My good-girl-following-instructions penchant left me completely lost for what I’d say was a good 10+ years. I’d channelled every ounce of teenage self towards getting a scholarship at a prestigious university (a double degree in communications/ law, thanks for coming) and once I got there, I hated it with the ferocity of a thousand suns.
And while I tried to stick it out (don’t worry, I didn’t suffer long- I think I grated along for 6 weeks in total 😆) it suddenly occurred to me that studying this whole legal jargon stuff wasn’t a game. That this subject / area / focus was what I was meant to do for life.
The horror of it. Gross. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me?!
Fast forward to driving two states across Australia and a ferry ride home in my 1986 4-Speed Mitsubishi Colt with the faux cow skin seat covers I was, as Bon Jovi so accurately prophesized (not) halfway there, but for sure livin’ on a prayer.
The make it, I swear, came quite a long while later (and truthfully, perhaps it’s still in progress)
I don’t have words to describe the atmosphere of my 20’s but the closest that I can get is “untethered, without a clue, prone to self-flagellation with a side dish of self-loathing”.
I was both unwillingly and willingly (we contain multitudes) released from all systems and structures that I had relied on for certainty and support (school, university, the usual 9-5) and to be blunt, had no idea what the hell to do with my life.
I did some cool stuff if you read it off the box but I was anxious, unsure, and constantly chewing at my own insides.
I went from being ‘person with the perfect scores at school’ to the person people made fun of because there was ‘yet another thing that Jane was trying’. I would love to say that I wore that badge proudly, but the truth was, I wanted to die of shame.
I did not see my wildly curious, smart, creative, innovative, inquisitive mind as an asset. I just couldn’t understand why it was so intolerable to me to follow the beaten path, to stick at things (that I really wasn’t into), or to live in the ‘normal and regular way’.
But it really was all that: intolerable of the want to scratch your skin off kind. In all the ways you can imagine.
So when people speak to me about feeling unmoored or worried their making a mistake by blowing up their life / wanting more / changing course / following their curiosities, I understand more than I might let on.
And I frankly didn’t expect to find myself liberated at 47 years of age (I was going to write 46 but then I realised I’d had a birthday and self-corrected), picking up horse poo in the paddock in the freezing arse mud, interviews between cognitive scientists beaming into my earballs, to be the place of my new found liberation.
Because get THIS tattooed on the back of your hand:
The whole notion the specialisation is a farce.
Well, I mean, not completely.
But it’s certainly not the only route to meaningful work
If you want to be a surgeon or a golfer or a chess player, then concentrated amounts of defined and narrow practice in stable and predictable environments create what appears to be freakishly accurate intuition for what comes next.
But for those of us who live, work and think outside of closed circuits or place of predictable patterning and process (**raises hand and flaps it all around**) breadth of skill rather than a singular focus has been shown to be the foundation of creative achievement.
In those environments (read: most of life), the ability to draw from several fields- to carry an idea from one place and introduce it somewhere it has never met before- can become an enormous advantage.
Turns out: Breadth is not the poor cousin of expertise.
And as I shout that into the hills behind me currently full of grazing sheep, this one’s for my people in the back row:
There are those of us who have spent YEARS convincing ourselves that we are commitment phobes or flakes or that we perhaps don’t seem to be able to sort out this whole singular interest / career / life out.
We start something new, mentally subtract our so-far twenty-seven hours from the sacred 10,000 and conclude that we are approximately 9,973 hours away from being allowed to call ourselves anything close to proficient, let alone ‘an expert’.
Except the 10,000-hour rule isn’t actually a rule.
Not in the way we were sold it, anyway.
(A side note here: A large meta-analysis examining deliberate practice across music, games, sport, education and professional work found that practice matters, but that the amount of performance it explains varies wildly between fields).
And in case you’re getting twitchy: this is not an argument against practice. You still have to do the work.
It is an argument against treating human ability like a Tesco Clubcard, where inserting the prescribed number of hours eventually causes mastery to drop from the sky and clunk us on the head.
Practice is part of it. But so are opportunity, motivation, feedback, temperament, context, previous experience, your particular brand of body and brain, and the strange accumulation of apparently unrelated things you have learned while wandering around this spinning rock of a planet hurtling in ways I struggle to compute.
Which means there is something else available to those of us with peculiar, winding collections of skills, fascinations and experiences:
We have more material to connect.
You are allowed to be a person with multiple and varied skills and interests. And that is not your weakness. Quite the opposite. It’s your secret superpower. And it makes you, well… interesting.
I know when I started drawing, that it improved my writing in ways I could never have predicted. That someone seeing my process literally laid out in front of me as an image; to see this physical progression- from the drawing version of a shitty first draft that looked like a piece of clip art to something that looked full bodied and real- gave me so much more grace for bits of writing that appeared at first to be clunky and unchewable. They were just at the clip art stage.
The same for the moments when I’ve been working and people have asked me “how to do what I do” as far as coaching and teaching; I’ve never known quite what to say.
I think of how my travel split open my mind, and the mental illness in my family from an early age made me understanding and compassionate of the lurgies we wrestle with, and how playing with my horses taught me about energy and pressure that applies directly to any and all conversation I ever have with humans.
That we’re allowed to be, supposed to be people with depth and breadth and range.
And for some of us, that makes who we are and exactly what we do hard to define. Which is as it should be.
It turns out, people like us are exactly what is needed.
We might be living on a prayer, but I can now confidently bish bosh out the next part:
We will make it, I swear.
Thank you, Mr. Jovi.
xx Jane
PS. Got thoughts? I’d love to hear them. Replying makes me feel loved and like I’m not speaking into the void (#needy). And I’ll reply to you, ya know. A big ol’ conversation!
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