Why you have so many interests, why choosing one can feel impossible, and what may be moving underneath them
By Marlyne Lili Lack
Having many interests does not always mean you are confused, unfocused or incapable of committing. Sometimes several seemingly different interests carry a deeper pattern of curiosity, perception, intelligence or expression that has not yet been recognized.
I have worked with people who arrived carrying some version of the same frustration:
Why can’t I just choose one thing?
And I know the question intimately.
At different points in my own life, I have moved through music, art, singing, journalism, television, business, communication, sales, entrepreneurship, spiritual work, teaching and philosophy.
For years, those things could have looked like different lives.
Eventually, I became much more interested in a different question:
What if they were not as unrelated as they appeared?
So instead of writing another essay telling you how to “find your one thing,” I decided to use this space differently.
I gathered the questions I have heard from people I have worked with, questions I have asked myself, and questions people are searching for when they are trying to make sense of having many interests, gifts and possible paths.
And I want to respond to them here.
Before we begin, you may already have received advice like:
Pick one thing for 90 days.
Build a portfolio career.
Choose a niche.
Combine your passions.
Create an M-shaped career.
Find the intersection.
Turn your interests into a business.
Some of this advice can be useful.
Some of it can become another way of forcing a person into a structure before they understand what is actually moving through them.
And if ADHD is part of your experience, appropriate assessment and support can of course matter. But having many interests by itself is not enough to conclude that ADHD is the explanation.
What I want to offer you here is a different place to begin.
If you are asking these questions, I first want to say:
Congratulations. There may be far more life moving through you than you have known how to organize.
You may be highly receptive to ideas, possibilities, patterns and forms of expression.
In my language, you may be multi-expressive.
And like many forms of sensitivity or creative intelligence, when that movement is not understood, organized, translated or given the right containers, what could become a gift can begin to feel like a curse.
Too many ideas.
Too many directions.
Too many unfinished things.
Too many versions of yourself competing for the same life.
So let us begin there.
1. Why do I have so many interests?
The first thing I would question is the assumption hidden inside the question:
Why do I believe I should have fewer?
Some people naturally move deeply through one field for decades.
Others encounter themselves through several subjects, disciplines and forms.
Having multiple interests is not automatically evidence that something is wrong.
But neither does every interest necessarily belong to your deepest path.
This is where inquiry begins.
Rather than asking only “Why am I interested in so many things?” I would begin asking:
What becomes alive in me through these particular things?
There may be something beneath the subjects themselves that is trying to become visible.
2. Why can’t I stick to one thing?
Sometimes it is because you are avoiding depth.
Sometimes because the thing truly completed its season.
Sometimes because the excitement of beginnings is easier than the vulnerability of mastery.
And sometimes because you have mistaken one form for the entirety of what you are here to express.
Those are not the same experience.
The more useful question may be:
Do I leave because I am escaping something, or because something in me has genuinely completed its relationship with this form?
That answer requires honesty more than productivity advice.
3. How do I choose a career when I’m interested in everything?
I would not begin with the career.
I would begin with the person.
A profession is a container.
Before asking which container to choose, become curious about what the container needs to carry.
What kind of problems do you naturally notice?
What kind of contribution energizes you?
What qualities keep appearing across your interests?
What are you actually doing beneath the different job titles?
You may discover that several careers could carry pieces of the same deeper movement.
4. Do I have to pick one passion?
Perhaps not.
But you may need to choose what receives your attention in this season.
Those are two very different things.
Choosing one expression now does not require declaring every other part of you invalid.
Focus does not have to mean self-abandonment.
It can simply mean:
This is the expression I am willing to give form to now.
5. Am I unfocused, scattered or just bad at committing?
Possibly.
But those words are conclusions, not observations.
Look underneath them.
Do you start repeatedly and abandon things when difficulty appears?
Do you lose interest after genuine completion?
Are you trying to hold ten projects simultaneously because choosing one feels like losing yourself?
Do you lack structure?
Are your interests actually connected by a thread you have not learned to recognize?
The behavior may look similar from the outside.
The origin can be completely different.
6. How do I know which interest is the “real” one?
I am not convinced there is always one.
Sometimes the search for the “real one” is the very thing creating the confusion.
Instead ask:
What is real in me across several of them?
That question moves you away from ranking the interests and toward recognizing the intelligence moving through them.
7. What if choosing one path means losing all the others?
This fear is very real for multi-expressive people.
Because choosing can feel less like commitment and more like amputation.
But a choice does not always have to become an identity.
You can choose a form without declaring:
This is the only thing I am allowed to be.
A season can receive your devotion without becoming a prison.
8. Why do I become deeply interested in something and then want to move on?
There are many possible reasons.
Sometimes novelty is stimulating.
Sometimes you reached what you came there to learn.
Sometimes another expression is becoming alive.
Sometimes you leave at precisely the moment the work asks for discipline.
And sometimes what you thought was the destination was actually one classroom in a much larger education.
The inquiry is not simply “Why did I lose interest?”
Ask:
What did this experience give me that I am carrying forward?
9. How do I focus without abandoning parts of myself?
By separating focus from identity.
You do not need every part of yourself active at equal intensity.
Some parts can be central.
Some seasonal.
Some private.
Some professional.
Some dormant.
Some simply pleasurable.
You are allowed to contain more than you are currently expressing.
10. How do all my seemingly unrelated interests fit together?
They may not all fit.
And I would resist forcing them into a clever sentence just to make your life look coherent.
Instead, listen.
What repeats?
A quality?
A question?
A way of seeing?
A population you care about?
A kind of transformation?
A particular relationship with beauty, truth, liberation, healing, creation, structure, meaning?
Sometimes coherence cannot be manufactured.
It has to be recognized.
11. Can I have more than one calling or purpose?
I think we often confuse purpose with form.
If purpose means one permanent occupation, then changing work can feel like losing your purpose.
But what if a deeper purpose can move through several expressions over a lifetime?
That is one of the inquiries at the center of my work.
Perhaps the calling is not always the title.
Perhaps the title is simply one place the calling becomes visible.
12. How do I explain what I do when I am many things?
This is where many multi-expressive people begin cutting themselves into pieces.
You try to list everything.
Or choose the one title people understand most quickly.
There is another possibility.
Instead of beginning with everything you do, begin becoming more intimate with:
what moves through what you do.
Your language becomes clearer when you understand the deeper contribution underneath the titles.
But that clarity is discovered. It should not be manufactured merely because branding advice says you need a sentence.
13. Is this multipotentiality, ADHD, curiosity or lack of discipline?
It can be tempting to find one explanation that settles the whole matter.
But these are not interchangeable concepts.
Multipotentiality is commonly used to describe people with many interests and creative pursuits.
Curiosity is part of ordinary human variation.
Discipline concerns how we relate to commitment and action.
ADHD is a clinical neurodevelopmental condition and cannot be identified simply because someone has many interests or frequently changes direction.
More than one of these realities can also coexist.
The label should not replace the inquiry.
Ask what is actually happening in you.
14. How do I actually finish anything if I keep having new ideas?
You may need containers.
Not fewer ideas.
A place to capture what is not for now.
A decision about what is alive enough to receive devotion.
A definition of what “finished” actually means.
Permission for some ideas to remain ideas.
And perhaps the maturity to recognize that receiving an idea and being responsible for bringing it into form are not always the same thing.
The question becomes:
Which ideas am I willing to enter into relationship with deeply enough to give them a life?
You may not need another label
Maybe multi-passionate resonates.
Maybe multipotentialite does.
Maybe polymath, creative, generalist or multi-hyphenate feels closer.
I use another word in my own work:
multi-expressive.
Not because I think everyone needs another identity.
But because I became interested in what happens when we stop looking only at the multiplicity of the interests and begin noticing the Essence seeking expression through them.
What if there is a deeper coherence you have not recognized yet?
What if the goal is not to make yourself smaller?
What if it is to learn your own movement well enough to know:
what belongs,
what is seasonal,
what is distraction,
what is devotion,
and what is asking to become form now?
That is a different journey.
And perhaps a more interesting one.
If you are still in this inquiry
If you are still discovering what is uniquely yours, how it wants to move, and what expression it is asking you to give form to, The Original Essence Flow™ Apprenticeship was created as a sacred space for that journey.
It is not a program for forcing all of your interests into a niche.
It is an apprenticeship in learning your own Original Essence, its rhythms, seasons and natural movement, and then beginning to give what is uniquely yours a real expression in your life and work.
The Apprenticeship opens once each year.
Explore The Original Essence Flow™ Apprenticeship →
