Unclassifiable

For most people, “what do you do?” has a one-word answer. For a polymath it is a problem, and in professional environments it has been a costly one.

My background is artisan: antique repair and woodwork, a world where mastery shows in the hands. I studied journalism and cinema, then worked in enterprise BI consulting. After 2003 came a web platform, a fine-art practice, two photography brands, a decade of 1:1 work with people in personal transition, a solo service company in Brussels, and now AI products. Alongside those I carried passions that most people would file as hobbies, and I treated them with the same seriousness as paid work.

Seen from outside, that looks scattered. From inside it was always one drive: to learn and to build, to reach mastery, and to make things with beauty and grace. The call came from inside rather than from a market need, and so did each decision to start something new.

Sensibility, and a certain fragility, shaped how I related to people and to the environments I worked in. None of that fits in a job title.

The Renaissance admired people like Leonardo, who worked across painting, anatomy and engineering. Yet when he wrote to the Duke of Milan looking for work, he led with military engineering and mentioned painting near the end. He presented himself through the skill the buyer needed. Five centuries later, professional environments still work that way.

Recruiters, procurement and HR are built to match a label to a slot, and someone who cannot be classified does not fit the slot. The polymath either picks one fragment and feels dishonest, or lists everything and watches the other person lose track.

Over time you start to doubt whether the pieces add up, because nobody, including you, can read them as one path.

I think those environments are already over, and most people working inside them have not registered it.

Org charts, job descriptions and hiring processes were designed around specialist paths, and they keep running because changing them costs more this quarter than continuing does. That is inertia, and inertia is not a strategy.

Startups behave differently because they have no legacy roles to protect. A small team needs someone who can cover several fields, and that need matters more than the label.

Specialisation made economic sense when every skill took years of manual execution, so depth in one field was the only way to be fast enough to get paid. AI lowers the cost of execution in almost every field at once. If that holds, the person who connects domains becomes the one who knows which problems are worth solving and how the parts fit together. I think that shift is real. The market has not caught up with it yet.

The practical move is to stop describing yourself by domains. List your projects, and next to each one write what you were actually after when you started it. The answer that repeats is the thread. Turn it into one sentence and use that sentence the next time someone asks what you do. Watch who understands it. Those people, and the organisations they work in, are usually the ones that can use what you bring.

The label problem will not disappear by itself. What can change is where you spend your energy: trying to fit the old slots, or finding the places that have stopped using them.

Next in the series: Your Superpower Is the Thing You Don’t Notice.