Is This You?

A note from Michele

I was five years old the first time I was told to stay in my seat.

A fire engine went by outside the classroom window. I heard the siren and I needed to see it. I stood up on my chair without thinking, the way children do when something pulls them before their mind can negotiate.

The windows were too high. I didn't know that yet.

What I learned instead — in the swift correction that followed — was something else entirely. Stay in your seat. Stay on task. The curriculum is here. The fire engine is out there.

For most of my life, I adapted. I tried on the lanes the world offered. I measured myself against models that were never designed for a mind like mine, and every time I fell short, I called it a personal failure.

What if someone had told me I didn't have to do it a certain way? What if the models themselves were wrong — not for everyone, but wrong for me?

The Day I Walked Out was when I gave myself permission to choose for myself, whatever that looked like. It would be mine.

The Butterfly Map is what I wish someone had handed me then. Not a prescription. A structure wide enough to hold everything I already was.

If any of this sounds familiar — keep reading.

— Michele

Is this you? I suspect it is.

You've never had trouble with ideas. You've had trouble with just one idea.

You light up in conversations that cross disciplines. You make connections other people don't see. You've been told you're creative, insightful, gifted — and also, somewhere along the way, that you need to focus. Pick a lane. Stop spreading yourself thin.

So you tried.

Maybe you built a career around one thing and did it well. Maybe you stayed in the lane, kept your head down, delivered. But something kept tugging. Another interest. Another question. Another version of yourself that never quite got to show up.

Or maybe you never picked the lane at all — and spent years quietly wondering if that meant something was wrong with you.

It doesn't.

What if breadth isn't the problem?

There's a word for people like you: polymath. Multi-potentialite. Renaissance soul. Da Vinci type.

You're not scattered. You're not unfocused. You're not failing at being one thing.

You're a person whose genius moves across terrain — and you've been handed maps that were only designed for a single destination.

The world tends to reward specialists. It builds systems for people who go deep in one direction and stay there. And if that's not how your mind works — if your genius is associative, wide-ranging, cross-pollinating — those systems have probably felt, at various points in your life, like cages.

Not because you couldn't perform within them. But because performing within them required leaving most of yourself at the door.

What you might recognize in yourself:

You've had multiple careers or feel pulled toward more than one — not because you couldn't commit, but because one container was never going to be enough.

You think in connections. A conversation about martial arts leads you to a thought about code leads you to a question about learning itself. You're always game to hunt along rabbit trails.

You're energized by new ideas and sometimes exhausted by the maintenance of old ones.

You've been called "a lot" — too intense, too curious, too much — by people who meant it as criticism and didn't understand it was a description of your genius.

You do your best work when you're allowed to bring all of yourself — not just the relevant credential.

You've been looking, maybe for years, for a framework that doesn't ask you to choose.

That's what this is.

The EDG Butterfly Map wasn't designed for the person who needs to find their one thing.

It was designed for the person who needs a structure wide enough to hold everything they already are — and dynamic enough to move with them as they keep becoming.

Eight tensions. Two wings. One map. Infinite expression.

You don't need to narrow. You need a map that was built for your kind of mind.

Start here:

Take the Genius Imprint Assessment — a free tool that helps you understand the pattern beneath your breadth, not just the breadth itself.

[Take the Assessment →] Your Genius Imprint