It’s Okay to Want to Eat the World

My name is Regina Lankenau and I suffer from Fickle Passion Disorder.

Hiiii Reginaaaa.

You may recognize the disorder for its symptoms: the eureka moment, where, eyes shining with unbridled enthusiasm, you learn of a new Thing — a new Thing that just clicks with you, moves you, turns the gears in your mind. You then share this Thing, at 1000 words a minute, to anyone and anything that will listen. A new Thing that you spend hours and hours researching, devouring any iteration of it — books, articles, movies, products —so that you can learn everything about it. A new Thing that becomes an obsession, a 24/7 plague on your mind, or worse — dare I say — a new Passion.

You might ask, well, what’s wrong with being passionate? Isn’t passion what everyone — from college admissions officers to your wife — is looking for?

The problem isn’t so much passion, but the inability to stick with just one. People will tell you that the idea of the Renaissance Man is dead. In other words, if you don’t have a deep specialty you’re good at, you’re practically useless. People want depth, not breadth and there is no longer space for the Leonardo da Vinci’s of this world in the workplace.

This is something I’ve been hearing since day one. Whenever I would tell my mom I wanted to be a writer but also work at the United Nations and fly to the moon, well, she would tell me with a knowing smile:

“No trates de comerte el mundo, mijita.” Don’t try to eat the world.

It’s a phrase that has been iterated to me time and time again by family and friends who felt my passions were too scattered, my dreams too far-fetched, or my time and focus stretched too thin. My older brother, in his sagacity, often looks at the 27 tabs open on my laptop in disgust, telling me there is no way I can truly need so many tabs open (I don’t tell him that there’s actually four different Google Chrome sessions with the same amount of tabs open at the same time). Though I argue that I keep them open because I want to be able to return to them in the future, he argues that 1–3 “solid” tabs with the pertinent website I actually need in that moment are much more effective and don’t slow down my laptop.

It’s true. I mean, even I’ll admit that I don’t always return to tabs I’ve left open for days or even weeks. But there is just something about closing a tab that feels so…permanent. So effacing. Knowing my forgetfulness, I can never guarantee that I’ll remember to Google that exact search word or arrive at that golden nugget of a website again.

Perhaps, it is truly representative of who I am. For every project I’ve done in my life, there are 10 carcasses of forgotten passion projects and ideas I’ve left in its wake. For every passion I take on — North Korean human rights, 20th century literature, space, mountaineering, Zumba, nuclear weapons, UX design, etc. —there are countless hours of time I could have spent on another passion that I’m choosing to sacrifice. In classic microeconomic theory (yes, I’m taking Microeconomics right now), it’s the opportunity cost of being an extremely passionate person that worries my family and friends who feel I will be filled with shallow puddles of knowledge in many fields rather than a meaningful ocean of knowledge in one specific area.

However, I argue that perhaps it is this Fickle Passion Disorder that has gotten me to where I am today. In fact, as noted by Brain Pickings in this article,

“Creativity is a combinatorial force — it thrives on cross-pollinating existing ideas, often across divergent disciplines and sensibilities, and combining them into something new, into what we proudly call our ‘original’ creations.”

Being a genius is to be original, for to be a genius you must have come up with something no one else has thought of. However, as we all know, no idea is really new, it’s simply an old idea recycled into something different. So many people are exposed to the same things, but it’s the person that manages to find the link between uncommon things that creates something new and world-changing.

In fact, this is something that I’ve found as a common theme in the best works of my peers at Princeton University. The essays, projects, and ideas that most stand out to me (and to faculty) seem to be those that are the most creative and outside of the box: those that combine ideas from multiple disciplines to arrive at a revolutionary conclusion. It’s those kind of ideas that leave you scratching your head wondering how you didn’t come up with that. Rather than simply specialize in Mathematics or History, mathematicians are minoring in Creative Writing and spending their free time rock climbing while historians are researching the game theory of political affairs and reading up on biophysics. It truly is an age of anything goes, and the more kooky the concoction of interests, the more interesting (and successful) the person.

Despite so many people still believing that being a dabbler of many things is useless and a waste of time/resources/energy, it seems that those at the forefront of breakthroughs have picked up on this need for pattern-recognition that only comes from melding different fields. Yale University offers classes and talks on the physics of dance and competitive, innovative companies like IDEO employ people that are T-shaped: people who are deeply specialized (the stem of the “T”) but who can collaborate across varied disciplines (the top of the “T”).

However, that doesn’t mean that I believe being a well-rounded generalist rather than an expert specialist will get you immediately hired or accepted into your dream school. I still believe that one must become specialized in at least one thing (or have one focused passion) in order to achieve anything tangible. My brother was definitely on to something when he scoffed at my tabs — as evidenced by the subsequent crash and forced reboot of my computer.

While having a hundred different “passions” may be taking it too far (and ultimately ineffective), exploring side-hobbies and smaller passions is a key part to being able to make creative connections and useful solutions to problems. It not only allows us to keep feeding that hunger for knowledge and learning (a hunger that too often stops after one joins the world of cubicles and business suits), but it opens our minds to new worlds that each have something to teach us. A designer can learn a lot about creating a product from the way an engineer or an entrepreneur views the world, just as a world leader could use a psychologist’s perspective to understand human decision-making or a biologist’s mentality to understand climate change.

Maybe I won’t be able to eat the whole world in one bite, but at least I can taste it.