Breadth vs. Depth

(Or: Why I Named My Snake Fluffy)

Nobody hands you a giant boa constrictor and says “you’re going to be great at this.” But there I was, holding thirty pounds of snake and explaining to a group of children how they unhinge their jaws to eat. I said yes to that job. I also adopted a baby boa, named her Fluffy, and had more adventures than I can fit in one essay.

This is what my life has looked like: say yes, figure it out, repeat.

There is a word for people like me. A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits, no single driving passion, and a resume that makes traditional hiring managers twitch. We are told, kindly or not, that we need to pick a lane. I’ve been told that depth is serious and breadth is just distraction.I have also heard many times that the person who has done one thing for twenty years is more valuable than the person who has done twenty things well.

I disagree. And I had the boa constrictor to prove it.

The ability to move across disciplines, say yes to unfamiliar experiences, and to connect with people outside your immediate expertise is not a liability. It is a skill set. Some of the best connectors, leaders, and problem-solvers I know are multipotentialites who got written off early for not committing hard enough to any single thing. They were too busy being useful in lots of directions.

I spent a lot of years wondering if my breadth was the reason I kept hitting walls professionally. It took longer than it should have to figure out that the walls weren’t about me. They were about systems that reward the appearance of focus over the reality of capability. That is a central argument in my book, Unemployable! The Psychological Toll of Proving Your Worth, which comes out next month.

Until the book is here, I would like you to sit with this: breadth is not the opposite of depth. For multipotentialites, breadth is how we get there. Depth comes from every unexpected yes, every room we walked into underprepared and figured it out anyway, and every skill we picked up sideways. It just does not look like the version they taught us to recognize.

If you have ever been told to pick a lane, consider this your permission to ignore that advice. Comment below, restack if this hit home, buy me a coffee if you like and stay tuned because there is a whole book’s worth of this coming May 12. And oh yeah, I named my snake Fluffy because it was the most ironic thing I could do in my early 20s. I usually win the ‘two truths and a lie’ game with that one!