This guest post is by Christy Smith, of ThinkBlot Communications.

Grown-up work is hard. When you’re a kid, you don’t hear stories of unemployment, disgruntled employees, profit and loss margins, or managing this elusive concept called work/life balance. You lived in a world that was limited only by the bounds of your imagination and in that world you could do or be anything.

Navigating the halls of the workplace today is a challenge. We are stressed out, overworked, and overwhelmed. Even if we recognize an opportunity to get ahead, it often requires efforts far outside our comfort zone to make an impact. We want to do it, but we don’t know how. We start making up excuses not to do it. But the next time you have a potential career-altering opportunity at your fingertips, try saying these four little words instead:

“I think I can.”

Repeat several times. Suddenly, we are transported back to our childhood when we listened with great anxiety wondering whether the Little Blue Engine would make it over the mountain in Watty Piper’s classic The Little Engine That Could . We begin to recreate our childhood belief that we can do whatever we set our minds too.

If you are unfamiliar with the tale, a train breaks down on route to the “other side of the mountain” carrying toys and goodies for the children who live there. The toys ask for help from three capable and experienced engines, but they are refused for various reasons. Finally they ask the Little Blue Engine, who, despite never having been over the mountain or being really big enough to tow anything, agrees to try. Because this is a children’s tale, we know that the Little Blue Engine succeeds, and the story has a happy ending.

As an adult, when I’m struggling to create my own momentum, I remember the Little Blue Engine. I not only remember her, I strive to BE her. Her story taught me several things about working towards my goals, and believing in myself.

Help those who ask for it

The toys asked for help from three other engines before the Little Blue Engine. The engines they asked all had experience going over the mountain, and were big enough and strong enough to pull the stranded train with little effort. But they chose not to. Why? Because for one reason or another, they were too busy, tired, or important to do so.

One of the easiest ways to stand out is by being willing answer the call when no one else will. Volunteering for responsibilities outside your comfort zone is great way to gain new skills and perspective without having to make a full-time commitment.

Be willing to take risks

The Little Blue Engine had no experience at all outside of her train yard. She had never been over the mountain. She wasn’t considered big enough to transport cargo. But when she was asked, she was willing to try because she understood that job was important. She took on the risk, and became a leader.

If you feeling overwhelmed, the first thing you may think is “I can’t do this”. We defeat ourselves before we’ve even started, or we look for the chance to get out as fast as possible. Stepping up and risking the unknown is scary. We don’t know what we don’t know. But we owe ourselves an optimistic start. Otherwise we run the risk of shutting down and never finding out what we “could” do.

Don’t give up

The Little Blue Engine was small, and climbing that mountain was hard work. But she knew that the happiness of all of those children on the other side of the mountain were dependent on her making it over the top. It was all downhill once she reached the peak. So she pushed herself to the limit.

“I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

Because she focused on moving forward, she gained momentum. If she had hesitated for even a moment, she might not have made it.

We watch those around us closely to see how they handle adversity. We use their actions as our clues to how whether or not we can trust them. Don’t be afraid to show your passion and talk about what’s important to you on your journey up the mountain. Talking about what you are doing serves the dual purpose of keeping you excited and driving your forward progress.

Give yourself credit

The story ends with the Little Blue Engine saying “I thought I could!” You can sense her happiness, and the new-found confidence she feels from succeeding at something that she never thought possible.

I know every time that I make it to the end of a journey that pushed me outside my comfort zone, I feel elated. I celebrate, and then I reflect on all of things that made it possible. I want to be able to replicate that success over and over again.

There is something empowering about setting aside the limitations we’ve acquired in our journey to adulthood. When we give ourselves permission to think like a kid again, we open ourselves up to new opportunities.
This openness is necessary for our ability to grow and be our better selves. It is our challenge to recognize when fate gives us an opportunity to push ourselves and think about what’s next. Even if we aren’t sure that we can make it to the top of our mountain, it is important to start by saying “I think I can”. Give yourself the chance to know that you can do it.

Christy is the founder of ThinkBlot Communications and is a self-diagnosed Pollyanna. She is currently exploring the ways we can create positive self-dialogue to achieve our goals. She can be found at Twitter @thinkblotcom.

This post is by Kirsten from Multi-Passionate Productivity.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a ballerina. Then I had major plans for a life as a rock star. For a while, the idea of being a model sparred with my desire to become a Methodist pastor. While debating my eventual career path, I took classes in drawing and painting, designed a few of my own clothes, invented a largely impractical personal heater, wrote a novel and plotted out an itinerary to backpack across Europe after graduating high school. (My parents put the kibosh on that one, unfortunately, so I did it on my own dime a few years later.)

I went off to college to study animal science with the intention of going to vet school, but then I tossed in another major in Spanish language and literature, just because it sounded fun. Let’s all pause for a moment to make the inevitable joke about specializing in veterinary medicine for Chihuahuas. Done now? Let’s go on.

We’re trained to believe that one passion is all you need. That’s what the guidance counselors, the college admissions brochures and 99% of the personal development literature tells you, right? Find your passion and find a job in that field, and you’ll be happy until you retire. For a large segment of the population, this is great advice. But for a lot of people, myself among them, it blows chunks. Why? Because we don’t have just one passion. We have five, or ten, or more.

Enter: the Renaissance Man

We are polymaths, Renaissance Men, multi-passionate people. We are not flaky or unsettled. We do not have attention deficit disorder and we are not doomed to work an endless stream of entry level jobs. In fact, we are going to lead tomorrow’s world.

Society used to exalt multi-passionate people. To quote Pride and Prejudice, “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing and the modern languages…” But sometime in the twenties or thirties we began to embrace the image of the specialist, the person who knows everything there is to know within a tightly defined niche. We have this vision of a scientist drilling deeper and deeper into their specialty and pushing the frontiers of knowledge. By encouraging our students to pick a specialty early we’re pushing them toward those distant frontiers. There’s just one problem—frontiers are, by definition, a long way from home.

Exploring the wild blue yonder doesn’t leave much time for understanding how your work relates to anything else in the general human experience. Rosalind Franklin couldn’t discover the structure of DNA because her specialty in biophysics and x-ray technology didn’t leave room to understand all the other pieces of the puzzle—biochemistry, genetics, information theory and mathematics. Conversely, Watson and Crick couldn’t have put the pieces together without Franklin’s x-ray images. (This idea comes from a most excellent book by Steven Johnson, titled Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation (aff).) Society needs people who create the pieces and people who put them together. The latter are our Renaissance Men.

Having multiple passions means that, by default, our store of experiences and general knowledge is wider than most of the population. This means that when we approach a problem, we weave our experiences into our potential solutions. That ability to borrow from other fields vastly increases the chances that we’ll come up with a potentially world changing combination, whether it be the mix of Flash, Java and the internet which created YouTube or the mixing of blues, R&B and 1-4-5 chord progressions which catapulted the Beatles to fame. That potential makes us extremely valuable, and even if conventional wisdom doesn’t recognize it, smart employers do. Why do you think Google allows their workers to spend two out of every ten hours on their own projects?

How do I find a Google to hire me?

I’m sure some of my fellow multi-passionates out there are probably scoffing after that last paragraph, remembering the times they’ve been rejected for jobs or internships because their resume was “too scattered” or “lacked focus.” While that is a danger of following multiple passions, there are ways to present yourself as valuable and innovative contributor rather than the derogatory jack of all trades, master of none.

1. Do not apologize for areas of your resume that you perceive to be lacking. Instead, highlight your wide variety of experience as evidence that you enjoy learning and can pick up new skills quickly.
2. Don’t put emphasis on your technical skills, unless you’ve truly put in the time to hone them to expert level. Instead, focus on the broad skills that your experiences have given you—skills like problem solving, information acquisition, organization or interpersonal communication.
3. Be targeted in who you choose to work with. Don’t send your resume to every job that remotely complies with your interests and skills. Instead, take the time to do some research on the company and decide whether you think you’d be a good fit. You’ll have a much better chance of getting called in for an interview, plus you’ll have the background knowledge on the company to use in tailoring your resume, cover letter and questions for your interviewers.

So stand tall, my fellow multi-passionates! We play an essential role in society, and sooner or later conventional wisdom will recognize that we solve almost all of the thorny problems in the world. Since we’ll be leaders, you might want start brainstorming a good honorific. Then when some uninformed sod accuses you of being a flake, you can point them to this post and inform them that the title is the Supreme Most Excellent Flake, and you’d thank them to use it properly.

Kirsten is the polymath behind Multi-Passionate Productivity, and she’s also a full time graduate student working with two research groups and running two and a half businesses in addition to MPP. Go here to check out her blog on productivity and organization for multi-passionate people, or join the crowd following the Interactive Novel project over at Written Insight.