When I was a young kid I was brought up to always strive for excellence in academic subjects and in sport, although it applied to most other areas as well.

Perhaps the area in which this strive for excellence had the biggest impact on me is the academic. Education in Malta in my time was very competitive, with exams being a do or die affair that determined whether you would advance to the next year or not.

Failing, especially in the year end exams, was pretty much unacceptable as it would mean a ruined summer studying for the resits in September, potentially losing all friends if you fail to advance to the next year, and feeling like a total failure. Not to mention the scolding to be received from parents and teachers for not trying hard enough.

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I thought I’d share my thoughts on how the Coronavirus situation will be affecting the world in the coming weeks and months from different perspectives.

The key takeaway from all that is happening, in my opinion, would be this:

Don’t panic, but don’t stick your head in the ground like an Ostrich either.

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Over the course of the past couple of years, I’ve learned to identify myself as a multipotentialite. I’ve known since my childhood that I was different from most people in that I had an insanely varied and ever-changing range of interests, but I never knew how to explain why.

Reading recent books like Refuse to Choose and regular psychotherapy has helped me understand my characteristics better.

There were many times why I wondered what was wrong with me for always having too many things I wanted to do and seemingly never going to the very end in any project I undertook. There seemed to be some hidden finish line where my heart would suddenly decide that I’ve done enough of this thing and it’s time to move on to the next. My heart and my mind used to be at odds as I would interpret this as a failure and struggle to understand why I’m finding it so hard to continue investing time and energy into something I was obsessed about just a few months ago.

In the light of multipotentiality, this all makes sense, so here’s some more information about multipotentialites, scanners, or renaissance souls; all these terms refer to the same kind of person.

Typical multipotentialite traits:

• Have an unusually wide range of interests and a low tolerance for boredom
• Change jobs, careers and/or fields of study more often than most
• Follow their energy and inspiration more easily than a schedule or calendar
• Either have lots of diverse projects on the go at once, or bury themselves in one project until they lose interest and move on to something different
• Are better at starting projects than finishing them
• Prefer variety rather than concentrating on one single thing
• Will lose interest in a topic or task when they’ve learned what they wanted to know or achieved a particular goal
• When they reach a goal or level of success, they decide to change to something different, rather than going deeper into the same subject or project

Do you identify with the above? It can be a revelatory moment to understand that you’re not alone and there’s nothing wrong with you. I highly suggest working with a psychotherapist once you’ve identified as a multipotentialite, so you can get past any negative emotional feelings about yourself and flourish.

Some further resources that will help:

• The Creative Introvert podcast

I frequently get asked why I blog so regularly, especially in the age of Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and all the other social media platforms that are all about short form and quickly digested content.

In this post, I’ll explain why blogging is by far the most rewarding activity for me online.

A Lifelong Journey

Since my early childhood, I remember loving to read and write. To me it seems like a natural process to read, digest the information, and then come up with my conclusions and write them down. Writing things down helps me organize my thoughts better. At any point in time I am usually reading about several different topics, and unless I take the time to write things down, I feel like things are all jumbled up in my head and I can’t make the best out of the new information I’m consuming.

As I grew older, with the introduction of the internet and computers, I found myself extremely comfortable storing my writing electronically. There was no longer a need for diaries and the risk of my writing getting lost. Online and in electronic form I could take backups, easily edit my writing, and organize it in a logical way.

The real game-changer for me, however, was the introduction of the internet and the fact that I could put out my thoughts to the whole world. I feel much more comfortable writing about something than speaking about it, and feel that I can communicate better using this medium. By putting my thoughts out to the world, I got the opportunity to meet like-minded people and get feedback on my ideas.

Ever since my son was born, I also feel that by recording many of my thoughts and decisions on this blog and other private journals (I use Day One for that), my children will have a nice record of what their parents did and why they did it. It’s a kind of autobiography of sorts [Read more…]