New find - A blog for multipotentialites

Over the last few days, I was busy trawling the blogosphere and in the course of my web sojourn, I hit some treasures - lovely, inspiring blogs that truly and absolutely rock.

I am sharing one of these with you today.

Puttylike is a blog that focuses on people with multiple interests and abilities, who often find it hard to dedicate their entire lives to just one pursuit or profession. In short, it is all about multipotentialites and helping them channel their many passions into their life's work. I had never heard of that term before.

I was a 'finger-in-many-pies' kind of person, or rather, a budding 'multipotentialite' as I now know myself to be, right from my school days. I participated in a wide variety of activities ranging from public speaking to group singing (I was not confident enough to sing solo), with everything such as plays, writing and drawing/painting thrown into the mix.

What is even more interesting is that if someone asked me which my favorite subject was,  I would be hard pressed to name one. What was a little more intriguing and a little worrying at times was that there wasn't a subject that I despised either.
I loved history, geography, science, even math and languages which I easily scored high marks in. Even a second language that I was not fluent in did not make it into my hate list. My hate list was empty.

Looking back now, I feel that was a golden period in my life when learning was fun. While marks and competition to be at the top of the class always loomed large, they were not the sole focus of my academic life and that was the secret to success, too.
Later in life, I became too caught up in worries, worries that I had not done enough, worked hard enough or smart enough or as much as my neighbor or enough to make the mark and, of course, worries about results.

In degree college and in working life, I missed the variety that was the part of my life from reading John Keats and Tukaram, Jerome K. Jerome and Munshi Premchand, or learning about Eratosthenes and volcanoes and the French Revolution, along with Henri Becquerel and radioactive theory and cell division, not to mention trigonometry and card game probability.

Laser focus on one area alone bored me quite a bit though I some times wonder if I just chose the wrong major. There were core subjects in college that I enjoyed and grasped very well though. Extra-curricular activities were a part of my college life, too, and I added some sports (badminton) to my repertoire though I was never really an athletic type.

A few months ago, I started reading a book on Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance genius, named "How to think like Leonardo da Vinci" (note: the link points to Amazon.com). In my childhood and early adulthood, I only knew da Vinci as  a legendary painter, the creator of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
The master became a huge inspiration to me after I started learning more about his life from museum exhibits and other sources of information. Imagine trying to learn about the human body when one is not a professional doctor or about the science of flying when one has no formal training in the area.

How many worlds there are still to explore and how many of us even bother to notice patterns of nature around us, be it the constellations in the sky or the behavior of birds in our own backyards?
Most of our knowledge is bookish, it is rather information passed down to us, rather than anything we experience or observe on our own. That, I feel, is the tragedy of our Information Age and the mad race of getting into a good college and establishing a career.

Some of the world's greatest minds, be they scientists or philosophers or many other professionals, were keen observers.
Today, I am inspired all the more to explore, to learn and utilize many more of my talents than I used to in the past.

Do check out Puttylike and the book that I mentioned.

P.S. I just found out that Eratosthenes was a multipotentialite, too, courtesy of Wikipedia.