The New Rules of a Multidimensional Career

The polymath has been written about so often, and so badly, that the word itself now arrives with a slight smirk. The image is of someone who is good at everything and serious about nothing. A dilettante in a nice sweater.

The people I spent the past year talking to do not look like that. They look, mostly, like people who decided at some point that the standard career — one ladder, climbed slowly, in one industry — was not going to be enough. They did not arrive at this conclusion romantically. They arrived at it after a long, sober look at the economics of attention.

The rules they have, mostly without writing them down, look something like this.

"If you do two things, you have to do them both with the discipline of someone who only does one. Otherwise you are not multidimensional. You are just unfocused."

First, both jobs have to be real jobs. Not hobbies. Not aspirations. Not "what I am also working on." Real jobs, with deliverables, deadlines, and consequences. The people who fail at this almost always fail because one of their two things is not actually a job.

Second, the two jobs have to compound. Not in a marketing sense — they don't have to be in adjacent industries — but in a cognitive sense. The skills you develop in one have to make you better at the other, even if the connection is invisible to outsiders.

Third, the schedule has to be brutal and honest. Most of the people doing this well are working sixty to eighty hours a week. They will tell you this in private. They will rarely say it in public. The culture has not yet caught up to the math.

Fourth, the social cost is real and worth naming. Friendships thin out. Hobbies disappear. The texture of a normal life — Sundays, evenings, the quiet middle of a Tuesday — is given up almost entirely for several years. The people who do this well have, almost without exception, made peace with that exchange. The people who have not made peace with it should not attempt this.

Fifth, and this is the rule no one wants to print, you have to be more honest with yourself than is comfortable. About which of your two things is actually the thing you love, and which is the thing you are using to fund the thing you love. About which of them you would keep doing if money were not a factor. About what you are actually building, and what you are using to hide from what you are actually building.

The people I admire most are the ones who have done all of this and come out the other side with both careers intact and a clear-eyed view of the cost. They are not selling a lifestyle. They are not telling you that you, too, can have it all. They are telling you that you can have more than one thing, if you are willing to give up almost everything else, and that the trade can be worth it.