Too many interests
 

I have this problem that I have too many interest I want to do at the same time. I workout to do Ironman triathlons which take lots of time. I am studying to be a personal trainer. I want to develope myself to be a better person(Thats why I am here) And I use to do art till about 4 years ago. Now I hunger to get back into that. But I don't know how I could fit in one more hobby. And if I choose to get back into Art I want to be good at it. So that will consume time. There's little things too such as working on my website. Then there is the real world stuff need to be a Dad and a Husband. Does anyone encounter this? I am curious if I am not the only one who deals with this.

You're not the only one. I thought I was the only one, then found this website and book, Renaissance Soul Life Design. Try the little quiz on the side, and if you answer most of them yes like I did, you'll know that all along you haven't been by yourself. And trust me, there is nothing wrong with you. I thought there was something wrong with me for having too many interests (sports, travel, history, nutrition, etc.), but now realize that there is nothing wrong at all.

It's actually a great quality to have in my opinion. I can just never see myself doing ONE thing for the rest of my life, just because that's what most people expect you to do. There's too many great things in life to only try and love just one. I just ordered that book, so I look forward to reading it.

Hey thanks! Looks like I am one too. I'll order the book right now! :)

I answered yes to allmost all the ones on that quiz.

I've always had lots of interests. When I was finishing high school, I remember talking to a girl in my class, and she didn't know what she wanted to do, because she had no special interests. To me this was completely alien. I had so many interests, I had a hard time picking one to go with. I wound up studying animation, because I figured I could incorporate many of my interests into it (including story writing, acting, drawing, music, comics and animation).

Later in life I've found I thrive on learning new stuff. If my work is challenging, and I'm forced to learn new stuff all the time, it keeps my interest. If it becomes too much of the same, I get bored. Been there, done that... The renaissance soul really sounds like me

Hmm....I guess I'm going to have to order that book. :) Thanks for the tip.

No problem. It's just one of those things that I saw, and knew I had to find out what it was. And I'm glad I did. And yes, I answered yes to every single one of those questions on that quiz.

I've spent quite a while trying to learn information on all kinds of careers, and I just have so much passion and enthusiasm for more than one. I definitely thought I was "odd" for not being able to make one choice. But after learning about this, I feel so much better now, and I think this book is gonna take my life to a whole new level.

When I saw this thread title I knew I had to recommend that book, but you beat me to it.

I finished it recently. It's an excellent book.

My advice is to 1) embrace your ability to have multiple interests, and 2) be thankful, for I think that being a Renaissance person is a great gift -- I certainly wouldn't want to live any other way.

It's easy to be conditioned against your Renaissance tendencies. Society has the illusion of favoring people who pursure a single interest cradle to grave as if it's their calling.

To me, the initial learning curve (where it's often steepest) of any hobby is the most interesting part. So I tend to move from hobby to hobby "too fast".

I grew up doing all sorts of artwork, but I quit it because in college I stopped seeing the long-term purpose in it (I used to want to go into an art-related field like, e.g. architecture, but I since changed career outlooks). Now, I recently picked it back up for no other reason than to keep the Renaissance person inside of me happy.

Narrow down your current hobbies/projects to 2 or 3 things. It's easy to become paralyzed and overwhelmed by dozens of interests and ambitions. So make a firm decision to push most of those aside for a while. Even if you have a busy lifestyle, I think you can always find enough time to work on 2 or 3 hobbies -- enough to satisfy the Renaissance craving, at least.

Yeah I have this too. I don't see at as a problem, I just resist narrowing down and focusing on only certain interests. Luckily mine are quite intertwined, so I know I will be able to branch out when the time is right.

Oh yes I suffer from this so badly :) Infact I wrote once to Steve about this... he responded in lines of :

"I have similar issues, so instead of fighting it, I decided to embrace it and turn it into a strength. I join groups where I'm at the bottom in terms of competence and see how quickly I can reach the top. Then I graduate (i.e. quite the group) and repeat it with a more challenging group. That way I'm always in the sweet spot of challenge, I get to meet lots of interesting people, and I grow very quickly without holding myself back. If other people can't keep up with me, why should I slow down?

So even though I leave a lot of old friends behind, this process has made me good at quickly forming and then deepening new connections. When I moved to Las Vegas two years ago, I challenged myself to see how quickly I could make new friends. Now I have an absolute abundance of great friends who challenge me. When I'm no longer challenged and uplifted by those relationships, I'll seek out new ones.

Don't fight who you are -- embrace it. Turn it into a strength. Resistance is futile. ;)"

He was right as usual :) But I didnt listen... Mh :(
Quess I better try that book.

Just wanted to add a little followup to this thread. Just finished reading The Renaissance Soul (thanks again for the tip) and was very happy with the book. It rang very true for me and had lots of good advice. It actually made me feel better about myself. I took a while to read it, as I did most of the exercises in it. :) I would highly recomend it to anyone with too many interests.

The book got me thinking about purpose in life. I messed around with the idea from Steve's article about finding your purpose in 20 min last year, without much success. Maybe it was because, as a renaissance soul, I have several purposes, and may very well have purposes that don't last me my whole life. So finding my true purpose in life, may simply not be right for me.

Any thoughts?

Same to me, i have a lot of interests. Even in music, I wish I could play all the instruments in this world. In art, I want to good at all medias. At sport, wanna be a good athlete. I want to be a better human being both my body and mind.

Something that combines a few of your hobbies:
Make webcomics about fitness issues.

I feel your pain, I have a massive amount of interests and sometimes i'm overwhelmed by how much it would take to achieve a lot in everyone of them. At first I was deterred, a saying i've heard was "A Jack of all trades is a master of none" and I wondered if maybe i'd never truly excel at any? however, i believe that's true only if you execute your goals poorly.

I think in order to make good progress in all of your interests, you need to tackle them one by one.I developed a system of abilities (inspired by the game Final Fantasy IX)

Basically, each character had a list of abilities they could learn, but they needed a certain amount of experience points in order to use them, however, experience points earned would only go towards one ability at a time and once you gained enough experience, you learnt that ability, you could select another ability and go on to learn more and more until you went through all of them.

I think goals are much the same, if you try and tackle them all at once you'll get nowhere, but create a list, and tackle them one by one, until you have enough experience that the abilities for that skill are 'learnt', and move on to the next thing.

hope that wasn't too confusing.

Definitely not! This is a quote from the about page on my blog:

For like the last ten years, I've been into all sorts of creative projects. A few of my friends and I really just love coming up with ideas, but we're usually not so good at actually developing the ideas. We've been into game development, film making, we've discussed making our own card game, we're really into spraypainting, etc. So right now I'm just trying to break out of the habit of coming up with new ideas and not doing anything with them. I'm trying really hard to actually focus on one thing at a time, which at the moment is a Facebook application.

This is a problem in school too. I'm in Electrical and Computer Engineering, but the field is HUGE. I could do so many different things, but I find a lot of things interesting. I even find many fields outside of my majors interesting, like genetics. I'm really worried that I'll never be able to decide on something.

I am like that too, in fact, just a few days ago i realized i NEEDED to focus on something in order to achieve something, because in all this years of learning and doing stuff i didnt achieve anything, i did learn, something, but to a level i cant do anything with it, or something with bad quality at least, focus is necesary, you must have a list of priorities in your life, or youll be like me.

I have been studying 3d modeling, programming in various languages, studying game design, making games as a hobby, playing the guitar, study painting, studying graphic design, working, personal developing myself, other stuff in life, and all these are a world in themselves, they are complex and they require much time, but in all these years of doing them did i achieve something?, did i make my first commercial game?, am i a proficient musician/painter?, did i buy my first home?, am i the great person i wanted to be?, no, no, no, no... i am not saying i was wasting my time, i absolutelly didnt, but i belive i did manage it badly, if i keep like this in ten years ill be in the exact same spot i am now, living with my parent and without any achievements.

So i made a change of priorities, right now i kept work to a minimun, i wont study anything else except painting, and maybe another thing more, ill keep with personal development and ill dedicate my time to fufill the my dream of beign an indie game developer, otherwise, with so many things going on, ill never achieve it...

I think indie game developer is like the equivalent for our generation of a fire fighter or astronaut. It is like everyone's dream job. :D

Astronaut?, Addict you gave me a new idea, i want to be an astronaut! :p :D

It has been my dream since i am 15 years old, now im 24, it is such an exiting thing, you get to influence people indirectly with games and in a positive way, you get to draw a lot to make a pretty looking game, you get to writte stories, you get to program, game design is such an interesting thing to study too, everything i like to do in one package :), but its soo hard!, a biiiig challenge.

I want to be an astronaut too! besides writer, opera singer, tango dancer, coach, animal healer, mathematician, kryptoanalyst, massage therapist, sculptor, project manager... :D

Haven't read the book yet unfortunately. Too many other books I want to read :D It's in the queue though.

Ragtag : I've been thinking a lot about my purpose too. I think we should not confuse our interests and our purpose. We have many interests, but that doesn't mean we have many purposes. I don't know, maybe looking for one purpose is really not the right thing for you. But if you have one message, you can have many ways to express this message! As an example, imagine you find out your purpose is to teach people the LoA ;) Well you can do so by being a kindergarten teacher, or a coach, but you can also write a book or be a journalist. you can become a great actor and talk about the LoA all the time. You can learn ten languages and travel the world to tell everybody about it. You can paint pictures illustrating it. AND you can do all of this together :)

As a Renaissance Soul you have many possibilities to express your message and can use more than one at the time. Great isn't it? :)

The greatest difficulty is to find the message I guess. Good luck with this!

You are not alone. You're a Scanner. I read a book that really helped me out with it called "Refuse to Choose!". I wrote an article about this on my blog here: » Leonardo Da Vinci was a Scanner and an Amateur, Are You? - Self Help and Personal Growth Blog by Paul Piotrowski

Welcome to the scanner club. Well, actually, you've probably always been a scanner.

Embrace your ability, don't fight it.

I could never narrow down my interests to only a few things. I just think it would be so cool to be able to fly a plane, and do surgery, and know tons of different programming languages, and lead a business, and give people psychological counseling, and institute an economic growth plan to revitalize a country, and negotiate peace in the Middle East, and a ton of other different things.

I'm completely serious about all of those things, which is why I read a few hundred books a year and see all of those things as attainable goals.

Yup. I'm the same way. My only problem is finding enough room for my bookshelves :(

I tried eBooks, but I just can't read them like that. I end up printing them out anyways so I don't even bother. There is something about touching the words on paper.