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

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

experiments? Fine, his wife might say. Why don’t you go to MIT and pursue a nice stable career in science?

FIVE SIGNS THAT YOU MIGHT BE A RENAISSANCE SOUL The ability to become excited by many things at once, often accompanied by difficulty choosing A love of new challenges; once challenges are mastered, easily bored A fear of being trapped in the same career or activity for life A pattern of quick, sometimes unsatisfying flings with many hobbies A succ

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

This short list includes just a small number of the Renaissance Souls who have made a name for themselves throughout history:

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.

Winston Churchill (1874–1965):

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

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