Are you one of those people that has too many choices in life?  Do you find it difficult to choose a direction in life?  Have you gone down a path only to find you get bored very quickly and regret not going down the other path?

If you’re one these people (like me) who can seemingly invent and find more things to do than there is time to do them in you might be what Barbara Sher calls a ‘Scanner’ in her book ‘Refuse to Choose! : A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love’.

What is a Scanner?  Well, the book describes and goes through all kinds of different types of Scanners out there, but the basic premise is that Scanners are kind of the opposite of specialists.  Scanners are amateurs.  Not in the bad sense of the word which would make you think they are unskilled at what they do, but in the good sense of the word as in the fact that they do things because they love to do them, not because they get paid to do them like professionals.

Some scanners can develop their skills to the point where they surpass the skills of professionals, but they are still amateurs because they do the thing they do more out of love than for money.  For example, your mom might be an amateur cook and she may have cooked thousands of meals for her family because she loved to cook and her food might taste really good, but because she isn’t a cook in a restaurant she’s not technically a ‘professional’.  There is nothing wrong in being a professional, I just wanted to point out the difference in meaning between a professional and an amateur.

Scanners will often pickup hobbies, learn new skills and sometimes become masters in a specific skill, but unlike specialists who then stick to that skill, scanners learn and then move onto something else.  Scanners are multi-talented, they are highly adaptive to change and new environments and can do very well professionally and financially if they set their lives up correctly.  If they don’t, they usually feel lost, ridiculed by our specialist-preferring society and frustrated with their inability to ’settle down’.

If you have felt the frustration of not knowing which thing to pursue out of the many things you’re good at, the answer may not be in choosing one of them, the answer may be in doing all of them.

The book has very excellent ideas on how to accomplish this and I highly recommend it to the ’scanners’ out there.  To give you an idea of how it’s helped me, besides my full time job take a look at the other projects I’m currently working on in my life at the same time in a true scanner fashion:
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1)  I’m currently taking an 8 month self-study course to be a certified nutritionist.

2)  I started to learn how to sketch / hand draw.

3)  I am learning the basics of flying Radio Controlled helicopters.

4)  I am studying a martial art.

5)  I am building this blogging software I wrote myself.

6)  I bought a gas-powered RC Car and will most likely be purchasing another one in a kit format which I’ll be building myself.

7)  I have two part-time website projects I’ll be working on most likely during weekends.

8)  I am planning my wedding coming up this year.

9)  I am working on my Life Planner software which will help me and others to organize their lives.  It should be a great software especially for scanners like me.

10)  I’m writing articles like this one to develop my writing skills and help people.

This is just a list of 10, but there are other things that I’m working on as well.  My point is that after reading this book I no longer feel bad about having “too many hobbies” because there is nothing wrong with it.  The book made me realize that just because society has been organized to value specialists for the last 50 years or so, for thousands of years before that scanners (formerly known as Renaissance men) were revered by society not made fun of.  Leonardo De Vinci was a scanner.  He was an inventor, he was an artist, he was a writer, a philosopher and many other things.  The fact is that although he was all those things, he was an amateur in all of them.  He loved what he did and he didn’t just stick to being an inventor or just to being a painter, he did what he loved and he loved many things.

Do you think you may be a scanner?  If so, read ‘Refuse to Choose! : A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love’ - you will not regret it!

-Paul

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