In the name of God
For years, I kept hearing the same sentence from different people:
“Choose one field and go all the way.”
It wasn’t bad advice. It made sense.
For a while, I thought I should do exactly that.
The problem was that I didn’t know which field to choose.
Not because I didn’t like anything.
Quite the opposite.
I liked too many things.
Music, cinema, graphic design, storytelling, programming, photography, and many other things that could each take years of a person’s life.
But most people I talked to seemed to agree on one thing:
If you get closer to one field, you have to move away from the others.
And I didn’t like that part.
Because for me, choosing one thing didn’t feel like simply choosing it.
It felt like losing several others.
For a long time, I couldn’t choose.
The thought of spending the rest of my life in a single field, staying within the same boundaries, scared me more than it reassured me.
For a while, I thought maybe the problem was me.
Maybe I was careless.
Maybe I wasn’t responsible enough.
Then I started looking for answers.
I talked to different people.
I read.
And slowly, I realized I wasn’t alone.
A friend and a teacher recommended a book to me:
Breadth or Depth.
I found the book interesting, but one idea stayed with me more than anything else.
Some environments can be understood through clear and predictable rules, like chess.
Others don’t work that way.
You can’t always find one clear rule for everything that happens inside them.
Work, life, art, and many of the things we deal with every day are much closer to this second kind.
In such environments, perhaps depth alone is not enough.
At least, not depth in a single field.
Maybe breadth matters too.
Being broad, however, doesn’t mean being a jack of all trades.
Broad people are not necessarily superficial.
They can become deeply skilled in one or several fields while continuing to learn from others.
They can bring things together that don’t usually belong together.
Later, I found another name for people like this:
Multipotentialites.
I don’t know how important the name itself is.
But finding it was important to me.
Very important.
ــ Taha Avin