Everything Conference

Minneapolis, Minnesota: August 1-4, 2024

Some people having a darn fine time at Everything Conference

Why Do Just One Thing?

Hey, you, the multi-passionate, ever-curious, I-want-to-do-it-all soul.

Sick of trying to fit into that boring ol’ box? Tired of explaining your zig-zag career path and your constantly shifting passions? 

We hear you, and we’ve got just the place where you don’t have to be anyone but your wonderful, ever-curious self. Welcome to Everything Conference (ETC), where being a multipotentialite isn’t just accepted – it’s celebrated!

It’s possible you’re already thinking, “Count me in! Where’s my ETC 2024 ticket?”

Tickets for ETC 2024 are sold out.

Need More Deets? Dive In!

Everything Conference 2019 High-Five-a-Palooza

What Exactly is Everything Conference?

Everything Conference (ETC) is like no other event out there.

It’s a wild, vibrant, participant-driven gathering where multipotentialites from every corner of the globe unite to revel in their diversity, connect with fellow explorers, and dive headfirst into a kaleidoscope of interests.

Inspired by the thriving online haven known as The Puttyverse, ETC first hit the scene in September 2019, bringing together 100 multipotentialites who found their people.

McNamara Alumni Center Outside View

Why ETC? What Sets Us Apart?

At ETC, we don’t just have attendees – we have participants, contributors, and a boatload of quirks! Everyone is invited to share their unique gifts, no matter how “weird” they might seem to the rest of the world.

You see, we let our participants take the reins. We encourage and actively help them to lead sessions on topics they’re passionate about.

Think outdoor yoga, conversational knitting, entrepreneurship deep dives, or even a spontaneous musical jam session. ETC is where almost anything goes, and there’s something for every curious soul.

Who's Welcome at ETC?

Our people are a melting pot of misfits, creatives, and free spirits.

Whether you’re an engineer who moonlights as a painter, a theater kid turned coding wizard, or a plumber by day and a speculative fiction genius by night, you’ll find your kindred spirits here.

We open our arms wide to all, embracing diversity in thought, age, gender, culture – you name it.

Wondering What We Did at the Last ETC?

Here’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Frameworks for Your Multipotentialite Career, Business, Side Hustle, and Life

Without a clear idea of what you want to do, how are you supposed to stop doing what you think is “right” and start doing what’s right for you? In this workshop, you'll gain clarity about what's important to you and why so that you can make decisions with confidence.

How to Organize Anything

Rather than discuss the latest closet storage solutions or Marie Kondo hack, let's talk about an approach to getting organized that can be applied not just to the pile of stuff in the corner, but to the pile of stuff in your brain as well.

Personal Finances, Your Money Story, and Being Everything

How do personal finances work with being a multipotentialite? How can you integrate discovery and exploration with taking care of your money, both for the present and future? We'll share the internal scripts and beliefs we have about money and talk about the building the knowledge, mindsets, and skills you need to make it all work financially.

Playing With Our Inner Critic & Super Hero

Viola Davis once said "you either claim who you are or you end up chasing your worth for the rest of your life." In other words, we must be willing to confront our inner critic as well as own our weirdness. This workshop will challenge you to explore both through play. The goals are to identify what triggers our inner beast while also rediscovering our unique superpowers.

Bookstore Scavenger Hunt

Attention book nerds! Find a list of clues to help you hunt down new and old favorites, missed hits, and more in this beautiful bookstore. Maybe you'll come out with a new book or two you want to read?

Family Life as a Multipotentialite: Creative Tools for Parenting and Educating

How do we use our multipod skills in our family? How can we best encourage our multi-talented kids? Let's create a resource manual to help us become better parents and educators.

Why Am I So Awkward?!: Mastering the 3 Invisible Dimensions of Any Conversation

Real-life conversations are messy, awkward, inelegant, and … well … human. They can also be fulfilling, empowering, and incredibly cool sources of connection. In this session, you'll learn the secret to mastering the inelegance and creating connection; to move past the awkward moments and help steer your conversational ship more smoothly.

Crafting a Multipotentialite Brand That People Will Actually "Get"

Your multipotentialite brand has awesome potential to stand-out, fascinate, and be unforgettable. It also has potential to totally confuse, underwhelm, or miss the chance to resonate loudly with your right people. The line between these two camps is tip-of-a-needle fine, but you don't have to depend on dumb luck to be where you stand-out and resonate.

Stitch and Bitch: Crafts and Community

When crafters come together, the conversation flows while our hands are busy. Bring your current crochet or other small, crafty project to work on and share as a jumping off point for us to talk about the intersection of creative passions and community.

How to Build the Success Pack Who'll Fuel Your Best Work

Once we figure out that going alone is the hard way, a natural question arises: how do we figure out who needs to be on our team? In this workshop, we'll cover who belongs in your Success Pack, what they do for you, and how to ask them to join.

Mental Health and the Multipotentialite

How can we support our fellow multipotentialites and ourselves? We'll be getting curious and questioning the messages multipotentialites are often given that contribute to depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental health issues.

How to Turn Your Creative Idea into a Business

Do you have a creative thing that you might want to turn into a business? Art, craft, software, or something else? Let's explore how to test business ideas to see if they're profitable. Plus, how you can scale your occasional side business into something that generates real money.

Special Contributors

Check out these extraordinary multipotentialites who’ll be sharing their brilliance with us:

David Delisle Headshot

David Delisle

He's the founder of The Awesome Stuff, an Amazon bestselling author, entrepreneur, real estate investor, speaker, and – most importantly – dad. His book, a graphic novel called The Golden Quest, offers us a new way to think about money by noticing the weight of our words, choices, actions, and the world around us.

Annie Sisson Headshot

Annie Sisson

She's a typical multipotentialite – a dynamic force and a true Renaissance woman. As a writer, educator, coach, and consultant, she draws from her diverse talents and experiences to aid others in clarifying and achieving their goals.

Emilie Wapnick Headshot

Emilie Wapnick

They are an award-winning author, community builder, and the CEO/founder of Puttylike, The Puttyverse, and Wingtip Astrology. They help multipotentialites integrate all of their interests to create dynamic, fulfilling, and fruitful careers and lives.

Justin Baker Headshot

Justin Baker

He's a teacher, guide, P.h.D. researcher, and life-long restless multipod. Most of his energy goes to helping other restless do-gooders align with their highest purpose and navigate mission-driven work on a complicated planet – mostly via Mindful Power and Still Point Insight.

Christine Lozada Headshot

Christine Lozada

She's a drone pilot, award-winning travel creator, podcast host, and pickleball player going pro. Millions have seen her drone work and she's helped thousands of people learn to fly. In other words, she makes drones fun and simple.

Rachel Alexandria Headshot

Rachel Alexandria

Rachel, MFA, MA, helps high performers out of their secret messes like overwhelm, anxiety, perfectionism, and people-pleasing. She's facilitated hundreds of Family Constellations since becoming a certified facilitator via the Seattle Constellations Institute. A former psychotherapist turned Soul Medic, she's written also three books on difficult conversations, the inner critic, and EFT tapping.

Martie McNabb Headshot

Martie McNabb

She's a legacy artist who creates heirloom visual narratives from her client’s photo, document, memorabilia collections. In other words, she tells stories with other people's stuff. She’s also an interactive story-sharing facilitator who helps people build deeper connections, community, and legacy by curating highly interactive public exhibitions + hosting gatherings about the Things that matter.

Jake Kahana Headshot

Jake Kahana

He's a co-founder of Caveday, teaching individuals and companies how to focus in a distracting world. In past careers, he's created ad campaigns you've probably quoted, coded websites you've probably been to, and designed billboards you've probably seen. He’s proud to have his work as part of the permanent collection at MoMA as well as his parents' fridge since 1987.

Heather Ussery-Knight Headshot

Heather Ussery-Knight

She’s a multipod, Puttyverse team member, and lives in the San Francisco area with two parrots + her specialist husband. That, and she has a penchant for psychology/coaching (IFS, Art), Integral/AQAL, video gaming and Tabletop RPGs, creativity, crafts, writing, technology, dancing, singing, environmentalism, websites, sci-fi/fantasy, and Systema.

Who Else is Coming?

We’re much more than our Special Contributors. Check out a sampling of other amazing humans you can hang out with at ETC 2024:

Hannah Janowicz Headshot

Hannah Janowicz

She's a Midwest-based mixed-media artist, performer, writer, creative director, and "corporate clown." Her local efforts are rooted in sustainability, accessibility, and straight up tomfoolery.

Colleen McGraw Headshot

Colleen McGraw

She's a retired corporate program management consultant, practicing metalsmith, and political junkie based in the Washington DC area. Her superpower is to organize absolutely anything.

Previous ETC Contributors

What can we say: 2019 was a very good year for us. Here’s just a sampling of some of the amazing Special Contributors who were with us, and might be with us again:

Jeff Harry Headshot

Jeff Harry

Pam Slim

Pamela Slim

Charlie Gilkey Headshot

Charlie Gilkey

Riikka Salonen Headshot

Riikka Salonen

Abe Cajudo Headshot

Abe Cajudo

Humaira Hamid Headshot

Humaira Hamid

Denise Ransome Headshot

Denise Ransome

Stephen Warley Headshot

Stephen Warley

Erika Backberg Headshot

Erika Backberg

Anthony Ongaro Headshot

Anthony Ongaro

When and Where's All This Happening?

Mark your calendar: August 1-4, 2024, in the wonderfully multi-faceted Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, at the McNamara Alumni Center (MAC).

MAC is just straight up rad with stunning architecture inspired by Minnesota’s landscape of wood, water, and copper. They have many unique rooms for us to gather, and we’ll pretty much have the full run of the place for three days.

Join the Multipotentialite Revolution

Everything Conference isn’t just an event; it’s your people, your spark of inspiration, and your stage to shine.

It’s time to raise your glass to your multipotentiality, flaunt your quirks, and join the movement that proudly declares, “It’s okay to be you and love all the things.”

ETC is absolutely necessary for any multipotentialite struggling to either find their place in the world or be comfortable with who they are.
Nadia Charles Headshot
Nadia Charles
Las Vegas, Nevada
At ETC, I learned that "my people" are out there and they are amazing. I realized that I might, in fact, also therefore be amazing. 🙂
Laura Krebs Illig Headshot
Laura Krebs Illig
Eugene, Oregon
Unlike like most conferences, the connections were transformational and not transactional.
Jeff Harry Headshot
Jeff Harry
Oakland, California
ETC was a reverse family reunion for me: a purely magical experience of meeting people for the first time and feeling like I'd come home. And thank you for giving me the chance to lead my very first conference workshop! I can't fully express how exhilarating and affirming it was to have your unconditional faith in my brand-new, untested material, to have the opportunity to make a valuable contribution to ETC.
Alyson Wagner Headshot
Alyson Wagner
Austin, Texas

Anticipated Questions and Attempted Answers

Your ticket includes full access to the welcome party + three days of ETC goodness: workshops, activities, meetups, swag, special surprises, and snacks.

You’ll also get access to an online space where you can connect with other participants before and after the event. The ticket doesn’t include lodging or meals.

In other words, you’ll get almost unlimited sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops while we’re together (although perhaps not literally).

Do you like bullet points with more context? Good! Here’s what you’ll get:

  • All you can handle activities in and around our main event venue: McNamara Alumni Center. That means vision labs (a.k.a. workshops), guided conversations, improv play, structured rest and relaxation, games of all kinds, and everything else we can dream up.
  • Simple snacks and various beverages.
  • Permission to share your gifts, talents, skills, resources, and assets with your fellow participants in a hybrid unconference style.
  • Invitations to any pre- and post-event gatherings we organize (e.g., some fun stuff on Zoom and other places).
  • Maybe the best thing of all: conversation, inspiration, and motivation from up to 100 of the finest multipotentialites in the world.

Only $699 USD.

We would love to have volunteers and make it easier for more people to participate. However, the more free or discounted tickets we give away, the fewer tickets we can sell, which means we have less of a budget to make ETC amazing (or to run it at all).

Sadly, we just aren’t able to offer any scholarships or free tickets at our ticket price point and event size.

About 60 + you.

We want to keep it intimate, introvert-friendly, and highly interactive.

ETC tickets are non-refundable. That said, we know it’s a big leap to buy a ticket now and risk not being able to participate for some reason.

With that in mind, you can transfer a ticket to another participant for a $100 processing fee until June 15, 2024.

ETC is designed for multipotentialites who want to integrate their many passions in a sustainable and fulfilling way. It’ll be a warm, supportive environment for people who love learning and connecting with other creative, open-minded folks.

ETC is also very much an introvert-friendly event. There will be a range of different group sizes and plenty of opportunities for quiet reflection time.

Best of all, you’ll be around other people who get it. At ETC, everyone knows how it feels to share the thing(s) you’re excited about and get sideways looks or questioning glances.

With us, you’re free to be everything you are, even if your many passions are very different from one another or otherwise “don’t make sense.” For three days, you’ll be surrounded by multipotentialites who are in the same boat, happy about it, and excited to make it work (and help you make it work, too).

We’re still two months away from the event and things are subject to change. But we’re doing this pretty much the same way we did it in 2019:

Thursday, August 1

7:00 – 10:00 pm – Welcome Party and chance at early registration at a to be determined location on or near the University of Minnesota campus (a.k.a. by the McNamara Alumni Center).

We’ll kick off the festivities in style with a party that mixes fun, food and drink, and quiet spots to chat with your new multipod friends. (We hear introverts will love it!)

Note: There may be some unofficial meetups earlier in the day and we’ll communicate about them once we have the info.

Friday, August 2

9:00 am – 12:00 pm – The first flurry of experiences at McNamara Alumni Center.

Doors will open at 8:30 am and we’ll begin in earnest at 9:00 am. Get ready for workshops, guided conversations, improv play, physical movement, fishbowls, or whatever else we can dream up. There will be official and unofficial breaks mixed in.

12:00 – 2:00 pm – Lunch

Plan to walk/transport yourself to any of the great restaurants or food trucks near the McNamara Alumni Center. Or venture a bit further with your generous two hours.

2:00 – 4:30 pm – Part 2 of day 1 fun

All you can handle activities in the signature style of ETC – any combination of topic, location, and format you can imagine. We’ll all come together at 4:00 pm in the MAC Johnson Great Room to send you off with ideas and inspiration before dinner.

After 5:00 pm

Unofficial meetups, dinner plans, and outings on the town led by your fellow ETC participants.

Saturday, August 3

9:00 am – 12:00 pm – The second flurry of experiences at McNamara Alumni Center.

Doors will open at 8:30 am again and we’ll get things cranked up at 9:00 am. As if day one’s mish-mash of discussions, play, and mind-benders wasn’t enough – but wait … there’s more! Rest and relaxation options will be abundant as well.

12:00 – 2:00 pm – Lunch

Are you having deja vu? Plan to walk/transport yourself to any of the great restaurants or food trucks near the MAC. Or venture a bit further with your generous two hours.

2:00 – 4:30 pm – Part 2 of day 2 fun

Some things are best when you rinse and repeat. It’s all you can handle activities in the signature style of ETC – any combination of topic, location, and format you can imagine. We’ll all come together again at 4:00 pm to send you off with ideas and inspiration before dinner.

After 5:00 pm

Unofficial meetups, dinner plans, and outings on the town led by your fellow ETC participants.

Sunday, August 4

Morning Self-care, reflection, outdoor adventuring, gatherings hosted by your fellow participants, and/or unstructured social time.

Your mind, heart, or spirit might be exploding at this point. So we’re holding space for whatever you feel is best for you in the moment.

If you need to explore, we have options! If you feel like chilling, we have suggestions! We’ll equip you with multipotentialite-tested ideas to feed your brain, body, and soul. Solidify new friendships, refresh yourself, and get some grub before we reconvene in the early afternoon.

1:00 – 5:00 pm – Final festivities and a group goodbye at McNamara Alumni Center

Take in and talk out everything we’ve built and learned together with some structured activities to help you plan where to go from here or consolidate the wisdom you’ve gained.

After 5:00 pm

Unofficial meetups, dinner plans, and outings on the town led by your fellow ETC participants.

Sorry, but no. We believe that the real magic for this type of gathering is because it’s purely in-person. Adding online elements is too much of a distraction for how ETC is designed.

Nope. We’re proudly sponsor-free and non-commercial!

Your main ETC team is Vanessa Tharp, Cory Huff, and Joel Zaslofsky.

We’re counting on up to 100 more unofficial co-organizers as ETC is a truly participant-led event, and we can’t do everything ourselves.

The short answer: COVID-19. The longer answer is on Our Story page.

We’ve worked out a deal for you with Graduate Hotel, right next to our event venue.

Use this link to save $20 – 50 per night depending on the room type.

If Graduate Hotel isn’t what you’re looking for, we’re confident you’ll find suitable accommodations on your own. 🙂

We give all participants the chance to offer one or more experiences to their fellow ETCers. We’re stoked to hear all about your amazing idea(s)!

Personal Renaissance LLC is Joel Zaslofsky’s business entity. All the finances are running through his business right now and he knows his reputation is on the line.

It’s a good thing he’s so reputable! 🙂

A Note from Your Hosts

Vanessa Tharp Headshot
Cory Huff Headshot
Joel Zaslofsky Headshot

Hey wonderful multipotentialite!

We’re your ETC event co-organizers: Vanessa Tharp, Cory Huff, and Joel Zaslofsky.

Vanessa and Joel co-organized the first ETC and brought their friend Cory into the mix this time.

We’ve been longing to bring us multipotentialites together since the last ETC in 2019, and it’s finally happening again!

It’s still everything 100 people loved from the first one: a highly interactive and community-focused event where you get to show up as your complete self. ETC 2024 is just intentionally a bit smaller to keep it as intimate as the first.

We’re cool with who you are and how you show up – regardless of what that is. Yeah, we’re generally some big energy people and we know how to weave in the needs for some chill or introvert-friendly activities.

Don’t let any shyness or questions stop you from joining us. Send us an email if you have concerns and we’ll do our best to give you the info you need without any pressure or judgment.

Sweet sassy molassy – we can’t wait to be with you in Minneapolis this coming August!

~ Vanessa, Cory, and Joel

But Wait. There's More ...

The ETC Dictionary and Fictionary

Let’s start with the basics. We define a multipotentialite as someone with many interests and creative pursuits.

It stems from the word multipotentiality – a psychological and educational term used to describe people who display aptitudes across multiple disciplines.

Of course, our 2019 event participants, especially Becca Campbell, continue to evolve what we call our fictionary.

Click a word below and explore.

Nervcited

Nervous and excited at the same time. Or probably what you feel about getting your ETC ticket.

Uber-love-whelmed

A supreme example of being engulfed in love. Or what the vast majority of our 2019 participants felt.

Hap-xausted

Happily exhausted from positive exertion.

Simul-feels

Feeling all the good feelings at once
ETC was like cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Before I got there, I had many incomplete parts. And I feel many of them were completed in connection with others to understand what my life all means.
George Goldston Headshot
George Goldston
Raleigh, North Carolina
Since ETC 2019, I have been able to get so much more clear on my offerings to the world. Part of that is because I came to ETC in my real skin. I heard how many times I say, "This might be weird but..." and I heard you say, "It's not." I have spent so much time in my own defense, protection, and excuses that the four days I didn't have to do that provided so much light in my life. I am grateful that I was ready to witness the transformation and I feel so much more confident and capable because I wasn't alone in the four corners game, no matter where I went. I'm in deep gratitude and I know that the debris that I had unconsciously put in my own way has been cleared ... I find that the exponential growth I experienced during ETC makes me feel like I am wearing clothing 3x too small, and I'm having a tough time fitting in where I was prior to ETC.
Becca Campbell Headshot
Becca Campbell
Lacey, Washington

OK. For real. We have nothing more to say other than get your ticket.