Picture yourself at a cocktail party. Someone asks the inevitable question: “So, what do you do?”
For most people, this triggers a well-rehearsed response: “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m a software engineer.” But notice what happens next—the conversation often stalls, as if that single label has somehow captured the entirety of who you are. We’ve been conditioned to compress our complex, multifaceted selves into neat, professional categories that fit on business cards.
But what if you responded differently? What if you said, “Well, I teach high school biology, I’m training for my first marathon, I play jazz piano on weekends, I’m learning to code an app about urban beekeeping, and I just started a sourdough starter that’s basically become my fourth child.” Watch how the conversation transforms. Suddenly, you’re not just a job title—you’re a fascinating constellation of interests, skills, and aspirations.
This is the essence of identity in the 21st century: we are not singular beings, but rather complex ecosystems of selves.
The Pizza Model of Identity
Think of your identity as a pizza. Traditional thinking says: perfect one slice. Make it flawless. Be the best at that one thing. That’s the specialist’s approach: 10,000 hours on pepperoni placement, becoming the world’s foremost expert on mozzarella distribution.
But what if, instead, you viewed your identity as an entire pizza with multiple slices, each representing a different aspect of who you are? Some slices might be larger (your primary career), others smaller (that pottery class you take on Thursdays). Some might overlap in their toppings—the leadership skills from your day job seasoning your volunteer work, the patience from parenting enhancing your teaching. The key insight: a pizza with diverse toppings is not only more interesting but also more resilient. If one slice gets burned, you’ve still got a whole pie to sustain you.
Psychologist Patricia Linville called this principle “self-complexity.” Her research found that people with more differentiated self-aspects—more slices—were less likely to experience extreme swings in mood and self-esteem when faced with setbacks. A bad day at work stings less when it’s just one part of who you are, not your whole sense of self-worth.
The Architecture of Multiple Selves
But here’s where conventional wisdom gets it wrong. The goal isn’t to collect identities like they’re novelty mugs from airport gift shops. It’s about understanding how your identities interact, support, and strengthen one another.
Take Lin-Manuel Miranda. Before Hamilton, he was already living as an everythingist. He wrote musicals, taught high school English, made hip-hop music, translated Spanish lyrics, and acted in local productions. His teaching deepened his grasp of narrative structure. His hip-hop roots reshaped Broadway. His translation work refined his lyrical timing. Each identity enriched the others.
Neuroscience backs this up. When people engage in creative tasks, their brains don’t light up in one isolated area. Instead, entire networks activate—networks built through experiences that span multiple domains. New skills don’t just add to your toolbox; they create bridges to existing knowledge, enabling unexpected breakthroughs.
From Self-Concept to Self-Complexity
Most of us grow up with the idea that identity is something we find. But maybe it’s something we build. The “unified self” model—the belief that there’s a single, stable, authentic self to discover—is appealing but ultimately limiting. Research shows that people with more self-complexity not only cope better with stress, but also report greater life satisfaction.
I didn’t always have the language for it, but I knew this intuitively. In graduate school, I was officially there to become a researcher. That was the identity I was supposed to pursue with singular focus. But to pay rent, I taught tennis and worked as a personal trainer. To decompress, I studied martial arts and wrote songs. I played open mics, and once, I even sang the results of a qualitative study I conducted for an advanced methods class. The project centered on centenarian women in a local community who shared their routines, their beliefs, their secrets to a long life. They moved daily, gardened, practiced gratitude, and embraced humor. They were physically active, mentally sharp, and emotionally rich—walking examples of self-complexity in action.
Each week, I’d walk into my advisor’s office feeling like a fraud. I wasn’t living in Memorial Gymnasium. I wasn’t publishing fast. I was doing too many “other” things. I was always trying to add new directions, measures and metrics to my dissertation. “You need to simplify,” she’d say. “I know,” I’d reply, though I wasn’t sure I believed it.
But I wasn’t distracted. I was becoming. Exergaming and martial arts taught me embodiment. My psychology coursework grounded me in theory. Songwriting trained me to distill ideas into their emotional core. Teaching tennis and mentoring taught me how learning really happens. These weren’t detours—they were essential structural elements. They helped me connect theory to lived experience, and they gave me the tools to communicate with precision and heart.
When I defended my dissertation on the ‘Development and Maintenance of Exercise Identity,’ it wasn’t a tidy linear narrative. It was a mosaic. And for the first time, I realized that I wasn’t just collecting experiences—I was building the very thing I had been studying.
The Everythingist Advantage
We’re living through a massive identity shift. In the past, identity was largely fixed—dictated by your family, your town, your trade. The Industrial Revolution cracked that mold, but mostly replaced it with new silos. Now, in the digital age, we’re unbundling. Identity is no longer job-bound. You’re a lawyer and a trail runner. A CEO and a ceramicist. A nurse and a stand-up comic.
Yet our mental models haven’t caught up. We still think like specialists. We fear side projects dilute our “real” work. We downplay our hobbies to seem serious. We forget the full quote: “Jack of all trades, master of none—but oftentimes better than master of one.”
Self-complexity research tells a different story. People with more complex selves are:
- Better buffered against stress and setbacks
- More creative and cognitively flexible
- More adaptable to change and uncertainty
But here’s the key: It’s not about quantity. It’s about quality.
- Differentiation: Your identities should be distinct, not clones of one another.
- Integration: They should form a meaningful whole.
- Balance: No single identity should dominate your self-worth.
Becoming an Everythingist
This book is not a call to do more for the sake of it. It’s a call to build with intention. To recognize the value of multiplicity. To stop apologizing for range and start designing a life that reflects your full self.
The specialist path is narrow. The everythingist path is wide, winding, and sometimes weird—but it leads to a more resilient, interesting, and fully human existence.
Let’s keep going.