Hello friends,
Last weekend, I found this buried in an interview I gave in 2010:
"Last year was a time of convergence. I had writing, curating, and organisational elements for art festivals, as well as music, and I was really struggling to keep all these things going. I felt I wasn't doing any of them well enough and it was getting me down. But at some point, everything seemed to converge. I have different hats that I wear, but more increasingly it's just becoming one big hat."
Fifteen years later and I’m still trying to turn multiple hats into one big hat… it’s almost as though nothing has changed.
But that’s not quite true, is it?
Welcome to Theory of Change.
(New here? I'd love for you to subscribe!)
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MULTIPATH? WHAT IS IT?
Turns out my decades-long identity crisis has become, somewhat unglamorously, a WHOLE THING.
Emilie Wapnick’s YouTube video popularising the term "multipotentialite" has 1.8m views. Generalist World is helping a community of 61k people build “multi-dimensional careers.” Melissa Wong’s Coherence Podcast (which I was recently a guest on) is all about the phenomenon “fluid career.” [Links below!]
The world, it seems, is busily trying to work out how to build multipath lives and organisations, in which multiple audiences, identities, and revenue streams converge.
Definitions are no longer the issue. We now have many names for this idea: Multipath. Multipassionate. Multipotential. Multihyphenate. Polymath. Scanner.
But I’m less interested in the nomenclature or the prescriptive identities (though there is inherent value in understanding your being in the world). I'm far more interested in this as a route, a process, and an approach.
Basically: as a way of intentionally moving through work and life in response to a very specific (and slightly f**ked up) set of worldly circumstances.
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WHEN THINGS FALL APART
Matt Klein, in his all-kinds-of-awesome newsletter ZINE, recently ran through the Overlooked Trends of 2026, and one idea jumped out: we’re experiencing a crisis of meaning as the old markers of success fade. “The dream-job, big house nirvana narrative is dated. There’s opportunity in helping people define modern achievement beyond title, salary, or follower count.”
Roles, communication structures, working patterns, the whole wireframe of what a successful life looks like is coming apart at the angles as economics, politics, and society reconfigures itself.
This explains the rising popularity, imho. The multipath life used to seem from the outside (and worse, from the inside) as scattered, as not-quite-committed-enough. But it’s transforming beyond zeitgeist, into an essential way of living and working.
My internal voice has always said just pick one thing and you'd actually get somewhere. I've had that voice on a loop for most of my adult life. It's very persistent, and weirdly British, like your auntie from Stamford who’s dismayed that someone has dropped a Swiss Roll on her new living room carpet.
But here's the thing about that voice: it's giving advice for a world that's already gone. In a world where all the markers are disintegrating, multipath stops being a cool personality type and starts becoming both strategy and tactics - personally, creatively, and organisationally.
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WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON?
Resilience was the pre-Covid buzzword in response to EXTREME UNCERTAINTY (bounce back stronger, return to shape, we go again). But the world's moved on (not really in a good way) and so should the metaphor.
What multipath living actually promotes is fluidity instead, being able to flow into whatever space opens up, sometimes to escape something, sometimes to take advantage of it, and to be able to do this in multiple spaces simultaneously.
Let’s start with the obvious reason why it’s on the rise: it's a hedge. One path means one point of failure. We are always one industry downturn, one bad boss, or one algorithm change away from a much worse year. Multiple paths spread that risk the way a portfolio does, not by betting less, but by betting on things that don't all fail for the same reason at the same time.
Then there's cross-pollination. My coaching makes my writing sharper. My writing process makes my music mixing sessions more patient. My music production gives me the creative flow space necessary to recharge after a week of coaching. Hybridity brings a flywheel effect; a life or organisation becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Finally, original thought isn't happening inside single disciplines right now. It's happening at the joins, where someone drags an idea from one path into a place it doesn't obviously belong. Multipath people aren't necessarily more creative than anyone else, they just have more experience of working between and across things.
For the people who can hold several paths together (and it is a skill as much as a personality trait), the upside genuinely compounds. When it clicks, it's better than any single path would have been.
Multipath organisations are the future too. The organisations that survive this downturn will be purpose-led, with their primary trait being fluidity, flowing into whatever partnership, funder, or community need opens up, rather than defending one out-of-date, five-year strategic plan.
Which leaves us with just one question: how the hell do we live a multipath life, or build a multipath organisation, without either burning out or going broke?
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HOW TO MAKE IT WORK
As an individual, there are plenty of places to start taking advantage of a multipath nature.
Pick your archetype. Emilie Wapnick's How to Be Everything names four working models: Group Hug (one role, many hats), Slash (several distinct roles), Einstein (a stable job funding the passion on the side), Phoenix (sequential reinvention). Check out her TED talk (link below); spend ten minutes identifying which model you're running. It’s validating, liberating, instructional (and can be adapted for orgs if that’s your focus).
Adjust your expectations. Not every path needs to be equally developed at once (see ToC 073: Adjacent Possible🚪). Your progress may seem squiggly or slow compared to others. That’s fine and by design. Make your peace with it (note to self).
Map your priority compass. David Bauer built a useful free tool for this: labs.davidbauer.ch/priority-compass - it's for individuals, teams, and organisations working out where their energy should actually go.
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🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊
The people who read this newsletter tend to recognise themselves, if not directly as multipath, as some kind of generalist or as operating in some kind of bridge role.
I’d argue it’s basically the same thing.
You people, in my experience, make exceptional entrepreneurs, fundraisers, CEOs, creative business-people and more because of what you’ve learned to hold together.
And I'm thinking about creating something new to help you all.
Might be a workbook, maybe some group coaching, maybe regular office hours. I’m not sure, but I’ve spent a few hundred hours now coaching people through all this, and I want to consolidate it all somewhere, somehow for the greater good.
If you’d be interested in the result, a quick favour: please reply to this email with the word multipath. No commitment, no sign-up, no pressure. I'm just trying to get a sense of whether this is (another!) niche obsession of mine or something worth building out properly.
Take care,
Adam
p.s. Coming full circle… one of the hats I mentioned in 2010 was being an musician. Well, last week, I released a new single. It’s music made for concentration and flow and available on all major streaming platforms. Here’s the Spotify link. Might be a good soundtrack for your multipath mapping!
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p.p.s. If you were forwarded this, hello! You can subscribe over at my website.
p.p.p.s If you've been here for a while, thank you too! If you'd like to support my work's independence you can tip me (and I promise I will not spend it all on hats). A huge thanks to everyone who supports this project financially or by forwarding these emails. It makes a huge difference.
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Where else to find my work (AKA my many, many hats)
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A note on AI
AI is, in my experience, like pornography: everyone uses it, nobody is willing to say how much. My view is that it's genuinely useful to me if it speeds up the parts of writing that were always just functional (the vehicle for my ideas I guess).
But the thinking still has to happen first.
I therefore use Claude a lot to take my notes, produce structural outlines, suggest section order, compress drafts, and check whether a throughline holds. I also use it to edit, and occasionally to suggest a sentence formulation when my brain is fried and my four-year-old still won't fall asleep in the room next door. I write at least 80% of the prose, which might be less than you hoped, but hey, I'm only human. For now.
If you're curious about my process, send me your questions.
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