Over the last few weeks, my husband and I have been redecorating a bedroom.  I’ve painted the room, installed shades, and build an upholstered headboard. This past weekend, we had new carpet installed, and I did some decluttering as I returned things to their places in closet and drawers.  While this gave me a great sense of accomplishment, I was distressed that I didn’t have a new painting to show you this week.

Then today on the Artist Conspiracy (http://www.artbizcoach.com/conspiracy/), I heard a wonderful interview with Margaret Lobenstine, the author of The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One.

She says that “A Renaissance Soul is basically somebody who loves the learning curve, who loves to learn new things and who gets bored once they’ve got something figured out.”  It’s more like the wide variety of interests of Ben Franklin than the focus of Mozart.

There are three characteristics of Renaissance Souls:  First, they prefer variety and combination over concentrating on just one thing. Second, in their process, they prefer to widen their options rather than narrow their choices. The third characteristic concerns outcome. Their definition of success and their definition of something being finished is based on learning to do something rather than finishing a project.

That’s me!  I feel better knowing there’s a name for my many creative endeavors.

I’ve had a variety of jobs over the years, and have learned something useful from each one. I don’t like to do repetitious work, but I’ll be glad to work out how to do something and pass the system along to someone else to do routinely.

In another part of my life, I’m always doing something artistic or creative.  I’m claiming the umbrella of “creative handwork” to explain my sequential obsessions with sewing, gardening, cooking, photography, decorating, and painting.  Who knows what may come next.  I’m just glad to know I’m in good company with Ben Franklin.

Does this sound like you?  Have you have you always known what career you wanted and maintained that focus?  Or do you have many interests, either sequentially or in parallel?  How is you definition of success different from others?