I’d like to share an idea with you. First, a personal story.
I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. I never had a ‘group’ in high school and would typically bounce around from one clique to the next during lunch. I’ve always hovered the perimeter at parties and tend to have a diverse social graph. This diversity and lack of groundedness has translated to my interests. Thematically I’ve always been drawn to creative and philosophical domains, but I tend to go deep on a wide array of topics, with each deep dive leading me to another.
Professionally, this has translated to a broad yet thematically connected range of skills and knowledge. I’ve always had difficulty (and a resistance to) communicating what it is I actually do, always with the underlying fear of being simplistically labeled.
In the last five years I’ve come to terms with this. And in many ways, embraced it. I’m comfortable not being ‘understood’ and being ‘an acquired taste.’