The Renaissance Soul: How to Make Your Passions Your Life—A Creative and Practical Guide

you may have a long history of beating up on yourself when you dropped one passion for another. You may have fallen into the trap of thinking that your different choices must have been the wrong choices. This is usually far from the case. One of the best ways to dispel uncertainty is to clarify what you value.

Because we love a good challenge, we tend to define success and completion differently from other people.

Not everyone will understand your desire to move on to new challenges. You can always remind these people of Leonardo da Vinci. Nowadays, he’d probably be considered a failure because he left the The Last Supper unfinished, or because he was satisfied simply with having designed a helicopter instead of having his flying machine mocked up, market te

When her parents wanted to get her attention, they often rattled off three or four other names before finally coming up with the correct one, and most outsiders couldn’t remember her name at all.

proud. And yes, there was a brief period in the history of time—basically, the latter half of the twentieth century—when a person could be hired fresh out of school by a large corporation and steadily climb that corporation’s ladder to more and more money and perks, until he (and sometimes she) retired with a good pension and absolutely no financia

Most people dread the difficult time spent moving up the front end of the learning curve. Not the Renaissance Soul! We are most fully engaged when learning something new and discovering how it works.

Renaissance Souls much prefer a work process that’s less restrictive, one that allows us to grow and evolve. We need lives and—yes—flexible plans that allow us to change direction and to respond eagerly to new possibilities. We enjoy stretching in directions we had no idea we’d turn.

They don’t understand that the choices they’ve left behind could well have been good ones they’ve simply outgrown.

Her name? Maya Angelou! Here’s what she has to say, one swan to another: “I think we’ve done a real disservice to young people by telling them, ‘Oh you be careful. You’ll be a jack-of all-trades and a master of none.’ It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I think you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a mistress-of-all-trades. If you study it, and