Transcription
If you have too many interests, people treat you like you're broken. Everyone else looks certain. They pick the lane, they're getting promoted, and you feel unfinished, a jack of all trades, a master of none.
But what if your lack of focus isn't your weakness, but a weapon? I have been a CEO, board member, and investor in tech companies that created billions in value. I was also an MIT grad, a musician, a monk in training, and a homeless teenager. So, on paper, I was a mess. I thought those chapters were random detours. They weren't.
In this video, I'll show you why having too many interests is your biggest career advantage and offer a path for those of us who were never meant to be just one thing. First, the old advice, pick one lane and specialize, is getting riskier by the month. The world has changed.
If you're looking to grow professionally, financially, personally, you know how it feels right now. Since you were a kid, you've been told to pick a lane, get really good at one thing, and then wait your turn. But today, a single lane feels like a dead end. AI is eating a big chunk of all the junior level work. analysts, the junior coders, entry-level researchers, the ground floor that helped you build expertise is sinking. So nowadays, your multiple interests aren't a liability anymore. They are your rope to get out.
Just ask the man people call the grandfather of modern AI, Jeffrey Hinton. He did not have a computer science degree. He started with experimental psychology. In the 1980s, the mainstream AI was dominated by logic and rules and huristics and expert systems. But Hinton was obsessed with human brains, neurons, and biological feedback. He asked a simple question from an unrelated world. What if a machine learned the way human brains do? That became the root of the modern AI revolution. Hinton was not a specialist deep in the field of AI. He brought a different obsession and it changed the field.
Larry Page succeeded by going deep in computer science. Steve Jobs succeeded after dropping out of college, taking a calligraphy class and studying Zen. Both changed the world of technology. George Lucas went to film school. James Cameron was a truck driver who taught himself film making. Both changed the world of movies. Some were focused, some looked scattered, some picked a single lane, some had too many interests. There is no single template. No one should tell you that there is only one way to change the world.
Your own way is the only way because almost all innovation is never brand new. It's a recombination. Old ideas with new neighbors. And in that world, if you could see many dots, you could draw a map that most specialists would miss. And in the age of AI, that map isn't just your advantage. It's the difference between impact and irrelevance.
Here's the illusion. The best careers look like a straight line. But most real careers are a maze. You know, for years, I carried resume shame. The shame of being told I lacked focus, that I jumped around, that I didn't finish what I started. All true. While everyone around me picked a lane and stayed in it, I kept switching. Monk training, musician, math, tech, banking, seauite, boards, investor, my peers dug a well a mile deep. And I felt I was trading in a lake 6 in deep. And you keep telling yourself something must be wrong with me. There isn't. You're not scattered. You're unsorted.
David Epstein studied top performers across sports, science, business, and art and found something very uncomfortable. In complex fields, range beats early specialization more often than we admit. That is the M shape. It's not one narrow pillar is two or more genuine interests connected by a bridge of curiosity. It's the most resilient shape there is. If one pillar collapses, the other holds.
But there is a deeper truth here. A finance professional, for example, who picks up photography isn't Mshaped. Those worlds don't feed each other. They just compete for the same hours. The most resilient M shape is a stack where your interests multiply each other. To find that connection, you need a filter. That's our next point.
Here's a framework to build multiple interests that are actually reinforcing each other. Here's a four question test that you can run in just 60 seconds. Take any two interests. Call them A and B. Ask four questions. If the answer is yes, give it one point. If not, then zero. I call it the link test. L is language. Do you ever describe A using B's language? I is for improve. When A improves, does B get better without effort? N is need. Do you need the tools from A to solve B's problems? And C is cut. If you cut A entirely, would B get worse? If the score is one or two, they're adjacent. They're neighbors, but not linked partners. If you get a zero, these two interests are competing for your time, not compounding.
Now, if this is too abstract, let me run this framework with two of my own interests, just as an example. Years ago, I trained as a monk. A years later, I became the CEO of one of the fastest growing tech companies in the US, B. Now, they seem like they're not connected, but let's apply the link framework and find out.
Now, L for language. Did I describe B using A's language? Not really. It's not a strong connection. So, score there is zero. Improve. When one improved, did the other improve? Yes, indeed. More contemplative practices made me more patient, more present, more resilient, more focused, more focused on others. All good leadership skills. So, A improve B. That's a one. Third one is N or need. Did I ever need tools from one to solve problems in the other? Detachment from outcome is a negotiating superpower. So, heck yeah, one there as well. And finally, C or cut. If you removed monk training, would my leadership be worse off? That's an easy yes. So, one there. That's three out of four. So, these two interests are linked. They reinforce each other. Now, from the outside, it looks unrelated, but underneath is the same engine.
Now, this is just a random example from my life, but you can apply it to your interest to see which ones are secretly working together to make you successful. The action item is pretty straightforward. Pick any true interest. Run link. The total score will tell you what stacks and reinforces together. You don't have to invent the connection. Just uncover it.
Discovering which interests connect is only half the problem. The harder question is deciding which ones deserve your focus right now. For that, you need a sorting hat. In Harry Potter, the sorting hat looked at every incoming student and told them where they belonged, which house. Your sorting hat can sort your interests. Four questions. What am I already good at? What buys me stability? What buys me optionality? What restores me? If the interest does not fall into one of these four categories, it has no job.
In life and in our careers, we go through seasons. We change. We evolve. So do our interests. But in this season that you're in right now, each interest that you have must earn at least one of those four jobs. Think about interests like stock options. They vest over time. Your interests also need a vesting schedule. I'll again give you my personal example. I'm not a good guitarist. I love playing. It's not my career. I spent 2 years making sure that I could play chords without thinking. My fingers just know where to go now. But the job for that interest was the fourth one. I play for 10 15 minutes when I want to take a break. I love it. It restores me. That's the job. So 2 years later I asked do I want to go pro level? The answer was no because it would take years more. So for me that interest was vested. I stopped investing but I continue harvesting it for the joy it gives me. Now that's how I thought about it. Now you can run your own sorting hat. Check if each of your interests has at least one job to do. That is your focus map.
You know, starting early and staying in one lane only works in a very specific kind of world. We worship the Tiger Woods story. Tiger was mimicking his dad's swing as a toddler 10,000 hours before he was a teenager. That's the conventional wisdom. Start early, narrow quickly, become inevitable. Perfect strategy for golf. Golf is a kind environment. The rules never change. The feedback is instant and accurate. Repetition brings you rewards. But that's just one way.
Roger Federer played tennis, soccer, squash, wrestling, skiing. People thought he was unfocused and distracted. But then he went on to become one of the greatest tennis players in history. Why? Because tennis is a wicked world. It's adversarial and dynamic by design. Your opponent adapts in real time and you have to make it up as you go. Business is wicked. Investing is wicked. Medicine is wicked. Rules change, patterns break, feedback arrives late or never arrives or lies. Your growth is about surviving this wicked world.
Take Nokia. They dominated the world of flip phones. Absolute experts. They looked at the first iPhone and laughed. They thought, "No buttons? Who's going to use this toy?" Their very expertise had become their blind spot. They were so deep inside their own world, they couldn't see the next one emerging. And today, AI is moving the goalpost before you even line up your first kick. McKenzie projects that 50% of work activities could be automated as early as 2030. What AI will dismantle is the ladder underneath all of us. The ladder that used to give you reps so you could become an expert, a specialist down the line.
So in your life and in your career, if you dabbled in different domains, you don't have to feel like you're behind. You might be doing exactly what you need to do. And the data is weirdly clear. Michigan State University studied 773 Nobel Prize winners across the century. Nobel scientists were 12 times more likely to write fiction or poetry, 22 times more likely to be actors, dancers, or magic performers. So ask yourself, what if the interests that you've collected across your life weren't random? What if there is an invisible thread that connects all of it? find that golden thread and your interests stop competing with each other and start compounding.
Once you find that invisible thread, something surprising happens. You know, when I was doing music full-time, I envied the power and money that corporate jobs can bring you. And when I was on Wall Street, I envied the freedom and beauty that musicians can enjoy. I thought both were wrong turns. They weren't. They were just different seasons. And seasons don't have hard edges. There is no exact moment like Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. when winter suddenly becomes spring. They flow into each other. Your seasons are connected. Your interests are connected. Nothing is wasted.
In Dao, there is a concept of the uncarved block. Once that block is carved into a chair, it's useful, but its potential is over. From that point on, it can only be a chair forever. But the uncarved block isn't just one thing yet. It contains the potential to be so many things. So having too many interests just means that you refuse to be carved into a single limited tool. And if you ask me, the world already has plenty of chairs. It needs more uncarved blocks. It needs the painter, the priest, the poet, the product manager. Because the fabric of human progress is woven from all of them. One world intricately stitched together. It needs all of you, especially the parts you were told to hide.
If you enjoyed this video, you love the next one. It's about how to master any skill so fast it almost feels unfair. Thank you and I love you.