Stuck in the Crossroads of Your Passions? 5 Steps to Thrive with Multiple Interests
A practical guide for anyone who wants to successfully balance multiple pursuits.
“I have 10 different passions, but I have to focus on one main thing or I’ll achieve nothing.”
Doesn’t this sound familiar?
I’m here to tell you that you are completely okay and that there are millions of people like you. They called ”polymaths” or ”multipotentialites”.
In this article, I’ll share five practical tips for balancing all your creative endeavors, getting rid of FOMO, and actually making things happen.
We won’t discuss entertainment activities, sports, or other things that help you relax — those enrich our lives and are not in conflict with creative exploration.
Step 1. Understand your personal worth
Creative people face the biased belief that their worth is determined by their success or efficiency. Therefore creatives think they have to focus on one specific craft in order to achieve excellence, become known for it and to raise lots of money from it, sacrificing all other passions and possible options.
The first step is to acknowledge that your value doesn’t come from your skills or your financial achievements. When you were just born, your parents saw you as the most worthy thing in the world, even though you had not yet achieved anything.
If you are convinced that you “have to be perfect at one creative field”, I would advise you to work on your core beliefs. The best way to do this is by trying out the exercises in David D. Burns’ book, “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.”
Step 2. Choose a broad identity
The way you identify yourself matters. Try to avoid strict tight job titles like “UX Designer” or “Acoustic Guitar Player”.
For example, when naming yourself a UX/UI Designer, you cut yourself off from other design fields. You may want to create something different from app layouts and have enough essential skills for it, but your “label” blocks you.
Try to think of yourself in a broader way.
If you have expertise in typography, layouts, graphic editors, web, user experience, animations, “Designer” or “Design Generalist” would work better. Not limiting yourself to an exact design specialization allows you to work with different project types, niches, and mediums, which fulfills your creative needs.
If you write articles, perhaps a book, illustrate it, run a video blog or podcast, then “Author” could be suitable.
Good titles that could benefit your creative journey:
- Artist,
- Storyteller,
- Visionary,
- Inventor,
- Entrepreneur,
- Creator,
- Artisan,
- Craftsman,
- Polymath,
- Expert,
- Engineer,
- Art director.
Step 3. Cover the basic needs
Most of us can’t focus on creative endeavors while our basic human needs are still unmet. The Maslow pyramid doesn’t work top-down.
In her book “How to Be Everything”, Emilie Wapnick introduces the concept of a “good-enough job”. She advises readers to find a job that will help them pay the bills without exhausting them.
If you’re passionate about visual storytelling and dream about your own fashion brand, it’s okay to do freelance illustration work sometimes.
The key is to stop worrying about money and create space for your own projects, even if they don’t generate a lot of income at first. Let your creative sprouts to rise.
Step 4. Pick right skills to learn
When learning something new, it’s wise to integrate the new skills into your existing creative pyramid — the foundation of complementary skills and talents you already possess.
For example, if you are a natural storyteller, learning illustration skills can take your creative work to new heights.
Or if you are a 3D Generalist, studying academic drawing would help you to see the world as an artist.
The idea is to choose new skills that are complementary to your existing skillset, creating a synergistic effect.
One of my favorite examples of this synergy is Bo Burnham. This guy combined the piano and stand-up comedy, creating a unique style that sets him apart from other comedians.
Step 5. Serialize
You don’t need to and won’t be able to maintain all of your creative practices simultaneously. Let’s be real, there are only 24 hours in a day and just 7 days in a week.
Think of your life as a portfolio instead. You didn’t do each project from your portfolio at one moment, did you?
Split your year in quarters, months or even weeks and focus on the most relevant and interesting things in each period. For example, this quarter, you could start a drawing course, learn data visualization, print your designs, and practice cognitive therapy exercises.
Each activity should result in a finished piece of work. This way, you can end one chapter of your passion and come back to it later, perhaps in a new format.
You could structure your creative journey like “The Wire” TV Series. The show introduces a different institution of the city and its relationship to law enforcement in each season while retaining characters and advancing storylines from previous seasons.
What’s going to be your next season?
The Takeaway
Imagine a humanity without a Leonardo da Vinci’s pioneering work across art and science or Benjamin Franklin’s eclectic mastery of literature, philosophy, and statesmanship. How would these dudes become so great if they were biased by the conviction that they should ”focus on one particular thing”?
Cultivate your unique intersection of skills and be happy.
You don’t have to choose just one.
