How to Be Everything

Since you were a kid, people have been asking what you want to be when you grow up, and the question assumes there is a single, ready-made answer waiting to be discovered. For many people, it becomes a lifelong nuisance. You pick one thing at eighteen, when you apply to college, and then realize your mind is already interested in five other things.

Emilie Wapnick wrote this book for those people. Her premise is that the problem might not be you, but the question itself. Instead of looking for a profession that explains everything you are, she proposes viewing a variety of interests as a legitimate trait, with advantages and costs that can be managed.

The book is a practical guide full of exercises and examples of real people, not an academic thesis. The goal is to finish reading with tools to build a work life that fits your curiosity.

There is a very popular story that every person was born for just one thing and that happiness at work depends on finding it. Movies, commencement speeches, and family advice repeat this constantly. As a result, anyone with multiple interests feels defective, as if they lost the map everyone else received.

The author challenges this belief. To her, the single calling is a cultural narrative, useful for some and oppressive for others. Some people truly find fulfillment by diving into one specialty for decades, but that is neither the only possible path nor the most natural one for everyone.

Accepting this has an immediate practical effect: you stop wasting energy looking for the right answer and start asking how to organize your life around what genuinely interests you. The search stops being a test you are failing and becomes a design project.

Wapnick uses the word multipotentialite to describe someone who has many interests and talents and feels drawn to all of them at the same time. It is a coined term meant to give a name to a common experience. The author explains that the concept connects with older ideas, such as the polymath, a person who masters diverse fields, and the generalist.

The name matters because words help organize experience. Many people spend years thinking they are indecisive, immature, or lazy, when in fact they simply operate differently. Having a label that describes the situation without judging it relieves guilt and opens up space to talk about it with friends, bosses, and family.

The book makes it clear that this is neither a diagnosis nor a rigid identity. It is a language tool for anyone who recognizes themselves in the description and wants to stop measuring themselves by the yardstick of people who chose just one thing.