Multi-Passionate and Purpose-Focused: How Your Interests Shape Who You're Becoming
Human Be(com)ing • November 2025
Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age.
Greetings, fellow dragons!
Before we dive into understanding multi-passionate life, take a moment with last week’s SloDo. Your curiosity map will become the working material for everything we explore today. (Also, this post may cut off in your email. Full post on the web!)
Use the worksheet below to take notes!
Imagine fireworks at a neighborhood Fourth of July party.1 You grab a sparkler and light it up, watching little sparks ping off, glitter, and fizzle out in a couple of seconds, within a few inches of your hand.
Now imagine a bottle rocket. There’s a reason young kids want to attach these things to their Radio Flyer wagons. Bottle rockets go. They go far, and they go with oomph.
Sparklers and rockets are the exact same thing. They just distribute their energy very, very differently.
You probably know someone who starts three art projects, two side businesses, and a garden renovation in the same month. That’s sparkler energy.
Now imagine that same person choosing to focus their creative energy on launching one art business that funds their other creative experiments over time. That’s bottle rocket energy.
This understanding of energy distribution as the difference between sparkler and bottle rockets changed how I think about choosing projects, exploring interests, and understanding who I’m becoming. Lemme’splain.
A friend recently shared with me her struggles in choosing or making time for the life she really wanted to live. The struggle lay mainly in the fact of feeling spread over many different (good) commitments, which she enjoys, but which also left her feeling hurried and anxious.
She loves being available to others, but also feels like it’s scattering her energy and attention. She mentioned that it’s “almost as though these good things are distractions from what I feel most called to do.”
As we talked, I realized she was unconsciously creating a Venn diagram—looking for the sweet spot in the overlap between what energized her, what she wanted to do, and what the world needs from her unique combination of interests.
That sweet spot right in the middle of all those circles—that’s what we’re all searching for.
The Beauty of Multi-Passionate People
As we talked, I kept coming back to the idea of the multi-passionate (multi-P) person: the one for whom no experience, curiosity, project, or passion is lost. Everything interests us and nothing is off the table when it comes to pursuing our interests.2
We all struggle with this tug-of-war between interests, capacity, and focus. How do we navigate what sometimes feels like an impossible choice? What do we do with this thrilling, exhausting reality of being multi-passionate? Let’s start by understanding what a multi-P looks like.
Multi-Ps are described as individuals whose “interests span multiple fields or areas, rather than being strong in just one,” who “get bored” with single focuses, and are “not driven by any one passion or interest.” Such folks have the ability to quickly absorb knowledge across disciplines and see connections others miss, especially noticing how different fields interconnect rather than viewing them in isolation. Multi-Ps are also really comfortable with ambiguity and undefined spaces, roles, or categories.
Multi-passionate folks demonstrate the beauty and fun of divergent thinking, the wide-ranging, emergent kind of thinking that solves problems through insight. We’re perfectly happy exploring all the paths without worrying about the when and how of arrival.
If you are also a multi-passionate person reading this, you may be nodding to yourself. It’s hard to resist the lure of the next new discovery. And calls to narrow your focus and say NO to new things just fall on deaf ears.
I get it. Truly, I do.
The Reality of Missing Out
Here’s a hard truth I’ve discovered in my own multi-passionate journey:
We’re already missing out on pretty much everything.
To be alive is to miss out—to miss turns, meetings, opportunities, connections. Every choice we make for something is a choice against something else. And here’s another thing: all those projects and passions currently floating around in your life? You’re missing out on those too.
“Wait, what?! I work on them all the time. I’m always busy!”
I believe you! I know you’re working on them. Constantly.
But consider this. Consider whether there’s a difference between busy and progress, between motion and movement. And then consider (honestly!) which, of all your passions, have experienced movement and progress lately.
If your secret heart-of-hearts answer is “not many,” I got you.
Formation, Not Just Production
Multi-Ps see a goal or destination within a larger field of interests and curiosities—some related to that end, and some not. Everything in that field has an equal pull, the urgency of now. So often, Multi-Ps start pursuing their goals and all the passions, at the same time, while also generating new ide...squirrel!3
Multi-Ps can often feel a sense of shame or frustration: the path behind them appears littered with unfinished projects, abandoned ideas, and half-made creations. As James Horton shares, this frequently feels “demoralizing. It makes me feel like a deeply broken person even though I am aware that I am probably not alone.”
He’s not alone in both the feeling of frustration AND the experience of starting and not finishing.
In a world that values “production,” incomplete projects look like failure. But as Ankita Shah observes, such projects are “imprints of our curiosity, evidence that we once let ourselves fall in love deeply with something new and wildly outside of our comfort zone.”
Multi-Ps often release their energy like sparklers. And while we pursue all of our projects and ideas, the grand vision seems to shrink and fade further into the distance. We love being passionate about our passions. Asking us to choose between them would be like asking us to give up one of our senses.
But there’s something deeper happening here than just energy management. The sparkler versus bottle rocket distinction isn’t just about doing stuff—it’s about formation. When we scatter our energy like sparklers, we’re not just less effective, we’re also less formed by our experiences. When we channel our energy like bottle rockets, we create space for our interests to actually shape who we’re becoming.
The Wisdom of Constraints
But take heart!
Being multi-passionate isn’t something to fix—it’s something to celebrate. It’s an invitation to play in our lives—with hobbies, as a way to connect with others, as a channel for expressing what matters to us. It’s also a way for us to “collaborate with reality,” as Maria Bowler puts it in her book Making Time.
Reality is full of constraints—our bodies need sleep, days have only 24 hours, we can’t be in two places at once. Collaborating with reality means working creatively within these limits rather than exhausting ourselves trying to transcend them.
A multi-passionate person might choose to pursue photography in winter when gardening is dormant, or alternate between intensive writing seasons and social commitment seasons. Constraints aren’t punishment—they’re invitation. As writer Joan Westenberg observes in her work on creative limits, they adapt to changing conditions and offer us ways to improvise.
The Interconnected Life
Here’s the thing… It’s not that Multi-Ps are more creative. It’s that we’re less beholden to specific patterns or habits of thinking. The unexpected combination of what seem to be wildly disparate disciplines reframe what is or isn’t possible, what lenses are permissible, or what processes “work best.” How can music not move our bones? How can science not make us sing in wonder? How can emotion not shape our buildings, our homes?
I love how Troy Bronsink puts this in his book Drawn In: God makes things for other things. His creations have “something to do with other things around them; they are never created simply for themselves.” Nothing exists purely for itself—oxygen serves living creatures, carbon dioxide feeds plants, the moon draws the tides. This interconnectedness isn’t just poetic—it’s how reality truly works.
Christian theology teaches that we’re created with purpose—what classical theology calls telos, our designed end. This isn’t purpose we manufacture but purpose we participate in, discovering who God designed us to be. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins beautifully explored how individual purpose connects to the larger world in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Each mortal thing, in being itself, is for someone and something else. Hopkins reminds us that our individual purposes don’t exist in isolation. They’re meant to connect and serve. When we live into who we’re designed to be, we naturally serve others’ flourishing.
Why does this matter for us in our daily lives?
Because when we understand that our diverse interests are meant to serve something beyond ourselves, it changes how we approach them. Instead of feeling guilty about having multiple passions, we can ask: “How are these different interests forming me into who I’m designed to become? How might they serve others’ flourishing?”
Purpose as Signal, Not Restriction
Remember the center of that Venn diagram my friend was creating—that sweet spot of focus and direction? Purpose helps us recognize when our interests are moving toward that center overlap—where energy, calling, and service intersect.
It’s not that my friend is struggling against her multi-passionate nature. Rather, she’s looking for something to help her discern which of her good commitments deserves focused attention in this season.
The constraints she feels aren’t limitations to overcome, but invitations to discover what matter most. These commitments felt like distractions because she sensed they were pulling her away from something deeper, something more aligned with who she’s designed to be. Purpose won’t keep her from those interests, rather, it will help her navigate them.
This is where purpose becomes, not a restriction on our passions, but a signal for distinguishing between equally appealing options. Purpose serves as destination, filter, and standard—a constraint that helps us recognize which of our current interests best serves who we’re becoming.
A multi-passionate life then becomes less about production and more about becoming. Rather than simply prioritizing and scheduling ourselves more efficiently, the goal becomes using our diverse interests as invitations for discovering and living into our truest selves.
The multi-P who integrates their diverse interests through clear purpose doesn’t just become more focused—they become more available to contribute their unique combination of gifts to the world.
The Creaturely Pace of Purpose
Living a purpose-focused life provides a helpful corrective to multi-passionate urgency and the demands of “productivity.” It invites us, in John Swinton’s lovely phrase, to become “friends of time”—accepting that we’re creatures who need sleep and food and relationships. We have seasons and rhythms; we inhabit one place at a time.
Working within our limits isn’t settling—it’s collaborating with how we’re actually made. Our inability to pursue everything simultaneously isn’t a bug, it’s a feature that encourages deeper engagement with what matters most.
We practice hopeful traveling, remembering Tolkien’s insight that “we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive” to maintain engagement with long-term passions even when they’re not currently active. We cultivate wisdom over information, focusing on how our various interests are forming us as people rather than just building our knowledge or skill base.
Integration, Not Elimination
Multi-passionate overwhelm is less about “managing” our time, energy, and attention, and more about creating space for our true selves to emerge. When these multi-passionate interests serve a deeper sense of purpose and identity, they become opportunities for discovering and integrating who we’re meant to become rather than distractions from it.
Far from being abandoned, unfinished, or forgotten, every curiosity, passion, and project becomes part of our creative, formative journey. They serve as conversation partners, helping us articulate and progress closer and closer to the self, the life, that we envision and desire.
Because reality is so interwoven that no part can ever truly be separated from the whole, our interests and curiosities reflect that interconnection. Multi-passionate people may be uniquely designed to serve this interconnectedness. Our diverse interests position us as translators between different domains—helping the scientist understand the artist, the theologian dialogue with the entrepreneur, the parent integrate wisdom from multiple sources. Rather than being scattered, we become bridges.
When we channel our energy like bottle rockets rather than sparklers, we don’t lose our other passions—we create the foundation and momentum that allows them all to flourish in their proper season.
My friend is learning this integration in real time. Her many good commitments are slowly revealing her Venn diagram of purpose, each one informing and refining her understanding of who she’s becoming. The solution to multi-passionate overwhelm isn’t better technique but deeper self-knowledge and clearer purpose—allowing ourselves to engage our many interests from a grounded center rather than being scattered by them.
It’s learning to say yes to the right things not by eliminating our passions, but by letting them inform each other in the process of who we’re becoming.
Where are you being invited to root your diverse passions?
What would it look like to let your interests become conversation partners this week, discovering which ones deserve focused attention in this season? Which passion might need to move from sparkler energy to bottle rocket momentum?”
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
Have a question? Ask me anything.
A Note on AI
I use LLMs at the END of my writing process, to help me edit the work, zoom out to find patterns I’ve missed, and generate social media posts, title ideas, and other related tasks that make me want to shrivel up in a corner and die. The blood, sweat, and tears are wholly my own.
Or y’know, any kind of party.
I am this person.
