Why Zyn, Espresso, And ADHD Might Be Your Superpower
And How The Future Probably Belongs To People With A Ton Of Random Interests
There exists, among the industrious, the LinkedIn-optimized (cringe), and the grotesquely “goal-oriented,” a certain dogma—a kind of leftover Protestant work-ethic residue that stubbornly clings to the modern labor economy like gum to a hot sidewalk—or like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi to sabotaging the future. This dogma insists that specialization is not merely good but holy. You must pick a lane. You must stay in it. You must refine your skillset into something so ruthlessly efficient that it could, theoretically, be measured in quarterly profits.
Which, of course, is catastrophic news for the multipotentialite—that curious, genre-fluid heretic who insists on treating the world like an all-you-can-eat buffet of intellectual curiosities. But here’s the delicious irony [cracks fingers over keyboard]: it’s the polymaths, not the tunnel-visioned, who actually drive human progress.
History is littered with these frenetic, caffeinated, Zynned-out-of-my-brains pinballs, these people who—rather than burrowing into a single, marketable niche—found ways to connect seemingly disparate fields into world-altering innovations. I call them human brand confusions—but they’re in good company. Da Vinci was doodling anatomical sketches between fresco commissions. Steve Jobs was crossbreeding calligraphy with computer science. Bro, even Einstein was a patent clerk moonlighting as a physicist.
Of course, society's allergic reaction to generalists isn’t new. Ever since the Industrial Revolution turned us all into replaceable cogs, the ideal worker has been one who can do one thing—efficiently, mechanically, and (if possible) without asking too many questions. But here’s the problem: the 21st-century economy doesn’t run on factories anymore—it runs on ideas. And ideas don’t live in silos.
Multipotentialites—those defiant, omnivorous weirdos—are uniquely equipped to thrive in this environment, not despite their varied skillsets but because of them. They’re the ones who can stitch together engineering and philosophy, data science and poetry, AI and ancient wisdom. They’re the ones who actually see the whole chessboard. And yet, despite all evidence, society continues to mislabel them, stuffing them into the dusty old “jack-of-all-trades” box—a phrase which, hilariously, everyone misquotes. (The full version? “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.” Kind of changes the whole thing, doesn’t it?)
So what’s the move for Multipotenialites? Here is my biggest thought:
