Dearest gentle reader!

I turned 34 this week. I'm currently in full vacation mode. And yes, I just finished binging Bridgerton season 3. I'm writing this sipping on tea lovingly made by my maava, sitting on the balcony, listening to bird chirps and lorry honks.

A theme I've been thinking about has been around reinventing oneself. A conversation from 2019 with a close friend of mine came to mind - about being a multipotentialite - people with many creative pursuits and interests. We recognised each other as fellow multipotentialites and discussed how our environment isn't built to foster people like us.

Multipotentialite personalities don't necessarily stem from the lack of excitement from a single topic (in contrast to the Japanese's Shu-Ha-Ri to master something very deeply) but from a deep-rooted want to learn/practice many things. Similar to what Scott Adams advocates - becoming very good in multiple domains, and marrying them together.

Let's jump into this week's edition! Do share the post with your friends :)

-Teej

🍞 Breadwinner meets laser swords

The past week has been crazy hectic on our business front.

First, the elevator gave way, and getting it fixed was a chaotic mess.There were numerous issues with service agreements, delivery timelines, and many he-said-she-said.Things are functional now, but it all feels like a bandaid rather than a permanent fix. We're yet to decide on a course of action for making this more hands-off.

We got a name board laser cut for the building.One of my besties arranged for a visit, where we got to spend some time looking at large machines fire beams of light to melt steel and blow it off with Nitrogen/Argon. Precisely moving according to the design laid out in the control machine, with large gantries to hold up the heavy equipment and rows of spikes to secure the plate steel.

The factory was huge, and it brought up all thoughts of the missed opportunities of being able to work in such a place. We were here on my birthday, and it felt nice to get to see these machines too!

My father had been spitballing a few ideas on organising an educational tour of such factories, to experience what happens in these giant sheds - think Discovery's How It's Made, but in real life.I want to call it a theerthyatra for to-be mech-heads.Would you be interested in such a tour?

🐶 Same, but different

This talk by Randy Deutsch that I had come across years ago, had been instrumental in how I think about my career. My parents have also walked this walk - and shown me first-hand how important it is to have multiple concurrent streams of interests.

I've been a hardware engineer, photographer, software engineer, engineering manager, and now most currently - a real-estate manager. And this list is just the main gigs. The side gigs are far too many to list or count. All in the last dozen years.The single line that connected all part of this career track was me being able to make a difference - and being able to scale this. And all this feels like something I've been doing for myself - and not for somebody else's idea of my life.

What Randy talks about is having a Major/Minor career, and reinventing the minor one every few years - to keep things fresh - to permit yourself to explore things. These concurrent careers give you the room to have multiple creative outlets depending on how the markets/environments are.He calls this "alchemy" - where you're taking apart your skills and passions, and putting them together to reinvent yourself.

He suggests looking at your career as a set of sigmoid curves - you start learning something new and become an expert eventually at it. Somewhere in between, you pick up something new again and jump off to a different curve (the dotted one). Doing this every few years, again, will help you learn a lot more and offer far more opportunities to grow. This also helps you control the trajectory of where you're going.

What are your current side gigs?

💿 Everything is a remix

Speaking of alchemy, this video is my annual watch (there have been previous editions).

When you take something old, and use it in something new - that's remixing. That's creating. To build complex things from simple ideas.

Sampling ideas and combining them into new ways is probably the most defining thing humankind does.From music (video has great resources on it), to stories (what Disney does with folk stories), to memes (no one can deny screenshotting and changing text labels anymore), to software (most are sampled and remixed), to even this language (context is adapted into the medium of communication).The idea of original thought is quite farfetched and rare.Sure there are laws on what is infringement, and boundaries of appropriation, but evolution at its core is about remixing and seeing what works.

Copying ideas is essential to creativity. This is how we learn. This is how we grow.Remixing is not plagiarising - where one takes credit for someone else's work. Remixing is finding another interesting perspective when one puts multiple ideas into the melting pot.

The three important processes while remixing are - copy, transform, and combine.In the context of a home cook, you copy a recipe that has worked for someone else, transform it into your own by switching out ingredients (switching tomatoes to tamarind is something I do often in the kitchen), and combine them to make new things (I reckon vangi-poha was made when someone tried making vangibath and realised they ran out of rice).

Leaving this section with this Omeleto video on an original idea.

🥱 Boredom as a path to fun

Back in 2009, one of my besties and I ended up at IIT Bombay's cultural fest - Mood Indigo. More of my besties were supposed to come, but life happened, and they didn't show up. We were part of a larger contingent from my college and didn't gel too well with them.To beat the boredom on the train, we spoke about weird and crazy possibilities. Like how the Hindu lunar calendar would look if the Earth had 2 Moons. Or what the course of evolution would look like if electron clouds formed just a little bit differently. The ideas were truly mind-boggling for a pair of 19-year-olds. I wish we had written them down!

We ended up taking all the workshops at the fest. And I mean all of them.We explored DJ-ing, juggling, and a lot more, and found we were quite good in a few. Enough to consider alternate career paths if software wasn't our thing anymore.

I think I'm at those crossroads now. Software doesn't spark that joy - at least working in a software company doesn't. And this has given me a chance to get bored with things. To find joy in just doing things. To have fun.

Our environment too isn't conducive to boredom at all! Entertainment is so accessible, that the consumption of content is magnitudes higher than the creation of content. All because we don't allow ourselves to sit idle and get bored anymore.

Slide into my DMs if you have ideas around this

🧮 Being a polymath

And finally, on how to balance all these interests. I came across this video recently, which sparked the thread in my head.

Embrace your inner multipotentialite, and understand that you may have an array of interests.Once you're able to come to terms with this hit me up (just kidding, but I would love to know what your current passions are).

The key learning I've had is that not all hours of the day are created the same for an individual. Different tasks are meant to be scheduled or pursued at different energy levels. Example: It's easier for me to write at sunset than to write first thing in the morning, while I feel sleepless after working out in the evening.Understanding this internal clock, and energy bar is key to being able to pursue multiple passions.

Other things like timeblocking, pomodoros etc will help to stay on track, and systems like setting SMART goals will make sure you don't get overwhelmed.

A periodic stock listing of your passions can also help focus on what's interesting currently, and park your other ideas or close some loops.I haven't practised this well enough to preach, but documenting the journey can help pick up things where you left off instead of restarting things from scratch.

Errata / Updates

* I wasn't able to stream this week. I'm vacationing too hard 😅

* Some of you loved the Masalapuri story. Hope the instagram feed sparks joy too! I will eventually get this rolling ❤️

* A few of you resonated with the kids these days section. This was heavily inspired by Ryan Holiday's Daily Dad.

End Note

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34.00 - On being a multipotentialite

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