thinking that in order to have a decent enough sample, the four activities should be focused on for at least three weeks. That way it is long enough to form a skill or habit if you want to continue and build upon the activity in the next time period. I am thinking that it would be ideal to choose a new ‘sampler’ every calendar month. Next month I’ll be living in a new city and so I might choose long walks (window shopping in Melbourne!) to be one of my focused activities instead of spending time with friends in Canberra, and then the month after that I might swap out the long walks for jogging. I think I will continue with the webpage for a while, so I can leave those elements in my sampler and swap out the others.

One more thing that Margaret didn’t really touch on but that I think is implied and important is remembering what you’re focusing on this time. If I wrote down those four activities and then promptly forgot them and then tomorrow saw an ad for a build-your-own greenhouse and purchased it with the intention of setting it up this month, then I would be back to the scattered and unfocused version of the Renaissance Soul. So for that reason it is paramount to remember what your sampler is this month. Doing so will save you money too! You can write down your four chosen activities in a diary, or make them into a desktop background for your computer or phone, pin them to a notice board, stick them to the fridge, put them next to the bathroom mirror or on the back of the toilet door… whatever you like. Then go for it with enthusiasm!

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