Article on Talent Development Resources
Many people make use of their abilities and achieve satisfaction in life by becoming focused pros or even experts in one area. But many others keep exploring multiple talents, interests and passions.
In her article Are You a Scanner?, Barbara Sher identifies people with “intense curiosity about numerous unrelated subjects” who are “endlessly inquisitive and interested in everything.”
Filmmaking may be one of the most ideal arenas for such multitalented people.
Anna Paquin (who won an Oscar at age 11 for The Piano) acted in and also executive produced her upcoming film Blue State, getting involved in casting and location scouting among other aspects.
In a new interview article, she notes she was “unconsciously” trained to produce while working as an actor for many years. “Maybe I’m weird, but I was always interested in things like insurance and how the weather would affect a shoot,” she says.
“Ultimately, even if I’m just the actor, it’s my movie too, and those things trickle down and affect you. I’ve worked on jobs where literally everything but frogs fell from the sky. And you have to be aware of those things. Because the more pressure you’re under to turn in the performance, you know it all comes down to you being able to do your job well and quickly.” [From Having Their Say, By Jenelle Riley, Back Stage May 21, 2007.]
The photo is Anna Paquin in the HBO movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in which she portrays another multitalented woman: Elaine Goodale Eastman, who married a Santee Sioux physician educated at Dartmouth and Boston University.
A PBS site describes her as a “novelist, poet, journalist, editor and activist, and a schoolteacher only very briefly. But her influence on 19th century Native American education was considerable. At a time when few women lived so independently or spoke so publicly, she emerged as a voice for Native American rights.”
The film is a drama about the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children by the U.S. Cavalry in 1890, and is based on the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown.
Not many of us will get the opportunity to be an actor or filmmaker, even if that is of interest. But with the right approach and attitude, and support from others and their companies, probably any career can be more fulfilling and creative.
Teresa Amabile – head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard BusinessSchool – commented in a Fast Company article [The 6 Myths Of Creativity] that she thinks “most people aren’t anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they’re laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation. The anecdotal evidence suggests many companies still have a long way to go to remove the barriers to creativity.”
