How would it feel to forget about finding your big passion and enjoy the delightful fact that you can learn anything you like and your life will be filled with variety and excitement?
This feeling is the cause of every Scanner’s unexpected ending. The dread of being locked away from their main source of energy and joy – learning, discovering, sleuthing, creating – makes Scanners pull back from every job or project, no matter how hard they try to stay.
Bitterness isn’t as authentic as it looks. Believe it or not, one of the reasons we choose to feel bitter is because it’s easier than feeling pain. It makes us feel tough. Being bitter gives the illusion that you’re fighting, that you’re not taking defeat lying down. But bitterness is a log jam. It won’t let you get moving.
You see, you’re not someone without direction; you’re an investigator, and the whole investigative process consists of learning a little bit about everything that looks interesting to you. If you respect your natural curiosity, you’ll come to trust your enthusiasm. It knows something about you. Your trail of enthusiasms is the most precise instrument you have for locating where you’d find the deepest satisfaction in your life.
When you lose interest in something, you must always consider the possibility that you’ve gotten what you came for; you have completed your mission.
But the main reason Scanners are different from others, and the reason they get noticed for not sticking to anything, is because they learn faster than almost anybody.
You might find the perfect combination of all your interests and have a very enjoyable career. Or you might discover that what you really love is learning itself.
Boredom is the mind’s way of rejecting anything that lacks nutrients.
Maybe coming up with ideas is just the way your brain dances. Instead of thinking “This could be a great opportunity for success!” why not enlarge the meaning of “opportunity” to include the Good Feeling? As in: “This could be a great opportunity for my brain to boogie!
Although it may not seem finished to anyone else, it’s finished to you. It’s your project. You did it by choice. You have the right to decide when you’re done.
No, being too busy isn’t your reason for keeping clutter in your life. Uncomfortable though it may be to have so much unfinished work surrounding you, you keep those magazines and broken antiques because all that potential feels nice. Now take one more step in your thinking and what you’ll find is a tiny but powerful fear of commitment.
Let’s end the notion that ideas have no value unless they turn into a business or have some other practical use.
Remember that to yourself, you are and always will be the strongest element in your environment. That’s why any job, right or wrong, will teach you important lessons about yourself. The truth is that personal development is the real reason you should be working in the first place.
Since then I’ve come to believe you don’t always have to use things you love, and it’s not always so practical to be so practical. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize that all that delicious dilettantism pays its way as much as any degree in medicine or engineering, by making me remember every day – whenever I pick up a book or watch the Science Channel or try to read a map of Asia for no particular reason – that life is amazing and there is no end to the wonder of it.
And be grateful that you’re a Scanner. Not everyone can have this much fun with nothing but what’s between her ears.
Remember, whenever too many people fail a requirement, there’s nothing wrong with them, there’s something wrong with the requirement.
The problem is that most of us have limited our imagination to what we have been told is possible – and usually we’ve been told by people without much experience.
Start small. Start now. Start everything. And don’t bother to finish any of it.
When you know chances are good that you will not be working on a project again, you simply gather together all the parts, wrap them up in a parcel of brown paper, and tie it with a string. Then attach a large label explaining what the project is, what the goal was, at what stage the project has been put away, and, should it ever be continued, what the next steps should be.
In your fantasies you imagine that you’d love to have all the clutter gone so you could relax, but in fact, nobody really wants to relax. Not for very long, anyway. Everybody needs something to do.