Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

by Barbara Sher

Interest is the sincerest form of respect. It’s the most unself-conscious, authentic way anyone can say “you deserve my attention.”

Scanners love variety because they have brains that process things quickly and are ready for new subjects sooner than other people. They have special abilities in many areas, and they’re built to use them. That’s why somewhere inside, although they hate to be stuck and don’t know how to justify their behavior, Scanners secretly refuse to choose. They sense they’re being stubborn. What they don’t know is that this stubbornness comes from a deep sense of integrity.

A Scanner is like a passionate artist or a great lover.

artists and lovers give their whole hearts to the object of their interest; they hold nothing of themselves back. A Scanner must do the same. As a Scanner, you must always focus completely and give yourself wholly to anything you have chosen. And when you feel the desire to do something different, you must commit yourself to the next thing you want to do.

Curiosity, creativity, and learning are essential to Scanners, and without them they become depressed.

Learn, Try, Teach, Leave.

This! Is what an activator person does. This is what I’m best at. Reading how this formula might work in my personal projects or at work made me have a beautiful aha moment. Very glad to find that learn, try, teach, leave is not being flaky…it’s taking full advantage of my activator and scanner nature :D

Creativity and learning cure burnout. Involvement in a fascinating project will heal you.

What do you really want to know about this area of interest? What would you most enjoy doing with that information (if you had a magic wand)? Who would you love to talk with about this subject if you could talk to absolutely anyone?

Even if it’s only in your imagination, when you think about the reality of doing what you’d love, something happens. That feeling of deprivation you thought you had to live with goes away and you start understanding what it feels like to be satisfied. Soon those assumptions you made about wanting everything, needing a lifetime to investigate each thing you wanted, and most of all, the hopelessness of doing anything at all will be gone, driven away by the bright light of reality. And you’ll be just a step away from ending your self-inflicted deprivation, choosing one of the once-unattainable items of your list and actually starting it. Today.

quit depriving yourself of what your hungry mind has been craving. Enjoy yourself.

It’s one of the biggest tricks our fears play on us: They make us forget how many safe steps you can and should take before you even think of leaving behind what you have.

Defense mechanisms are primitive and powerful, and they think everything new is a survival issue. Right or wrong, they affect you.

Backward Planning

This reminded me of a strategy applied for curriculum design and lesson planning when teaching: backward design: set the goal first and from that end backwards, peel back what needs to be done until you get to the very first baby step to get started. I never thought of applying this same strategy for my personal creative projects :D

If you want to lower your fear level, lower the danger level.

Isolation is the dream killer. It will stop you every time.

If you find that you still have a need to do the “But What If. . . ” routine and you can’t talk yourself out of it, here’s a way to bring in the kind of data to turn your analyzing into something very useful. I call it Reality Research. Instead of wondering if your idea is a good one or a bad one—and going around in circles with an internal debate that can’t be resolved—go after some real answers,

Your subconscious defense mechanisms hear all that excitement as an alarm and try to protect you by making you

crash. You shouldn’t give up at those times because after a while, your interest will return in a calmer form, and you can continue.

There are many reasons Scanners finish before anyone expects them to, but they all have the same pattern: While the interesting part was there to keep them, Scanners stayed. When it was gone, they left.

This feeling is the cause of every Scanner’s unexpected ending. 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. Nothing could be more important than understanding when and why you have this feeling. It’s at the heart of what makes you a Scanner!

If your brain cells are having a good time, they must be hearing their own kind of music. Let them dance.

Start small. Start now. Start everything. And don’t bother to finish any of it.

Boredom is the mind’s way of rejecting anything that lacks nutrients.

Remember, you’re not required to finish everything you start, but you are required to know how.

I’ve identified three types of Cyclical Scanners.

But there’s a part of every Scanner that never grows up.

remind you to do all the things that have no purpose but pleasure:

Learn, Try, Teach, Leave—LTTL—method of project management.

Why do Scanners turn their backs on success? Do they fear it? Are they afraid of commitment? Or is it something simpler than that? Scanners just want to have fun People who want to have fun are different from people who are ambitious.

Scanners love to learn more than they love to “know.”

They pay a high price for that attitude in a culture that focuses on success.

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.

But they have a problem, and it’s a serious one that all Scanners worry about in one context or another. You can’t keep changing careers and build any kind of financial security. And of course, you’ll never be considered an expert at anything.

Scanner definition of variety: fun.

As a Serial Specialist, you’ll accumulate knowledge in more fields every year, and you can use the skills and experiences from each of them to create a wide variety of consulting services—

If you’re a Jack-of-All-Trades, keep in mind that there’s nothing missing from your résumé—you’ve just been looking in the wrong place or, rather, applying the wrong criteria to your abilities. It’s not a title or a huge salary you want: More than almost any other Scanner type, what matters to you is happiness. If you make that your main objective, success will come quicker than you think.

Wanderers are drawn by curiosity.

I believe we all owe a report of our times, our travels, and our viewpoints to generations that follow us.

Robert Frost said: A scholar is someone who sticks to things. A poet is someone who uses whatever sticks to him.

songs were poetry and that poetry is about the meaning of words.

the Good Enough Job can be a relatively mindless but not unpleasant job that leaves you enough time to pursue your interests on your own time.

enjoy their careers but don’t limit themselves to them.

the Sampler understands that the only way to do it all is to do it small.

when a High-Speeder’s ideas are lost, he starts to forget who he is and gets in danger of letting other people define him.

You need to throw yourself heart and soul into something you love and give it your very best effort. You need to push past your boredom barriers and take at least one of your passions to the absolute limit you’re capable of.

you have to learn how to throw your heart into something you love and not ask for it back until you have something to present to the world.