A Plate Spinner
Energized by doing many things at once
Do you often come up with solutions to problems faster than most people?
Do you enjoy the challenge of keeping lots of projects going at once?
Do you find it hard to say no when people ask you for help?
Do you like learning only when it solves problems, not for its own sake?
Does it feel good to be needed, to feel you're making a difference?
Have you ever felt that your abilities have trapped you into a smaller life than you could be leading?
Plate Spinners are energized by doing many things at once.
When they move fast, they don’t feel rushed. Plate Spinners are rarely overwhelmed because they think faster than other people. That allows them to work on two levels:
the task at hand,
the task of sharpening their coordination.
Plate Spinners go all in with real-world problem solving. It is what gives them satisfaction. People depend on them, and they often take advantage of them as well.
Being excellent at their job, Plate Spinners are rarely asked to employ all their talents. That puts them in the odd position of being both busy and bored, overworked and underused.
Spinners need to use a magic word "No" more often.
With problem solving as their main drive, Plate Spinners neglect their capability of entirely different and deeper kind of thought: A nondirected thinking aka daydreaming.
For some it simply doesn’t seem as important as real-world problem solving.
And yet, it can be an excellent way of finding things you didn't know you were looking for. A time to where you can capture and develop all the ideas that come to you.
Try this exercise
Imagine you’re on a tiny desert isle alone, with nothing to do. A ship will be by in 2 or 3 days and you have enough to eat until then, but there’s no one to talk to, nothing to work with, just a couple of days to pass while you look out to sea.
Allow yourself to gaze in the distance.
At first your mind might be empty, but give it a little time and when something comes to mind, pick up your pen and start writing.
What happened? Did you get bored or find your thinking slip into a different mode?
Your Life Design Model
The Alternating Current Life
This model has no calendar or schedule connected to it, and it can mean something as simple as remembering to step over to a window and look in the distance for a few minutes, just to see if another kind of brain wave would like a moment or two.
The LTTL System
LTTL - Learn, Try, Teach, Leave.
Learn what you need to know to fix the problems.
Develop new systems that will solve the problems and Try them out to make sure they work.
Teach someone how to use them.
Leave.
Careers for Plate Spinners
Nonprofit incubator
Plate Spinners usually are loners. They’re so competent that they’ve never learned how to delegate and are impatient with people who don’t do the job as well as they do. Thus, it's time to widen their social circle.
Keep your eyes open for people who can help you.
Start a class where you teach the best engineers (or anyone else who are you working with) in your present company how to solve their own problems.
Watch those same people to see who you’d love to work with when you leave this company.
Teach them to carry out those great ideas in your head, or preferably written out in your Daydream book.
Set up a nonprofit incubator for a half-dozen creative companies and get them all started.
Traveling troubleshooter
Or you can travel around the world in search for problems.
find a problem
learn to solve it
teach others
leave
Tools to help Double Agents
Daydream book
A magical place for your ideas and daydream trips.
20 or 30 Three-Ring Binders
One binder for each ongoing project. It is a holding place for all ideas related to the specific project.
Delegate and Eliminate
Plate Spinners need to learn how to delegate and eliminate work that slows them down.
When a creative person does work that someone else could do, he’s wasting his talents and depriving the rest who might benefit from those talents.
If you’re good at ideas, you should arrange your life so that you can use the ideas.
Acknowledge what you need and fight to get it. Time is all you have. Don’t waste your gifts when the world needs them.
tl;dr
How Plate Spinners Do Everything They Love
Life Design Models for Plate Spinners
The Alternating Current Model
The Learn, Try, Teach, Leave (LTTL) Model
Careers for Plate Spinners
Nonprofit incubator
Traveling troubleshooter
From Your Scanner Tool Kit
Scanner Daybook
20 or 30 Three-Ring Binders
Until the next week,
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