100 Day Project - Day Thirteen

So, I’m relieved (and not entirely surprised) to discover that I am NOT the only one who has several journals on the go at once. Or several reads. No wonder I like these people in my world. Amongst many other lovely things they bring to my life, they validate my quirks!

Interestingly, one of the quotations I shared yesterday was from Barbara Sher who wrote, amongst other titles, ‘Refuse to Choose!’, aimed at people she calls Scanners. I read it about 11 or 12 years ago and it provided one of the many “A-ha!” moments of my life. Scanner. Me to a T.

Scanners are people who, as she describes it, “others have called Renaissance men & women, da Vinci personalities, polymaths, multipotentialites, generalists, people with too many aptitudes, Jacks (& Jills) of all trades, eclectics, dilettantes or flakes.” Not all very complimentary labels, as opposed to Divers, specialists, experts, professionals, the Not-Scanners. But, despite this, the specifics of Scannerdom felt like my experience of the world.

And these are my Scanner-life journals. Those that are currently active. Each serves a slightly different purpose but really, they just represent a myriad of interests and an undeniable obsession with stationery. I realised after I took the picture, I also have a small one in my bag that didn’t make it into the shot and that this doesn’t include the digital ones on my phone and laptop. Eish! It is a bit of an addiction.

I didn’t share the pile of full journals – too many for a single pile – a whole box full in the garage. Nor did I collect the pile of blank books I have in waiting… that would just be embarrassing!

Along with ‘The Renaissance Soul’ by Margaret Lobenstine, this was very useful to me about 12 years ago. After a few rough years and a lot of self-doubt, it supported the reclaiming of a framework and vocabulary for who I am and helped me to feel okay with that, instead of thinking I was broken.

One of the most interesting insights from both reads was that the shift in focus to specialists being associated with success is a relatively recent one. Newer even than I’d fully appreciated. The rise of careers in science and technology, especially following the industrial revolution and again in the 1950’s, meant that arts, humanities and even history were devalued as “luxuries, irrelevant, silly, irresponsible”. For those of us with a bent and aptitude for arts, humanities or history, this was not a good development.

I think the tide is turning again but we’re still facing into some of this, even now. There have always been the renegade “arty” types but the labels for them, us, have remained largely challenging. It’s a slow turning of the wheel. My opinion is that in the future, scanners will be fully appreciated again for what they bring. Not better than Divers. But not worse. Not less successful.

In my work I’m experiencing this change in another form, through the shift from organisations that are considered and consider themselves machines, with individuals being merely cogs that turn them - alongside systems, structures and processes - into a recognition that they’re in fact more akin to living systems: dynamic, multi-faceted, learning, perpetually evolving. I think this is one of those, “Huh, how could it not be obvious?!” things but it’s surprising that many people – several of them fabulously “successful” don’t see it at all. Even now.