Member-only story
The Reason I’ve Never Excelled at Anything
I’m a jack of all trades. Sometimes, it’s really useful. You could throw me into almost any situation and I’d find a way to survive.
But I only survive – I don’t thrive.
Author Barbara Sher captured the camp of people I fall into perfectly, when she wrote about the Scanner personality type. Scanners love to start many new things, are keen to learn about anything and everything. But due to waking hours and human energy being finite, we rarely stick to one thing for long.
We are off to the next shiny new thing, rather than developing mastery in one area.
I’m a Scanner, and that makes specialising and drilling down on one focus so hard. It’s against my very nature. The urge to dabble in everything is hardwired into my neural networks.
Saying no to something new that grabs my attention feels like self-punishment. Yet I know I have to start saying no more, or I will never break my toxic cycle of overloading myself and falling short of any meaning success.
Currently I have a full time job, a weekend job, and 3 side hustles. None of them are getting my best effort because I am spread so thinly. But I’m so driven to do this.
