More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Barbara Sher
Read between
March 30 - April 9, 2020
The only true “passion” Scanners have is the passion to use every part of themselves, to exercise their curious brains, to follow anything fascinating until they’ve found out what they wanted to know. And then to leave it.
your genetic mandate is to make many commitments and enjoy each one to your full capacity. One path will never be enough for you.
You possess a valuable eagerness to explore what’s new and an ability to be fascinated where too many people see nothing at all. Those are gifts.
knowledge is like money: You might not know yet what you’ll use it for, but you can be sure it will come in handy sooner or later.
write a first-person, present-tense fantasy of what you imagine your workday will be like. Imagine you are actually in any job you’re considering.
Curiosity, creativity, and learning are essential to Scanners, and without them they become depressed.
you can always find a way to make a job interesting, at least temporarily. Here are a few tricks and tips
1.Set yourself the challenge of finishing your work early, and spend the rest of the time in private explorations that fascinate you.
2.Find a way to do interesting things for the company:
4.Use your job as your social life so you can dedicate yourself to a solitary passion after work.
Before you choose a job, see if it’s compatible with this four-step system I developed for my clients: the LTTL SYSTEM.
The letters stand for Learn, Try, Teach, Leave.
write up a one-page plan for every career or interest you’re considering, using the LTTL System.
Scanners need to learn, to invent, and to tinker with things. That’s how they’re wired. Rarely will a Scanner be happy sticking around to turn the switches on and off or keep the system humming. To require execution and maintenance of Scanners is not a good use of their ability. Talent is hard to find. A smart boss knows and respects it.
Every smart boss wants to hire and hang on to talented people. If you’re around someone who doesn’t care, you’re in the wrong place.
Commit yourself to give everything you’ve got to whatever you do, no matter how little time you have to do it. Holding back isn’t good for anyone, but for someone with energy and imagination, it’s especially unwise.
To feel right, you must commit to the fullest life you’re capable of. With the gifts and resources you’ve been given, any lesser commitment would be a terrible waste of brainpower and talent.
A Scanner can invent her own career. Don’t look on a career list; what you want isn’t there.
when you’re too rushed to think clearly, you lose any sense of what doesn’t have to be done and pile on more work than necessary.
Stress and anxiety are the cousins of fear. Fear comes when you have a sense of danger.
Learn to sort things in your mind as they come at you. “Urgent. Later. Someday. Not possible. Get help on it. Forget it. Yummy.” Just stand there and bat them into the right place.
if you’ve tried to cure burnout by taking time off and doing nothing, you know it doesn’t work. Boredom doesn’t cure emotional exhaustion,
Creativity and learning cure burnout. Involvement in a fascinating project will heal you.
Kids need to see their parents happy. No matter how little time you have, if your kids saw you enjoying yourself, it would be very good for all of you. If they saw you going after a dream, they’d know they wouldn’t have to feel guilty going after theirs. Too much self-sacrifice makes you a bad role model.
be sure you’re not being a camp counselor or a cheerleader; i.e., be real. Really think about those dreams while you talk about them. People will be pulled into your vision if you can imagine what you describe.
Scanners who sincerely want to spend years burrowing deeply into something go ahead and do it. They’re called Serial Specialists,
the prospect of imminent action—making Real Deadlines with your Success Team—will reveal any of your fears. Talking about them gets you nowhere, but action makes them melt away.
Maybe you’re a visionary or a leader. Scanners love beginnings and can set the course and inspire the crew. For them, that’s the only interesting part. They don’t want to take the voyage. They’d rather start something new.
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.
You leave a project because staying would feel intolerable. Staying would be intolerable because nothing you want is there. If you stayed, you’d have to accept being unhappy. And trying to accept being unhappy is just crazy.
When you allowed those feelings to drive you away from a project, you were doing the right thing!
Start small. Start now. Start everything. And don’t bother to finish any of it.
be grateful that you’re a Scanner. Not everyone can have this much fun with nothing but what’s between her ears.
When you’re stuck with a dreary task, use tempting new projects as your reward for finishing uninteresting ones.
Bring in a buddy.
It’s important to know how far you’ve gotten and how far you have to go or your task feels like it stretches to the horizon.
Sometimes you can bring a new approach to the same task—experimentation is always interesting.
observe what you do without judgment and try to understand yourself. The more you know, the better your chances will be of creating the life that fits you perfectly.
The moment Either/Or hijacks our thinking, all of our natural resourcefulness disappears.
Either/Or thinking puts you into a trance. It sneaks in when you’re not looking and monopolizes your thinking with artificial limits. Once it takes over, you don’t even try to imagine better alternatives.
instead of trying to change yourself, you should arrange an environment so that it gives you what you need to function at your best.
But too much of the same kind of problem solving creates a type of vitamin deficiency in
When you’re ambitious, your goal is success, in whatever way your culture defines that word. You stick with something through thick and thin because your eye is on money or prestige or awards.
If you ask them why they walked away from something they were passionately interested in and worked hard at, they’ll tell you they lost interest in it. To everyone around them, that doesn’t make any sense. Who cares? others ask. Do you have to be entertained all the time? Isn’t it time to grow up? And Scanners don’t know how to answer. They just know they can’t do boring things. And they know that they really have no choice.
It’s as though they’re creatures in a science fiction story who fly on a beam of energy, and when they move off the beam, they sicken and fall to the ground. If they get back on that beam, their energy comes back, and they can fly again. For Scanners, that energy beam is almost always some kind of learning, which often involves problem solving and inventing, creating and thinking, or some other variation. What it feels like to a Scanner is fun.
Scanners love to learn more than they l...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
How do I know that Scanners are different from people who reject success for emotional reasons? I know because when you reject what you really want, everything else feels like a poor substitute. But when Scanners reject something, they replace it with something they love more.
Harry loved the experience of living different lives, understanding the inside of someone else’s world through personal experience; Edith loved the excitement and intensity of taking on near-disasters and making them come out right.
Kidder went on to write many books, and every one took him inside an entirely new and different environment. Yet he had one career only, and every book he writes builds that career. Every world he visits is new, but he never has to start his career from the bottom.
Foundation officer: If you have the job of reviewing grant requests in a large philanthropy, you’ll get to know about hundreds of wildly different programs every year, while keeping this one job title.
