Multipotentiality & Bing Bong from Inside Out
The societal shame of reinvention and why our kids don't have to carry it.
Multipotentiality is like Bing Bong from Inside Out.
Bing Bong was Riley’s imaginary childhood friend. Riley adored him. They did everything together.
They played, consoled each other, and flew to the moon.
But Riley grows up. She changes…Emotionally.
The sacrifice scene
When Joy and Bing Bong fall into the memory dump, they try to escape using the trailer rocket. But it’s too heavy. They can’t both make it.
So Bing Bong jumps out. He sacrifices himself so Joy can rise to save Riley’s happiness.
As he fades away, he shouts: “Take her to the moon for me.”
Then he’s gone. Forever.
Why it hits so hard
My daughter was inconsolable watching that scene because Bing Bong isn’t bad. He hasn’t done anything wrong.
He belongs to a different part of Riley’s life.
Reinvention
This is our experience as multipotentialite people.
We have eras. Creative phases and bursts of business ideas that we travel through.
Bing Bong represents our niche, our career, our purpose, our creative era. Something we’re emotionally attached to. Part of who we are.
We form relationships with our creative projects and business ideas.
Riley didn’t get bored with Bing Bong. Her priorities changed. She started caring about other things.
Just as we do. Slowly at first.
We can feel it creeping up on us, right? And then one day we wake up, and we don’t want to do the thing we have obsessed over anymore.
And if you’re like me, you feel the shame in the pit of your stomach.
Many of us think we’re broken because of this. I know I did for a long time.
But we’re not broken. We just don’t know how to leverage our multipotentiality.
A specialist society has conditioned us to feel guilty. That we should just pick one thing and focus on it. That change and pivoting is failure.
The shame piece
Shame is an Anglo-Saxon word for “disgrace” or “dishonour.” So the kids won’t tell you, but they feel it.
What age were you when you realised you were weird?
It’s normally between 5 and 7 years old.
My daughter has three unfinished novels, a faceless YouTube channel, and numerous sketches. She felt shame when she bounced from one creative project to the next.
At least she used to. We encourage her to follow her creative curiosity now.
If we don’t help our kids feel seen and heard, that shame festers and entangles itself deep in their adult identity. Just as it did with us.
Can you imagine how much easier your life would have been without decades of feeling like a failure? Feeling lost and broken?
I think one of the greatest gifts I can give my daughter is to be proud of her multipotentialite creativity. To leverage it and not be ashamed of it.
That’s at the heart of what we’re building.
This is history repeating itself
The inventors, the scientists, the artists, the mathematicians who drove culture forward for thousands of years were nearly always multipotentialites.
We just didn’t have a word for it.
The traditional specialist path is being disrupted by societal shifts and AI. And it will be the multipotentialites who stack their skills in unique ways, spot the opportunities, and solve the new problems.
Our kids don’t need to be fixed. They need to be shown how to leverage their divergent thinking brains.
Future Proof Gen Alpha
That’s what Future Proof Gen Alpha is. An online creative entrepreneurial community for 10 to 16-year-olds.
Gen Alpha kids are growing into adulthood during the biggest technological disruption in human history, which will reinvent the social contract along with the structure of our society.
Just as the industrial revolution did, but that happened over a century whereas AI revolution will be a decade.
Gen Alpha multipotentialites have the innate skills to thrive: adaptability, pattern recognition, creative problem solving and idea synthesis in the face of change.
Ironically, our brains thrive in crisis, but struggle with normality and boredom.
The rocket was always big enough for one.
Unlike us, our kids, nieces and nephews don’t have to wait decades to figure that out.
We can teach them the hard and soft skills as kids so they don’t carry shame into adulthood.
Our job is to architect the creative confidence and emotional resilience within them so they take action and leverage their innate skills.
Only then can they fly to the moon.
Peace Out ✌️
P.S Thanks for the emails with suggestions of Child Therapists for the Future Proof Gen Alpha Community, we now have some great candidates.