2026-07-30 · 4 min
A fair word on multipotentialites
The name helps some people exhale. The research underneath it is thinner than the talks.
Emilie Wapnick gave a great many people a word, multipotentialite, for the experience of having several real interests and feeling scolded for it. Her book How to Be Everything is practical where a lot of career talk is fog. She offers ways to arrange a life around more than one center: a group of roles that share a theme, a slash of two jobs, a sequential life in chapters. Readers who had been told to “just pick” recognized themselves and stood up straighter. That is a real service.
It is also fair to say the word is a name, a community, and a set of strategies, and that it is not a diagnosis with a stack of clinical trials behind it. Vocational psychology already had language for people who score high on more than one Holland type. Those people are common. The hexagon expected them. What Wapnick added was permission and a set of designs for the week. Permission matters. Designs matter. The designs can be judged by whether the rent is paid and the person still likes their Tuesday.
The risk of the identity is that it becomes an explanation for never finishing the dull middle of a skill. Every interest has a phase, described by Hidi and Renninger elsewhere in this journal, where the sparkle drops and the work remains. Multipotentiality can be a true description of range and also a place to hide from that phase. The test is local. Did you leave because the fit was wrong, or because you reached the part where beginners look clumsy?
A map helps more than a label here. Put the interests down. Draw only the lines you can defend with a story from the last year. If five interests produce two real lines, you have a range with a shape. If they produce none, you may be collecting beginnings. Collecting beginnings is a pleasant hobby. It is a hard way to become trusted.
Use the word if it lets you stop apologizing. Then do what Wapnick actually recommends, which is structural: choose a pattern for the year, give each interest a container, and let one of them be the rent for a while. Your Calling Compass will draw the containers as clusters. The calendar is still yours.
Sources
- Emilie Wapnick, How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up. HarperOne, 2017.
- John L. Holland, Making Vocational Choices. Psychological Assessment Resources, 1997.