Perhaps you don’t know about Barbara Sher? Sher wrote a book “Refuse To Choose” for multi-talented people like us, calling us “scanners.” Fascinating book, because it shows how other multi-talents handle all their “unrelated” abilities at once in the unique lifestyles they have designed. With many flavors and styles, scanners are a mixture of many types – which Sher describes. Often each of us needs to design a unique variation of intermixed lifestyles that Sher discusses in the book. We need to take our many talents and interests for the ride they deserve, or these talents will act like achy muscles or spoiled pets… Always begging for our attention, merely bothering us like curses, instead of the blessings they really are. Other people don’t understand that forcing ourselves to choose which talent to specialize in – it is like deciding which child to feed.

What helped me most, (aside from learning from other eclectics,) was to learn a little “friendly reserve” when talking to people who only had a job, a family, and a hobby. I could just chill and have it be OK that someone might never know all there was to know about me. If they have no idea there is so much to who I am, let them be surprised later when and if they find out. It’s pleasant to be surprised.

That said, let’s play together! You don’t have to keep your multi-free range interests from those of us who have responded here… and that’s a celebrated relief!! (I’ll even understand your astrological interests.)

Going back to what Mike King said though, I think there is a danger that those of us who are perhaps of a more intellectual bent tend to get self-congratulatory at our perceived superiority.

So we form mini-cliques with our own set of social rules revolving around discussions about how our “genius” is misunderstood. Using MBTI, I would hazard a guess that most people reading this are NTs which means we personally enjoy discussing visions and ideas – there are other typologies who don’t but that’s just because they’re different, not because they’re dumber.

I think a key lesson for NTs is understanding the difference between intelligence and wisdom. We can learn all the disparate skills we want and become more intelligent, but it is only in recognising the inherent intelligence in people different to ourselves that we become wise.