A multipotentialite is a person with many interests and creative pursuits who does not have, and may never have, one single calling. The word was popularized by writer Emilie Wapnick in a 2015 TEDx talk. It is not a diagnosis or a formal personality type. It is a name for a common way of being curious, and for most people who hear it for the first time, it is a relief.
Open the drawer. There is a ukulele with two strings missing, a half-filled sketchbook, a beginner's guide to Python and a notebook with the first three chapters of a novel. Somewhere in your browser history is a 40-minute video on shipping containers that you watched with total joy. Every one of these was, for a few weeks, the thing. Then something else became the thing.
If that drawer is yours, you have probably been told to "just pick something." This guide argues something different: the drawer is not a failure of commitment. It is a common pattern, and it can be built into a good life and a decent living. If your bigger goal is turning many interests into real, deep skill, the step-by-step plan lives in our guide on how to become a polymath. This page is about understanding the wiring first.
What is a multipotentialite?
A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. That is the definition used by Puttylike, the site and community Emilie Wapnick founded in 2010. Multipotentialites tend to dive into a subject, learn it intensely, feel the pull of something new and move on, often many times over a lifetime.
Three things the word does not mean:
- It does not mean genius. The "potential" in the name is about interest and capacity, not proven mastery in many fields. That is the key difference from a polymath, covered below.
- It is not a clinical label. You will not find "multipotentialite" in any diagnostic manual, and psychologists do not measure it as a personality type. The nearest thing personality research does measure is openness to experience, one of the Big Five traits, which captures curiosity and a taste for new ideas.
- It is not a flaw. Some people go deep in one channel for fifty years; others move between channels. Both are normal.
People also use the short form multipod, which a Puttylike community member suggested in 2011 and which stuck.
Where the word comes from
The idea is older than the word. Educators were talking about multipotentiality decades before anyone said "multipotentialite," and the history is more interesting, and more contested, than most articles admit.
The gifted-education version (1970s)
In 1972, counselors Ronald Fredrickson and John Rothney published Recognizing and Assisting Multipotential Youth. They described a multipotential person as someone who, given the right environment, could develop many different competencies to a high level. The worry was that gifted teenagers who seemed good at everything struggled to choose a career.
Then came the pushback. In 1996, John Achter, David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow tested more than 1,000 gifted students from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, using harder, above-grade-level tests of ability, interests and values. For the vast majority, more than 95 percent when all measures were combined, the profiles were not flat at all. These students had clear peaks. The paper's title says it all: "It was never there and already it's vanishing". A follow-up review argued that the "good at everything" picture often came from tests that were simply too easy to show real differences (Achter, Benbow & Lubinski, 1997).
The lesson for anyone who likes the label today: many interests is not the same as equal talent in all of them. Most multipotentialites still have a few peaks. Finding them is part of the work.
Barbara Sher's "scanners" (2006)
Career coach Barbara Sher gave the popular version its first big push in her book Refuse to Choose! (Rodale, 2006). She called people with many interests scanners, because they scan the horizon for the next fascinating thing. Sher split them into cyclical scanners, who rotate through a set of favorite interests and come back to them, and sequential scanners, who move from one interest to the next and rarely return. Her signature tool was the "Scanner Daybook," a plain notebook for capturing every idea and tangent so none of them has to be acted on immediately.
If you have searched for "scanner personality," this is the source. Like "multipotentialite," it is a coaching term, not a psychological category.
Emilie Wapnick and the TED talk (2015)
Wapnick, a writer who studied music, film production and law (she graduated from McGill University's law faculty), started Puttylike in 2010 as a home for people like her. The name comes from Silly Putty: something that changes shape easily. She is widely credited with coining "multipotentialite," and in April 2015 she took it to a mass audience with a TEDxBend talk, "Why some of us don't have one true calling", which has more than 9 million views on TED's own site. Her book How to Be Everything followed from HarperOne in 2017.
Her key move was to reframe the question. Instead of asking "what's wrong with me?", she asked what people like this are good at. Her answer was three strengths she called multipotentialite superpowers.
The three multipotentialite superpowers
- Idea synthesis. Combining two or more fields and making something new where they meet. In her talk she describes a pair of founders who blended cartography, data visualization, travel, math and design into a company making map-based jewelry. Research on eminent scientists points the same way: Nobel laureates were more likely to have serious arts and crafts hobbies than members of the Royal Society or the US National Academy of Sciences, who in turn were more likely than typical scientists and the general public (Root-Bernstein et al., 2008). The data are correlational, but the pattern is striking.
- Rapid learning. Multipotentialites are used to being beginners, because they have been beginners so often. They know the awkward first weeks of any new skill, and they know those weeks end. Skills also transfer: Wapnick tells of a former concert pianist whose finger training made her a very fast typist.
- Adaptability. The ability to become whatever a situation needs: the person who can talk to engineers in the morning and to customers in the afternoon. Small teams, startups and changing industries value this highly.
A fair caveat: these are strengths multipotentialites can develop, not ones they automatically have. Jumping between interests without connecting them produces half-starts, not synthesis. Structure is what turns range into an advantage.
10 signs you might be a multipotentialite
These are patterns people who identify with the word report again and again. If most feel familiar, the label probably fits.
- "What do you want to be when you grow up?" always felt like a trick question. Not because you had no answer, but because you had nine.
- You fall hard, then you fall out. A new interest gets your full attention for weeks or months. Then, often right around the point of competence, the spark fades.
- The learning is the fun part. The first 20 percent of a new field, when everything is surprising, is your favorite place to be.
- You have a graveyard of equipment. Each item was a sincere plan.
- Your career path looks like a zigzag. Random on a CV, chapters with a hidden thread to you.
- You connect things other people keep separate. You notice that a problem at work looks like something you read about beekeeping.
- You dread the question "So, what do you do?" Any one-line answer feels like a lie by omission.
- Boredom hits you harder than stress. A hard, novel project energizes you. A comfortable, repetitive one drains you.
- You feel behind your specialist friends. They have titles and a clear story. You have range, and sometimes doubt.
- You have more ideas than time. Your notes app is a long list of things you want to learn, make or try.
"Am I a polymath?" is a different, higher bar about proven achievement; our explainer on what a polymath is covers it.
Multipotentialite vs polymath vs generalist vs scanner
The short answer: a multipotentialite has many interests; a polymath has real, recognized expertise in several fields. A multipotentialite can grow into a polymath (our list of famous polymaths shows what that looks like), but most never need to, and that is fine. The other terms overlap heavily, and most people use them loosely.
| Term | What it describes | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Multipotentialite | Many interests and creative pursuits; an identity and a way of working | Emilie Wapnick, Puttylike (2010s) |
| Polymath | Deep, proven expertise in several fields | Greek polymathēs, "having learned much" |
| Scanner | Many interests, with a focus on how you cycle through them | Barbara Sher, Refuse to Choose! (2006) |
| Generalist | Broad skills and knowledge, usually in a work context | Everyday and career language |
| Renaissance person | Accomplished across arts and sciences, the classical ideal | The Italian Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale |
| Multipotentiality | High ability across many areas, in gifted students | Gifted education and counseling (1970s) |
Weighing breadth against depth for your career? Read generalist vs specialist for the research on both paths. For the classical ideal, see what "Renaissance man" really means. And if you have ever been called a "jack of all trades," you may enjoy learning that the full "jack of all trades" quote is not the insult people think it is.
The real struggles (and why they are not proof you are broken)
The label feels good. Daily life can still be hard. Here are the most common problems, honestly.
Finishing things
The pull of a new interest is strongest right when the old one gets difficult. The surprising early phase of learning is rewarding; the middle, where you practice and polish, is slow. Many multipotentialites leave exactly where specialists start to pull ahead. Not every project deserves finishing, but the ones that matter need a plan for the middle (below).
Money
Promotions, seniority and pay scales reward staying in one lane, so zigzagging can cost you in the short run. The answer is rarely "pick one forever." It is choosing a work model on purpose, which is what Wapnick's four approaches are for.
"So, what do you do?"
You do not owe anyone your whole life story at a party. Pick the answer that fits the room ("I'm a designer," "I teach and I make furniture") and share the rest if they are curious. Or try an umbrella phrase such as "I help people understand complicated things," which fits a teacher, a writer and a UX researcher alike.
Impostor feelings
When you are always newish at something, it is easy to feel like a fraud next to twenty-year veterans. That feeling lies. Being a beginner in public is a skill, not a confession. Our guide to impostor syndrome has practical ways to quiet it.
Shiny object syndrome
Some new interests are really escapes from the boring or scary part of the current project. A useful test: if the idea still excites you a week after you write it down, it is probably real. If it appeared the moment the current task got hard, it may be avoidance in a costume.
Other people's timelines
Specialist friends hit visible milestones earlier; your path tends to pay off later. Julia Child worked as an advertising copywriter and then a researcher for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II before enrolling at Le Cordon Bleu in her late thirties; Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961, when she was nearly 49 (National Women's History Museum). Late starts are common for people like this.
Is it being a multipotentialite, or is it ADHD?
They are different things, though they can overlap. Having many interests and moving between them is a normal variation in how people live. ADHD is a medical condition, marked by ongoing patterns of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that get in the way of daily functioning (NIMH).
A rough, non-medical rule of thumb: if you switch interests but still pay bills, meet deadlines and keep appointments, you are probably just a curious person with a busy mind. If scattered focus is causing real damage, at work, in relationships or with money, and has done so since childhood, that is worth raising with a doctor or psychologist. Only a professional can assess it. If ADHD is part of your picture, our guide to learning with ADHD covers methods that suit a distractible brain.
How to thrive as a multipotentialite
The goal is not to cure the pattern. It is to give it a shape. Here are the tools that work best, starting with the big one: how you earn a living.
Choose a work model: Wapnick's four approaches
In How to Be Everything, Wapnick describes four ways multipotentialites structure their work. You can mix them and switch between them as life changes.
| Approach | How it works | What it can look like |
|---|---|---|
| Group Hug | One multifaceted job or business where you wear many hats | A founder of a small company, a product manager, an urban planner who draws on economics, design and sociology in one role |
| Slash | Two or more part-time jobs or income streams | A nurse / illustrator, a teacher / podcaster, or the luthier / psychotherapist Wapnick mentions in her talk |
| Einstein | A stable "good enough job" that pays the bills and leaves energy for passions on the side | A steady nine-to-five with sane hours, plus evenings for music, research or a side project |
| Phoenix | Go deep in one field for years, then rise again in a new one | Vera Wang: competitive figure skater, then about 17 years at Vogue, then a bridal-wear business at around 40 |
The Einstein approach is named for Albert Einstein's years as a technical expert at the Swiss patent office in Bern, from 1902 to 1909 (Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property). The job was stable and left him mental room; in 1905 he published the papers that changed physics. "Good enough job" is a phrase Wapnick borrows from Barbara Sher, and it may be the most underrated idea here. A job does not have to express every part of you. It only has to fund the parts it does not.
A quick way to pick: if you crave variety within a single day, try Group Hug. If you want clear boundaries between your identities, try Slash. If money stress kills your creativity, try Einstein. If you like going all in, try Phoenix.
Think in project seasons
Instead of "what is my passion?", ask "what is my project for the next three months?" A season is long enough to get past the beginner phase and short enough not to feel like a trap. At the end, decide on purpose: continue, pause or close it out. Old interests coming back in a later season is a feature, not a relapse.
Keep a curiosity list
This is Sher's Daybook in modern form. Whenever something catches your eye, write it down: the question, the link, the half-idea. You can stay with your current project without fear of losing the new one, and the list works as a filter, since the ideas you still want a week later are the real ones. Read it monthly. The recurring themes are your hidden thread.
Set finishing rules
You do not have to finish everything. You do need a definition of "done" for the things that matter. Two rules help most:
- Define done before you start. "Done" is not "mastered." It might be "play three songs start to finish," "publish one article," or "ship a working prototype to five users." Small, visible endpoints.
- Plan for the dip with an if-then rule. For example: "If I feel like quitting, then I will work on it for 15 more minutes before deciding." These if-then plans, called implementation intentions, have a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals across 94 studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
Unfinished projects also have a way of nagging at you; the Zeigarnik effect explains why, and why a clear "paused" decision helps. And if your trouble is starting rather than finishing, see how to stop procrastinating.
Build a portfolio of income
Management thinker Charles Handy predicted this kind of work life in his 1989 book The Age of Unreason, where he described "portfolio" workers who combine several kinds of paid and unpaid work into one career (Thinkers50). For a multipotentialite, a portfolio does not have to mean freelancing. It can be a main job, one paid side skill and one pure-joy hobby that earns nothing. The point is resilience: when one stream dries up, the others hold.
Be practical: keep a financial cushion before a Phoenix leap, and treat a Slash income stream as a small business, with rates and invoices, not a favor.
Find your people
Much of the pain is loneliness: feeling like the only one who cannot pick. Puttylike runs a community space for exactly this, and maker spaces, meetups and evening classes are full of people with range. Also find one or two "depth friends," specialists who love explaining their field. They sharpen you; you give them new angles.
Feed your curiosity daily, in small doses
A common trap: treating every new curiosity as a full commitment. An interest in astronomy becomes a telescope, three books and a course by Friday, when it only needed an evening.
A better pattern is two speeds. A deep project, one per season, gets your real hours. A daily breadth habit, five to ten minutes a day, gets everything else: the random question from the curiosity list, the topic from a podcast, the thing a friend mentioned. Breadth feeds synthesis. Depth pays the bills and builds real skill. If you want a structured path from many sampled interests to a few deep skills, the full polymath plan walks through it step by step.
A quick multipotentialite self-check
There is no validated multipotentialite test. Online quizzes with scores are for fun; no one has measured this trait the way psychologists measure, say, extraversion. What you can do is ask yourself a few honest yes-or-no questions:
- Have you had three or more serious interests in the last five years that you pursued with real energy?
- Do you often lose interest once you have become reasonably good at something?
- Does the idea of doing one job for the next 30 years make you feel trapped rather than secure?
- Do you regularly connect ideas from very different fields?
- Do you enjoy being a beginner more than most people you know?
- Has anyone told you, kindly or not, that you need to "pick something"?
- Do you have a list, written or mental, of things you still want to learn?
Mostly yes? Then "multipotentialite" is a useful word for you. Use it as a door, not a box.
Careers that suit multipotentialites
The best careers for multipotentialites are roles where variety is part of the job description, or roles stable enough to fund variety outside work. No job is perfect, so here is the honest version.
| Career | Why it fits | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Entrepreneur or small business owner | You do product, marketing, sales and finance, often in one week | Income is uncertain, and you still have to finish things |
| Product manager | Sits between engineering, design, business and users | Lots of meetings; you guide rather than build |
| Journalist or science writer | A new topic every week, and getting paid to learn it | A tough market; freelance rates are often low |
| UX researcher or designer | Mixes psychology, design, data and interviews | Needs a solid portfolio of real projects |
| Teacher | Primary teachers cover many subjects; all teachers explain | Pay and workload vary a lot by country |
| Consultant | New clients, industries and problems every few months | Travel and long hours are common |
| Instructional designer | Turns experts' knowledge in any field into courses | Can become repetitive inside one company |
What these share: each rewards learning a new domain quickly and explaining it clearly. That combination, not a job title, is a multipotentialite's real market value. And a plain, pleasant job that funds a rich life outside work is a perfectly good answer too.
Where NerdSip fits
We built NerdSip with this reader in mind. Most learning tools assume you want to commit. A multipotentialite on a Tuesday does not want a 12-week course on Byzantine history. They want to understand it well enough to stop wondering, in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
That is what NerdSip does. Type any topic that caught your eye today and it builds a short course of 3, 5 or 10 lessons; a 5-lesson course takes about five minutes. Every lesson ends with a multiple-choice question, so you actually test what you learned instead of just reading it. A swipe-to-learn deck surfaces topics you would never have searched for (fair warning: your curiosity list may grow). Spaced reviews bring lessons back over time, so Tuesday's Byzantine history is still there next month. Streaks, XP and weekly leagues help when motivation is thin.
Courses are fact-checked through several layers: grounded in Google Search when they are created, scored nightly, pulled if flagged, and open to reports from learners. That reduces errors but does not make them impossible, so stay curious and cross-check anything that matters. If you want a starting point, try The Polymath Sampler for a taste of many fields, The Interdisciplinary Edge on connecting them, or The Fastest Known Learners on how quick learners work. It is free to try.
NerdSip is the breadth half, not the whole plan. For the deep half, use the best source for the job: a good book, a course on Coursera, edX or MIT OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy for the basics, a strong podcast, or an AI chat assistant used as a tutor that quizzes you (double-check its facts). For why broad knowledge pays off, see why people who know random stuff are winning.
The bottom line
If you have many interests and no single calling, you are not broken, flaky or late. You are a multipotentialite, Emilie Wapnick's word for a pattern counselors and coaches had noticed for decades. It comes with real strengths in synthesis, learning and adaptability, and real costs in finishing, money and other people's expectations.
The costs are manageable with a little structure: a work model chosen on purpose, project seasons, a curiosity list, clear finishing rules, a portfolio of income and a few people who get it. Keep the drawer. Just give it compartments. And when you are ready to turn a handful of those interests into real depth, the guide on becoming a polymath is the next step.
References
- Achter, J. A., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (1996). Multipotentiality among the intellectually gifted: "It was never there and already it's vanishing". Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43(1), 65-76.
- Achter, J. A., Benbow, C. P., & Lubinski, D. (1997). Rethinking multipotentiality among the intellectually gifted: A critical review and recommendations. Gifted Child Quarterly, 41(1), 5-15.
- Fredrickson, R. H., & Rothney, J. W. M. (1972). Recognizing and Assisting Multipotential Youth. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
- Handy, C. (1989). The Age of Unreason.
- Root-Bernstein, R., et al. (2008). Arts foster scientific success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi members. Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 1(2), 51-63.
- Sher, B. (2006). Refuse to Choose! Emmaus, PA: Rodale.
- Wapnick, E. (2015). Why some of us don't have one true calling. TEDxBend.
- Wapnick, E. (2017). How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don't Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up. New York: HarperOne.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a multipotentialite?
A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits who does not have one single calling. They tend to dive deeply into a subject, then move on to something new, often many times over a lifetime. The term was popularized by writer Emilie Wapnick through her site Puttylike and her 2015 TEDx talk.
Is multipotentialite a real psychological term?
Not in the clinical sense. It is a coaching and self-help term, not a diagnosis or a personality type that psychologists measure. It grew out of an older idea from gifted education, multipotentiality, which described students with high ability in many areas. The closest trait personality research does measure is openness to experience.
What is the difference between a multipotentialite and a polymath?
A multipotentialite has many interests and the potential to develop in many fields. A polymath has real, recognized expertise in several fields. A multipotentialite can grow into a polymath with years of deep practice, but most do not need to in order to live a full and successful life.
Is there a multipotentialite test?
There is no validated scientific test. Online quizzes are fun but not measurements. A more honest check is to ask yourself whether you have had several serious interests in recent years, whether you tend to lose interest after becoming competent, and whether one lifelong career sounds more trapping than secure.
What is a scanner personality?
Scanner is Barbara Sher's word, from her 2006 book Refuse to Choose!, for people with many interests. She described cyclical scanners, who rotate through a set of favorite interests, and sequential scanners, who move from one interest to the next. Like multipotentialite, it is a coaching term rather than a clinical category.
What are good careers for multipotentialites?
Roles with built-in variety tend to fit well: entrepreneur, product manager, journalist or science writer, UX researcher, teacher, consultant, librarian and instructional designer. Many multipotentialites also do well with a stable job that leaves energy for interests outside work, or with two part-time income streams.
Is being a multipotentialite the same as having ADHD?
No. Having many interests is a normal variation in how people live, while ADHD is a medical condition with ongoing inattention or hyperactivity that interferes with daily life. The two can overlap. If scattered focus causes serious problems at work, at home or with money, it is worth talking to a doctor or psychologist.
How do multipotentialites make money?
Emilie Wapnick describes four models: the Group Hug approach (one job with many roles), the Slash approach (several part-time jobs or income streams), the Einstein approach (a stable good-enough job plus passions on the side) and the Phoenix approach (going deep in one field for years, then switching). Many people combine them or change models over time.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
📚 Keep Learning
- Polymath Meaning: What Is a Polymath? (With Examples)
- Generalist vs Specialist: Which Wins (and How to Be Both)
- Famous Polymaths: 30 Minds Who Mastered Many Fields
- Renaissance Man Meaning: What It Is and Where It Comes From
- Why People Who Know Random Stuff Are Winning (The Generalist Advantage)
- Impostor Syndrome: Why Smart People Feel Like Frauds (And How to Stop)
Explore the NerdSip learning hubs
The blog is our editorial layer. When you want to move from reading into doing, these hubs organize the rest of NerdSip by format, including the app itself and the press that has written about it.
A Home for Every Passing Curiosity
Whatever caught your eye today, type it into NerdSip and get a fact-checked 5-minute course with a quiz after every lesson. Feed your curiosity daily without letting it eat your life.
4.7 stars from 380 reviews · 8,900+ learners
