I spent a glorious week in New York City earlier this month. My best friend from college lives in hipper-than-thou Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I spent a few days with her getting to know that neighborhood and its denizens pretty well. Then I spent a weekend in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, where my best friend from high school got married. As we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house marveling at the architecture, and biking the Laurel Highlands that surrounds it, I struck up conversations with intellectuals from Japan, Russia, Israel, France, Italy and the UK. When I returned to Brooklyn, I ate up my favorite Middle Eastern delicacies and gobbled up conversations about great works of literature and laughed my ass off as artist-musician-writer types joked satirically about mass American culture. 

I’ve been cursed my whole life with being both right- and left-brained. Not a lot of people can go from designing a new website to working with raw demographic data tables for an unrelated project. I loved logic and trig while being a total art kid in high school. In college, I double-majored in philosophy and art, though I have to admit I could see no use for aesthetic theory – I couldn’t handle philosophy of art.

Thus far, it’s been really useful in my career. When I worked at a non-profit start-up straight out of college, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I recruited, I mentored, I edited news articles, I did research, I designed web pages, I coded, and I took bids on jobs. I had to be able to turn my attention from page design one moment to researching interviewees the next. As a marketing research analyst in a small department, part of the job description was that the candidate should be able to turn on a dime, and I do, from logo design to demographics mapping.

However, I’ve recently realized that my wonderful little gift is also my curse. There are a lot of things I’m good at. I’m not being an egoist; I’m really pretty good at all sorts of stuff. I like trying new things, and enthusiasm will take you far. I’ve been a DJ at a radio station and a nightclub, artist, barista, magazine editor, proofreader, new media director, special events coordinator, bartender, research analyst, blogger, IT consultant. At some point, I was even a pre-med major. I’ve rock-climbed, knitted, done ethnic cooking, trained for marathons, played softball, volleyball and soccer, been a vegetarian, and done some motivational speaking.

The problem? I’m all over the place.

When recently thinking about my career, I realized that I had no specialty. I’ve always had to twist my résumé credentials to fit the requirements (philosophy degree = critical thinking skills + analytical skills + thesis research = market researcher!). Don’t get me a wrong – I’m a great hire. However, I’d really like to be great at something.

I’d like to be great at something.

Not just good. Not okay. Not just ‘oh, yeah, I did that, too.’

I look at the people I admire, and they are either the giants of their fields or they’ve got a particular niche cornered. I’d like to really have my head wrapped around something, not just have a surface understanding or street knowledge about it. I’m tired of being OK at a lot of things.

I’m ready to be great at something. And not just to be Great, but to put the work into it to really understand it, to be an authority on it. When I was a philosophy major, I dreamed of being the Heidegger scholar studied enough to get a glimpse of his unpublished, untranslated papers tucked away in a small German library. As a new media director, I dreamed of taking our little start-up site nationwide, even global.

Now, I dream other dreams… dreams of a research analyst (believe it or not), dreams of a blogger, dreams of an entrepreneur. There are so many things I could do though; how do I choose? How do you know which one you have the potential to be great at?

This is part one in a two-part series.