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

Winston Churchill (1874–1965):

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

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

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

The Renaissance demanded a new kind of person, one well suited to the era’s invigorating atmosphere. This new ideal emerged in Italy from the writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), an architect and art theorist who stated boldly that “a man can do all things if he will.” Alberti dubbed this versatile, highly capable type of human Uoma Unive

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.

Not every Renaissance Soul takes the concept of versatility quite as far as Ben Franklin did, though. Those people who are closer to the middle of the continuum often have a foot in both camps. Some, like my client Matt, may even have one foot on Mozart’s side of the line.

Abū ‘Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham

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