My Little Da Vinci Curse
I can turn this around and around, but I still have this feeling that one life won’t be enough for me to try out everything I would like to try. My parents used to call me the 1000-thousand’s question’s boy when I was a little:
- Why does this animal behave like this?
- Why is this object made this way?
- How do we build cars?
That’s the type of questions I could ask all day if you would let me do. That’s how curious I am!
We’re going to see that this trait of my personality which might at first seem to be a quality, can be quite disabling. In this post, I try to illustrate with my personal experience a phenomenon.
The origin of my illness
I would say that this curiosity was initiated by my parents and then fuelled by this incredible new technology democratized in the 2000s: The internet. The time we live in offers unprecedented access to anything you can imagine and makes curious minds like mine very fortunate. However, as I grew up and as I had to make important choices for my future, I’ve started to realize that this abundance of information was sometimes a bit overwhelmed. How to choose between being a filmmaker and create masterpieces seen and loved by millions and be an engineer who builds cutting-edge technology that will help push the boundaries of humanity.
The agony of choices offered by our modern world is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it enables everyone to be educated and to learn almost anything for free. On the other hand, it offers an unprecedented number of possible careers in numerous fields, so much so that it becomes difficult to say that we will spend the rest of our lie in one of them in particular.
When I was in High-school, I’ve thought about being a game designer because I loved playing video games. Then I wanted to do special effects for movies because I was impressed by how these were able to make us artificially feel things through a screen. After seeing the Tv show “Mr.Robot,” I dreamed of becoming a hacker and protect our country from cyber-attacks. Now I’m here, a future electrical engineer that likes writing essays on life, psychology, and neuroscience. It seems that I can’t focus on the activity for an extended period. I like to say that I have a “little Da Vinci Curse.”
The Da Vinci Curse explained
In the book “The da Vinci CURSE: Life design for people with too many interests and talents,” the author Leonardo Lospennato writes that people suffering from the Da Vinci curse are unhappy and frustrated. Why? Because they jump from one activity to another without deep focus. In this case, we can talk about attention disorder, to the extent that switching rapidly from one activity to another feels like learning nothing. Jacks of all trades, masters of none, the saying goes. It’s a bit different for me.
The title is “My little” Da Vinci Curse because I don’t feel like I’m doing too many things at once. I rather focus on one thing at a time, but this one changes over time. When I start a new activity, I feel like this is it! It is what I want to do for the rest of my life! The main problem is that the professional world still belongs to specialists, not multi-talented people. I have this feeling that I need to find my thing. You know, the one :
- you are good at,
- you can be paid to do it,
- that makes you happy for the rest of your life.
I think that the pursuit of true calling will never stop. Each time I enter a new domain, I’m excited by it until I reach the “I-know-I-can-master-it” stage in which my interest drastically reduces. I’m stuck in the Dunning Kruger effect. After a while, I tend to overestimate my ability to perform in a particular field, and the lack of challenge discourages me from continuing, so I start something new. I struggle in finding the right tradeoff between focus and balance, which makes me somewhat inconsistent.
“Inconstancy is the dark companion of those who try to follow too many roads at once” — Leonardo Lospennato.
How to treat it
Unlike true DVC (Da Vinci Curse), I never give up an activity entirely. Sometimes I enjoy taking over the ones I left behind for a while. Yes, life seems easier for people that are born with a “true calling.” Mozart, Einstein, and other genius spent their life focus on what they love doing, and it brings them to the top of their field. However, I think that multipotential people can also find their place in this world. They too can make the most of the situation without being a Leonardo Da Vinci.
In a nutshell, I need to find a single activity that is complex enough to integrate many of my talents, that’s my ultimate goal! Mentalcodex covers only a part of what I like to do. A little part. In fact, I can do much more.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I think it can be a good idea to start a real personal blog. A place in which I can express myself fully. In the end, of all my passions the one that remained consistent over time was the desire to share what I do. Learning in public commits me more to what I do and is an opportunity to help others.
