Scanners:
For some reason this felt appropriate today. It’s pretty long so I’ll post it in an extended link.
Scanners
“Scanners want to taste everything. They love to learn about the structure of a flower, and they love to learn about the theory of music. And the adventures of travel. And the tangle of politics. To scanners, the universe is a treassure house full of a million works of art, and life is hardly long enough to see them all.
Robert Frost defined divers and scanners very neatly when he said “A scholar is someone who sticks to something. A poet is someone who uses whatever sticks to him”
Because our culture values the diver’s specialization and determination, we too often think of scanners as people who simply won’t get down to work.
This is a foolish cultural oversight.
If you’re a scanner, you have extraordinarily special and valuable skills. You love what is new, and you don’t suffer from fear and indecisiveness. You’re highly adaptable to new cultures; you’re so flexible you can turn on a dime. You’re a lightning-fast learner, curious about anything you don’t already understand; you like and respect all kinds of thinking. Although you may be unwilling to dedicate yourself to one path, you don’t lack discipline or have a low IQ. On the contrary, you’re dedicated to learning all that you can, and you’re intelligent enough to delight in all that you learn.
Having It All: At Once
In many cases, the only problem for scanners is finding the kind of work that will allow them to use their talent for scanning.
Career aptitude tests tend to miss scanners.
Take Jack, for instance.
Jack went to the most respected career testing service he could find. His tests showed he was equally skilled in music, nature, mathematics, science, and literateure. As a matter of fact, there was no subject for which he showed no aptitude!
Tha career counselors who tested him told Jack there was no way around it, he’d have to make a choice. “You can be a musician, a science teacher, a mathematician, or an editor in a publishing house. Which one do you want?”
Jack knew he woulnd’t be happy at any of them: “I’ve never gotten past Anything 101. In college, when I would take second and third courses in some discipline, like pre-med, or French literature, I’d feel like I was on a detour, off my path. What I really loved was the Overview, the sense of where philosophy belongs in a person’s life, or history belongs, or physics, for that matter. Once I’d get something located, I wanted to look at something else.
“My advisors didn’t know what to do with me. They called me a perennial student. But I couldn’t make a choice. I racked up so many credits they had to graduate me after a while. And there I was, no wiser than before about what I was supposed to be when I grew up.”
Jack wandered for a few years, until he accidentally stumbled into a writing assignment for a newsletter to be handed out at a convention for inventors. He really enjoyed interviewing all the different inventors for this article, so he went looking for other writing assignments.
That was twenty years ago. Today Jack is a successful freelance writer, and he loves his life. He just got back from touring the Far east with the American opera company, and this fall he’ll be on Mont Blanc in France with a group of French mountian climbers to write about their climb.
Jack is – and you might be – a popularizer. He can learn about biology, but what he likes to do with his knowledge of biology is translate it to the word- he’s a communicator. He’s a teacher.
It can take time and ingenuity to find a scanner’s niche, work that accomodates all of a scanner’s many interests. But the results are worth it
Scanners are poets – and librarians, documentary filmmakers, explorers, brilliant salespeople, good managers, naturally gifted teachers.
We’re trained to believe that we only get one choice in our lives. But to scanners one choice sounds like someone’s saying “You can have a coloring book or you can have crayons, but you can’t have both,” and they’re onto something. Scanners know that life is not stingy. If anything, life is too generous. The choices are dizzying.”
Barbara Sher, I Could Do Anything, If I Only Knew What It Was. P. 102-104