how to manage multiple interests & passions: a different approach

The thing about having multiple interests and multiple passions is that it can leave you in a state of paralysis, I've found. The fact that you do have so many things you're interested in, or so many skills you could develop, leads to a feeling of overwhelm effectively, and you either end up doing nothing at all, or never quite progressing in anything, and you're just sort of stuck in this weird multi-passionate, multi-interest limbo. And this is coming from somebody who has so many interests, like I'm an engineer in the tech space, but I'm also pursuing oil painting right now, I learned to lift, and then pursued like a fitness coach qualification, like certified fitness coach, and I also make content, and I'm into public speaking, and you can imagine when balancing all of these things, and if you're watching this video you're probably very similar, how do I feel like I'm moving forward whilst tapping into these multiple kind of facets of myself? And I used to play sims, like religiously, like I was a lover of sims, one of my favorite aspirations was the renaissance sim, and I don't even think I really understood what that was when I was playing it, like I don't know what age, from like primary school up until my 20s. Like yeah, yeah, I've been still playing them into my 20s, but that's another conversation. The point I'm making is that I think a lot of us know that we're this type of person, but we just don't know how to make it make sense in this world, and if you don't, you know, add tangible steps, or boundaries, or kind of frameworks around it, you can just be left, like I said, floating around, like with all of these interests, and it's like meh. So that's what I actually want to talk about, being this kind of person, I would argue throughout my whole life, how have I made it work in a world that is actually quite, I don't want to say linear, or like kind of one-dimensional, but it can feel that way, like we're encouraged to kind of master singular things, or master one path, and go down it. I just want to actually talk about the things that you can do, or ways that you can look at things, and these passions, and skills, and interests, in a way that's actually going to lead to you feeling fulfilled, moving forward, and actually growing and progressing in these things. So the first thing I actually want to talk about is mastering these skills, these multiple skills, or going deeper into the interests you have. I think one place that we kind of trip up in is, because we have so many things we're interested in, we never quite develop any of them to a high enough standard, and the reason why this is so important is, I think there are multiple reasons, but the first is that part of the fulfillment I think we get isn't seeing ourselves progress, right? Like there is a biological response when you get better at something, right? When you see yourself go from A to B, whether that is with painting, whether that is with coding, whether that is with writing, whether it was public speaking, right? As you see yourself progress, there is a response in terms of like the dopamine hits that you get, and the other hormones that are released in response to the way that you are growing, right? And partly that's to do with the way that your peers are seeing you, but I definitely think there's a deeper sense of seeing yourself move from a state of not knowing, and you know, and being quite naive about a subject to becoming, you know, media or mediocrity like, to mastery. And the second thing though is that to actually enjoy a lot of the things that you want to do, if you turn, say, an idea or a thought or you know, an idea that you have for an application into code, you have to have a certain level of mastery or proficiency in that thing. And that's the point when the skill or the interest becomes really fun and really engaging, is when you can take abstract things in your mind and make them a reality, right? Like it's one thing for me to know how to print out something in code, it's another thing for me to be able to build an application around an idea that I'm interested in. It's one thing for me to have an idea about a picture that I want to paint, right? Or that I want a photograph that I want to say, it's another thing to actually actualize that thing and have the skills to use the tools that you have, right? And the knowledge that you have to make good on that. I could go on about how writing a speech is one thing like, but to use the tools of language, right? Body language and all these other things to make that speech what you have in your mind, like again, to actualize that or even cooking, right? Like you might have an idea about the flavors that you want to bring together in a certain meal, but you need to know understand, you know, how to bring spices together and also how to cook meat, say, to a certain standard or in a certain way that will enhance those flavors. It is only once you have mastered or at least become very proficient in these particular skills and interests that you can do that. Even if it's not a skill per se, but a interest you have, say, in the natural world, right? But the deeper that you go, the more that you can start to engage with more complex or the nuances of that thing and start to make connections that are new. Now, this is why I talk so much about seasons on this channel because it's been so fundamental to me balancing my life as somebody who has multiple passions in really quite different realms. It's that the understanding that for a season there has to be a focus on one, two, three, a narrow set of these passions and interests in order for me to progress and move forward. In order for me, say, to leverage the power of habits and incremental change and incremental progress and practice and dipping into these different knowledge bases. I need the time and the energy and the resources to go into that place. So I'd say if you're feeling like that, I have all of these interests and passions, but I'm not getting anywhere with them, take some of them. Take maybe one or two and focus in on that one for a little bit. I just came back from Florence where I was doing an art course for a week in oil painting, right? So I know that there are people, for example, in the coding world and who were in my tech and engineering world who are like, all I really hear them ever speak about is tech and coding. And that is kind of where their focus is throughout. But I know that if I want to master certain things, I have to dip in and out of seasons that sometimes that'll be my focus. And other times it will be painting and other times, you know, it will be my public speaking and sometimes they'll overlap, but that's okay. Which actually leads me on to my second point, which is if you're going to be the type of person who pursues a renaissance path, right? With this idea about multiple interests and passions, you have to understand that your growth may be slower than those around you. And this is just really operating on a logical level. If I'm spreading my resources, my mental capacity, like my money that I may be invested in courses or in resources like, you know, supplies. If I'm spreading mine across, say, three things when you want time, but or two things versus somebody else who's gone all in on one thing. Like I was saying, the example of people who are in the tech space and, you know, they clock off and they're still coding. They're going to get from point A to point B faster than me in their particular path, right? That is just something that you have to accept. And you have to be very careful when you're a person on this path by measuring yourself against those yard sticks because you will almost always fall short. However, I want to argue that this mindset here, or this seemingly downfall or pitfall of being a person with multiple passions and pursuits is actually in the long term a strength, right? Because not only are you mastering multiple skills and, you know, diving deeper into multiple interests and therefore having a wealth of things to build on and draw on when times, you know, when something comes up or when you want to engage in a new thing, but you actually learn about the self more. You understand more about how you learn and how you can acquire skills and how you can dive deeper into interests. And I think this is one of the most powerful things a human being can have. And I think it's the reason why people say, like, you pick up new things very easily. We can argue that there's some biological factors maybe to do with memory, short-term memory and things like that, but a lot of it is to do, almost all of it is to do with understanding how your own brain works. And I think the person who is a dipping into multiple facets of the world, like is diving into their interest in the arts, into the sciences and engineering, right? Into writing, whatever it is, into content creation, into coding, whatever that is, they are understanding with each new skill that they develop how their brain works to the point where I think that I can pretty much learn anything. And even in a relatively short space of time, I'm not saying to master that thing is very quick, but to pick it up becomes extraordinarily fast when you understand yourself. Moving on a little bit from that and like, I guess, comparing yourself to people who may not be on the same path is actually understanding the synergy between the multiple things that you are pursuing. Sometimes it's very obvious, right? Like for example, I know that the fact that I like reading and that I read so much and have read so much over the years has influenced my ability to speak publicly. My public speaking skills, not me tripping up as I talk about public speaking, have been vastly improved with my other passion, my other interest, which is reading, right? And so in that way, there is a high level of synergy, but it goes further because sometimes the synergy isn't always clear until you dive deeper. For example, you may argue that there's no real difference or there's no, sorry, there's no real similarities between oil painting and, you know, coding. But what if I spoke to you about like, you know, the importance of fine details and composition? I was at that school I was talking about in Florence, Italy, and we were having a class or a discussion about the Fibonacci sequence and composition and actually the mathematical details involved in some of these Renaissance paintings, right? Like they weren't just thrown together. There was an actual real, almost science to the art and how those things can overlap into the way that you code or the way that you produce things and almost the composition, say, of your code and how that flows. And sometimes these things can get quite ambiguous in the way that you kind of entangle them or, you know, make these connections, but they are often there nonetheless, right? Like I could argue about the beauty and the art of a piece of code that you write. I could argue about the differences or the similarities between, say, lifting and the discipline required for that. And in a similar way, the discipline required with learning something like oil painting or like learning something like writing, right? That you're exercising your muscles in a way that you might exercise your brain, right? Like you show up daily, you write daily, right? You may have exercises that you do before you're writing in the same sense that you have a warm-up. I've heard writers and authors speak about how they have a routine before they start writing where they may like, you know, maybe it's in the form of journaling or just writing something random or a poem, whatever it is, in the same way that you warm up for your main event or your main lift in powerlifting. So you start to see the synergies between things. And again, the more that you go down this path, the more you are able to make these links. And there is not much new under the sun, right? There's that saying, like, nothing is new under the sun. What is new though, is the individual experiences and the way that people can make connections with things. This is another very powerful attribute, I think, of the renaissance man or woman, right? The multi-passionate. I don't know if that's a word, but anyway, that is a really big strength because you start to connect the dots of the world in new ways, ways that other people cannot. That is so interesting. And I keep talking about this because I just think it's wonderful because the people that we look up to again in this world are often the people making connections between things that already exist, right? Between an energy source that we have, between some transportation and some, you know, great pieces of engineering that we have to put us on, you know, send us into space or autonomous driving. These new things are connecting technologies or connecting pieces of art in ways that other people haven't. It's the same in the creative world when you see people make art that is a compilation almost of things, but in a unique way, in a way that me and you may not have thought about putting it together, but this particular person who maybe is a musician and is also, for example, maybe an engineer, but is also somebody who is into poetry, right? But also is perhaps somebody who's a public speaker and the way that they configure their art is in a way that none of us, the rest of us, can really fathom or really kind of pluck out of our mind. So that I would say being conscious of these synergies and actually making these connections yourself will again help this whole being a multi-passionate person, a multi-skilled person, stop feeling so disjointed and just random and start to feel connected like it is woven together effectively. And on a slightly deeper level, I think you have to stop seeing yourself and seeing the way your mind works as a hindrance, which can be very difficult, like I said, in a world that is set up for singular paths or singular pursuits, right? That's really what things are optimized for, even with university and so forth. And again, I'm not saying that path has any inherently... I definitely have disadvantages, both paths do, but I'm not saying it's wrong. But if this is not how your mind works, you have to stop seeing it as a hindrance. I'm speaking as somebody who kind of rejected the idea of doing medicine and becoming a doctor because I just knew that the level of dedication that I would need to put towards this singular path, and I'm not saying that there aren't doctors who do multiple things, right? But I wasn't ready at that age to just go on that path. I actually instead, much to my grandparents' distress, decided to do geography. A study or a course that is quite literally the study of the world. I always joke with my like geography friends, like anything is geography. Like we studied everything, human evolution, big data, population statistics, paleoclimatology, like you know, pollution of lakes, like just some of the most random stuff that you're like, how does this knit together to make a university degree? But even in my job, I'm not a software engineer, I'm not a cloud engineer, I'm not a DevOps engineer. My job is some amalgamation of all of these things, right? I'm an SRE, a site reliability engineer, and it requires me to draw on skills from a number of kind of different disciplines or domains in tech, if you would like, right? And I love that. I am so happy that this is the path that I found in tech because it is so suited to the type of person that I am. I'm not sure I wanted to be a Java developer, for example, all day every day. That is not to downplay because I can't build Java applications like they can, but I'm not sure that their mind could work in the same way mine or that it has been cultivated over time to work, right? And the point I'm making is that your mind is not a hindrance, your multiple interests and passions is not a blocker, it is your superpower, right? Like it is the thing that makes you so uniquely placed to do the things that you're supposed to do in this world. I kind of alluded to this earlier about how understanding the way you learn means that you can learn almost anything, but going back to that, I think being somebody on this path, again, the renaissance sim, means that you do actually have to believe that you can learn anything. And the more that you do learn, the more evidence you have to support this. I did a video speaking about confidence and how I really think confidence is true, lasting confidence is rooted in evidence, right? And it almost becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more you do, the more evidence you have that you can do the next thing and then you do the next thing successfully and you're also building skills at the same time it's a cycle. I have come to believe, I would say no, there is was nothing in this world that I could not learn. I had taught myself or told myself throughout my childhood that I was not good at art. I want to show you the first painting, oil painting I did and my most recent oil paintings and between these I didn't go to any school, the only time I've done any formal training is one week if you'd like in Florence. The point I'm making is this was in a few months of me learning from stuff on YouTube, trying some stuff out, right? But it's also the same like I said with lifting, it's the same with content creation. I'm not saying that I will become the best at everything, right? Like could I learn to sing? Probably to an extent. Will I sound like Mariah Carey? Probably not, right? But for the most part without a few boundaries that are linked to a physical like physical structure, yeah I could do it and you have to believe that too. If you're going to continuously second-guess yourself you will have problems because you what will happen is you will sit on the sidelines and you will watch what other people are doing which actually feeds nicely into one of the final things I want to talk about which is stop ignoring signs of interest and passion and intrigue, right? Because you just don't think it's quite for you or you're just not sure because again you will sit on the sidelines never quite making good on your interests and your passions and just getting by and feeling lonely and feeling empty because of it. I used to watch people on YouTube painting all the time like I would just watch these vlogs and I would watch these artists as they painted and they spoke about their process they spoke about other things and it wasn't until one day I was like what are you doing? Don't get me wrong I still watch these but like you spend hours what this is a sign of interest just because you've never painted with oils before you know the fact that you are watching these people continuously is probably a sign of interest, right? It's like the fact that I watch nature documentaries or like I'm very interested in the natural world about how things happen why things happen how things are connected between people and the planet that is not a random thing all right like that is a sign of interest in something that you should pursue and I mean I'm glad I did with my geography degree I'm glad I was able to recognize these interests and go forth with them maybe it's you maybe you watch people like um making content that's a sign like not just watching content for the sake of consuming content but like you're quite interested in how these things are being produced right like how this person is making this piece of content what's going behind the scenes don't ignore that even if it might feel silly in the moment like maybe when you read books like your interest in the book goes deeper than just you know the content itself but the formulation of the book how the book has been authored how it's been put together maybe that's a sign that you're quite interested in writing and writing your own things great again I could keep going on and on and on but the point that I am making is that when inspiration strikes and when you feel that don't ignore it don't brush it off don't feel like um oh you know that's that's lovely for those people but it's not quite for me right don't fall into that habit I would say and finally I think a final thing for the multi-passionate person the renaissance person is an understanding of the importance of community and sometimes this is something that I have felt that I have lacked being around people who are quite similar they don't necessarily have to have the similar interest to me but even the similarity of wanting to pursue multiple things right can sometimes be hard to find and sometimes I feel like oh I have maybe felt like to the outside world I'm doing too much I know I'm not most of the time anyway but like they must be like she's doing something else now what's she doing oh gosh she's off now I went surfing the other day just to try it like when I was in Costa Rica oh she's off surfing now then she's painting like to the outside world maybe I do seem like I'm doing a lot but when you find people who are much more alike or aligned with the way you are it starts to like I don't know not soothe your soul but again we are human beings we crave community we crave um feelings of reciprocation of an understanding of how I am and how you are and so community can be so powerful but also in the sense of giving I realized that when you don't share your work it can feel very isolating and I think there is a ceiling on how far you can go and like the depths of what you can connect to right when those skills that you are mastering or the interest that you have and the knowledge that you're building up you don't share you cap yourself not only do you cap others around you because they cannot learn from you they cannot grow with you but you yourself are not tapping into another level of what it means to be a renaissance individual I spoke about it in my other video but the renaissance was also a period of sharing right I won't dive too deep into that if you really want to know more about like renaissance era then I would suggest that you know going through that video too and examples of modern day renaissance women but which is why my youtube channel my content creation my platforms are so important they're actually part of the cycle you don't have to use social media to get to it some people sharing galleries say they are art or they do publications or you know they work in community centers or they do public speaking at certain events like it doesn't always have to be through the vehicle of social media but community and sharing is fundamental to not feeling again isolated if we're talking about enjoying the person that we are as a multi-passionate multi-interested person multi-interested then that is that is vital that's kind of all I really wanted to talk about I haven't really made a video for a while and I think I've been overthinking it quite a lot but it feels good to make this video this video felt very natural and I'm glad to be back hopefully I will be making some more content you know stop overthinking things yeah I'll see you in the next video