The Multi-hues: Who?

Our theme for this week is ‘Embracing the multi-hues’.  Let us understand the theme with a little reverse engineering here. Creativity is the derivative of Curiosity, and embracing curiosity leads to having multiple interests.

Take the case of Nick Holder.

Nick Holder, joined BT corp as a junior web designer in June 2015. He was thrilled to be working in a fresh, innovative and like-minded environment almost up till a year. After about 11 months of joining, Nick could not take the pressure of monotony and finally left the organization in August 2016. After a couple of months, he joined Blue Jack, digital marketing agency, as a social media executive. It was all new to him, but he was already getting so good at it. He was already slaying at SEO and learning how to develop brand awareness. His knowledge of using coding software like HTML and CSS, gave him a boost while doing his job. Nick also started to collaborate with the content and engagement team and loved sharing his ideas. However his superior, did not entertain interference of such level, and suggested him to focus only on his scale of work. Though Nick loved his work, he lacked autonomy and the freedom to use his creativity in assigned projects. He decided to quite Blue Jack in March 2017 and has now started up his own venture NiHol Media with a team of 5 people. Nick now takes care of the customized web based solutions along with SEO, SEM and PPC for elite clients.

There are many more examples from the history:

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519): painter- sculptor, mathematician- musician-geologist

Rabindra Nath Tagore (1861-1961): Poet, Author, Playwright, Painter, Novelist, Lyricist, Film score composer, Visual Artist.

APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015): Scientist, Teacher, Writer, Musician.

What are we really talking about?

Multi-Hued Personalities: Any individual who has the ability to choose and develop numerous career alternatives as a result of diverse interests, aptitudes and capabilities can be termed as a multi-hued personality. In simpler words, they are individuals with a ‘no-label’ personality and who choose ‘not to choose’. Their fundamental passion is to re-identify and redefine their evolving passions.

A multi-hued personality is also called: multipotentialite, multi-hyphenated, multi-pods, polymath, renaissance-man, scanner, and (neo) generalist.

Multipotentialites tend to think outside the box. A multipotentialite who embraces and uses their multipotentiality can inspire widespread movements and make significant social contributions.- Emily Wapnick

As human beings we live in a multi-stratum world. Our personality is a synthesis of weaved symbolic chunks. Hence we are a combination, an amalgam, a blend. And some people (generalists) are wired to breathe and live with this combination, while some (the specialists) like to concentrate on limited skills, and craft themselves a focussed career path -example doctors. We could use the metaphor of single and multi-hue progressions used in choropleth maps for understanding the difference. A single-hue progression is one in which the hue is kept fixed but the luminosity and/or saturation is variable, and a multiple hue progression is one in which many different hues are used at varying level of scales.

Isn’t it a great idea to embrace all the hues of our personality and be whatever we would like to be, pursue whatever interests us and thrive in “OUR” own world. But a lot of us fear embracing our generalist personality, for the fear of standing out from the crowd, self-doubt, losing focus or criticism.

We often like following the crowd, and doing things that are safe rather than doing things that we maybe wired to do. Gradually the forced career seems suffocating and we often lose out on the interest and creativity. Hence we go through anxiety and concern over the lost direction and depleting quality of our life.

But there are real life evidences supporting the fact that it is perfectly possible to voyage various roads side by side while balancing self discovery, without killing potential

In the next blog post we will discuss how to embrace diverse interests and yet be focused.