Deana Birks

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it years before I even knew I had ADHD and I still browse through it periodically. Recently I listened to the audiobook version read by Pam Ward.

Barbara Sher was a practical author who wanted people to achieve their dreams. She wrote Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, which was full of tools to help people set goals and nail them. But some people didn’t know what goals to set, so she wrote I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was to help people discover what they really want. Some people thought they were too old to achieve their goals, so she wrote It’s Only Too Late if You Don’t Start Now.

She wrote Refuse to Choose! in response to the thousands of responses she received from people who had read I Could Do Anything and saw a section where she described her concept of Scanners:

The people who wrote me were unbelievably grateful to hear themselves described in positive terms — usually for the first time. For years they had struggled to understand why they were so different from everyone they knew. They had spent years of their lives bewildered and frustrated …They couldn’t understand why they were unable to find the right careers, and they described the same patterns over and over again: Every interesting career they started soon became intolerably boring. Or they had never even tried one because they couldn’t make up their minds in the first place.

At the time she was writing, there weren’t people going around calling themselves multi-passionate or Renaissance people. People were expected to choose a career path early in life and stick to it for the long haul. There was real angst with people who didn’t know from the time they were a teenager what their One True Interest would be forever and ever. Sher says:

If Scanners didn’t think they should limit themselves to one field, 90 percent of their problems would cease to exist!

She doesn’t just provide encouragement and acknowledgement that you’re not alone (although there’s plenty of both). She provides an entire toolbox full of tools that Scanners can use to manage their lives and interests, achieve their goals, and give themselves credit for the things they’ve already been doing all these years. She has a few dozen tools up her sleeve, with names like “Catalog of Ideas with Potential” and “Interest Index Binder.”

In the second half of the book, she breaks down Scanners into categories based on the styles of people she worked with over the years. Some people pursue a lot of things at once, some pursue one thing after another, and some people cycle around to their favorites again and again. She gives each group a type (serial, sequential) and a name such as Wanderer, Jack-of-All-Trades and High-Speed Indecisive. For each group she has a plan and a list of which tools they tend to get the most benefit from.

An example of one of her tools is called “20 to 30 Three-Ring Binders” and it’s literally a bookshelf full of binders with one per interest. So instead of having a stack of clutter that makes you feel worthless and has you wondering what on earth you’ve even been doing with your time, you have an entire shelf with each of your interests catalogued so you can see what you’ve been up to and, more importantly, jump back into things that got put aside at some point.

Every time you get inspired by a new interest, you reach for a new binder and give that interest a home. When you start feeling stressed because yet another interest has arrived, one you can’t possibly devote yourself to in the way you want to, create a binder for it and put it on the shelf. The relief you feel after doing something this simple will surprise you. But it’s another way of knowing that nothing will be lost and everything will wait for you when you do have the time.

For most of my life I loved tools like binders. Then I moved 2500 miles across the country and I had to sift through and assess the value of every item I owned. What is worth paying to lug across the country? What is worth paying to store until you buy a house (which, in this housing market, seems distant?). Lately I’ve been mostly paperless and I’ve explored a number of digital solutions. One of my dreams is to update some of the tools I’ve learned from this book for some of the apps I’ve been using lately.

If you’re the kind of person who would benefit from this book, you are probably already looking it up on your favorite book site or your library’s website. For me it’s the opposite of the large number of books I’ve read and immediately forgotten over the years. Instead, it’s one of the small number that has stuck with me and made a profound difference in my life.