When I was in elementary school, I was given a Career Aptitude test. After answering a series of ~50 questions, the results showed that I would be best suited for a career in art or accounting. Not too far behind was forest service, writing, event planning, management, banking, and politics.
Really the only category I had a low score in was nursing. NO thanks!
I was so interested in a huge number of topics as a child, that I remember being mostly fascinated in all of the different jobs that were listed. I went home and read every single description – wandering through the careers in my imagination.
What would it be like to be a professor of psychology?
What about a magazine editor? Sounds glamorous!
Ooooh, a rockstar… How do I get that job?
I loved the test, but it did absolutely nothing to help me pick a career at that time.
Are you like me?
Maybe you’ve always been interested in everything. Or you jump from job to job with wild abandon. Or you stick to one booooring job, dreaming of making a huge leap into the unknown.
Welcome to the world of the Scanner. There’s loads of us!
I came across the word Scanner in a book by Barbara Sher. She was a Scanner too and had a huge impact of helping confused, overwhelmed, multipassionate creatives finally find fulfillment in their careers.
(Check out her amazing book “I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It.”)
If you’re new to the Scanner world, the #1 thing to do is REALIZE you are perfectly ok. In fact, you’re better than ok.
You’re awesome!
It’s wonderful to have a ton of different passions and interests. That means you’re alive.
The #2 thing to do is start CREATING a career you love. That means you probably aren’t going to find your dream job on Indeed (sorry).
If you want to create your career, you’ll have to do a lot of creative thinking, planning, and experimenting to find just the right fit for you.
First, write down alllllllll of the careers you have tried and careers that interest you. Take a couple of days to journal about your discoveries. (The journal is the essential tool of the scanner.)
Write down what you need from a career, from the salary requirements, to the day to day activities, to the location, to the time commitment. What do you really want?
Now start taking ACTION towards building your career by diving in.
Experiment. FAIL. And keep going.
Your Dream Career is out there – but you have to build it.