Too Many Passions Is Not the Problem
The real issue isn’t that you’re scattered. It’s that you haven’t found the thread yet.
Every few weeks, someone sits across from me and says a version of the same thing:
“I’m interested in too many things.
I can’t focus.
I keep starting and never finishing.”
A strategist who also teaches, cooks with obsessive precision, and keeps exploring new technologies.
A data scientist who has moved across startups, education, and public policy at an unusually young age.
An artist who codes through the night, coaches leaders, and makes art.
That last one is me.
For a long time, I believed the advice everyone gives:
Pick one thing.
Go deep.
Stop spreading yourself thin.
The world rewards specialists.
Generalists are just people who couldn’t decide.
Except — that’s not what I’ve seen.
Not in my own life.
And not in the people I work with.
When Variety Looks Like Confusion
One of the most memorable coaching conversations I’ve had was with someone whose interests seemed, at first glance, impossible to reconcile.
Food.
Teaching.
Strategy.
Technology.
He came into the session worried that he was just chasing whatever felt interesting.
“Should I be more focused?” he asked.
I asked him:
“What if these are not distractions — but signals?
What if they’re all connected, and you just haven’t found the thread yet?”
That question changed the conversation.
Because the issue wasn’t too many passions.
It was the absence of a frame that could hold them.
Scattered vs. Uncollected
There’s a difference between being scattered and being uncollected.
Scattered means your energy goes everywhere with no return.
You start, abandon, start again. Nothing builds.
Uncollected means you’ve gathered a tremendous amount —
experiences, skills, relationships, insights —
but you haven’t yet paused to see the pattern.
Most people I work with aren’t scattered.
They’re uncollected.
I wrote recently about a related pattern in You're Not Only Burned Out. You May Be Uncrossed. That state — where you’ve already left one chapter but haven’t fully crossed into the next — often comes with this one. Being uncollected is frequently its companion.
The Thread Is Usually a Verb, Not a Noun
The breakthrough rarely comes from choosing a domain.
It comes from finding a verb.
Not:
“I should be in education.”
“I should be in tech.”
But:
I teach.
I connect.
I build systems.
I translate complexity into clarity.
The person I mentioned earlier?
Their thread wasn’t any one field.
It was this:
Helping people understand things they didn’t yet know how to see —
and making that process engaging enough that they stay with it.
Once that became clear, everything stopped competing —
and started aligning.
I Thought I Had Five Different Careers
I thought I had five separate careers.
International relations.
Market research.
Startups and growth.
Art.
Coaching.
Each time, it felt like I was starting over from zero.
I wasn’t.
Each chapter was training the same capability from a different angle:
How to cross a border —
and help others do the same.
Diplomatic borders.
Research borders.
Growth borders.
Material borders.
Personal borders.
That’s when what looked like five distractions
started to feel like one practice.
And sometimes, these “careers” don’t happen in sequence.
They happen in parallel.
They overlap.
They collide.
Just a few weeks ago, I was in Mexico.
Spending a full month preparing for an art fair.
Every day was physical.
Collecting corn husks.
Drying them.
Dyeing them with natural pigments.
Letting them dry again.
Stitching them slowly, by hand.
Then going to a glass fabricator —
discussing heat, structure, fragility, form.
Standing inside material decisions all day.
Slow. Repetitive. Embodied.
Now I’m back in Seoul.
And my days look completely different.
I wake up and open Claude Code.
And then I don’t stop.
Writing code.
Building tools for my coaching clients.
Designing platforms for artists I care deeply about.
Restructuring the architecture of my own business.
Hour after hour.
Day after day.
And in between, I’m also building something physical again.
Opening Material Memory Studio.
Assembling furniture.
Installing systems.
Organizing materials.
Preparing the space.
Welcoming people in.
Holding conversations.
Hosting presence.
Letting the space begin to take shape.
Not just making a room —
but building a container for encounters, work, and integration.
From hands in pigment and fiber
to thinking in code and systems
to building a physical space people can step into.
From the outside, this can look like fragmentation.
But fragmentation is often just unintegrated coherence.
Too many roles.
Too many identities.
Too many directions.
But from the inside, I know I am doing the same work in different materials.
I build systems that translate across boundaries —
material or digital,
physical or conceptual,
individual or relational.
That’s when what looks like multiple identities
stops being a problem —
and starts becoming a practice.
What to Do If You’re “Interested in Everything”
- Stop trying to cut things.
Simplifying by elimination is often the wrong move.
You don’t have too many interests.
You have unorganized material. - List everything from the past 5 years.
Jobs, side projects, obsessions, conversations that lit you up.
Don’t filter.
Just capture. - Look for the verb.
What were you doing in those moments that made you come alive? - Test the thread.
Run every interest through it.
If the thread is right, they begin to align. - Allow yourself to be uncollected — for now.
The thread reveals itself through action, not over-analysis.
A Different Question
What if being interested in many things isn’t the problem —
but the raw material
for something you haven’t fully integrated yet?
Sometimes the thread is already there.
What’s missing is not passion, but integration.
If This Resonates
If this feels familiar, you’re likely not scattered.
You’re in the middle of integrating something.
And that can feel like confusion —
when it’s actually coherence trying to form.
This is exactly the kind of work I do in coaching — helping people turn what feels like fragmentation into something coherent, usable, and alive.
— Jay
If you’re in Seoul and want to see how your interests actually connect:
Material Memory Studio · SeoulWheel of Life + Harada Chart Session
*A Wheel of Life + Harada Chart session is a structured way to map, align, and integrate what you’re already holding.