How to Find Your Passion (When You Have Too Many)

Most passion-finding advice assumes you have one passion, quietly waiting somewhere to be discovered, and that your whole job is to find it. But what if you have twelve? Genealogy, building apps, coaching, writing, reading, philosophy, studying, drawing, making my own soil from kitchen scraps, growing things, sustainability, eco-friendly living. That's not a hobby list I made up for this post, that's a non-exhaustive (oups!) inventory of what I'm actually into, right now, at the same time.

I'm Murielle Marie, master certified coach, entrepreneur, and creative generalist, and I spent most of my life treating that list as a problem to solve. Then about 15 years ago, right around when I started coaching, I stopped trying to solve it. This post explores what changed for me, what the research actually says about "finding" a passion versus building one, and the actual system I use to run twelve-ish passions at once without losing my mind.

Why "Find Your Passion" Assumes You Only Have One

"Find your passion" carries a hidden assumption most people never question: that passion is singular, fixed, and waiting to be discovered, like a key under a doormat. Once you find it, the story goes, the rest is supposed to be easy.

A Stanford study revisited in a recent piece on the psychology of passion found exactly why that assumption backfires. Students who believed their interests were something to discover lost enthusiasm the moment the material got hard. Students who believed interests were something to develop kept going. These students received the same article with the same difficulty, but experienced completely different outcomes because of one belief about where passion comes from. The researchers' own conclusion was clear: urging people to find their passion teaches them to put all their eggs in one basket, then drop the basket the second it gets heavy.

"Find" implies passion is singular and pre-made. "Develop" implies it's plural and built. That one-word shift changes everything about what you're allowed to want.

The Real Problem Isn't Having Too Many Passions

I carried that "find the one" belief for most of my life, and it made every single interest on my list feel like evidence against me. Not "here's another thing I love," but "here's another thing proving I can't commit and that there’s something wrong with me."

I realized, about 15 years ago, that this was never actually a problem of having to choose. It was a problem of how I was looking at the whole situation. With good planning, and by combining instead of choosing, and by choosing what gets my attention in the moment rather than forever, I could have all of it. Genealogy didn't have to beat coaching. Drawing didn't have to lose to building apps. Nothing had to go.

A recent Inc.com piece on generalists in the AI economy makes almost the identical case from the job side: algorithms can already execute narrow, specialized tasks with incredible efficiency, which means a person whose entire value sits inside one specialty is, in the writer's words, a “depreciating asset.” The people who hold up are the ones who can move across disciplines and translate between them, exactly the muscle multiple passions will help you build without effort.

Passion Isn't a Weakness. It's a Mosaic.

Here's the surprising part when you dig into what current career writing actually says about this. Passion by itself isn't even the advantage. A 2026 Inc.com piece on career strategy argues that passion has become a commodity: millions of people are passionate about the same things you are, and increasingly, so is the algorithm. What actually sets someone apart is the unlikely, specific combination of everything they've done, what the writer calls a "mosaic." I don't think it's a coincidence that word is basically a synonym for combine.

Twelve passions isn't twelve competing loyalties. It's twelve tiles. Genealogy taught me how to trace a thread through a mess of scattered information, which is most of what coaching actually is. Building apps taught me systems thinking, which shows up in how I structure a coaching practice and how Coachmila's behavioral-change system is built underneath. Philosophy and ethics are the reason that same platform is built to safeguard people, not just engage them. None of these connections were planned. But they all strengthen each other, and inform the work I do one way or another. In my book Get Unstuck! I call the reason this Mosaic exists your “glue,” that binds all your passions together.

How I Actually Have Twelve Passions Without Losing My Mind

Combining instead of choosing sounds nice as a philosophy. It only works with a real system behind it, and mine is not complicated.

1. Ask what's essential right now. What's my current focus, what's actually making money, what's moving the needle forward. That's the layer that gets my attention today, this week.

2. Let everything else wait its turn, on purpose. When something new pops up, and with twelve passions something is always popping up, it goes on the plan to address later. It doesn't get chased the moment it shows up, and it doesn't get dropped either.

3. Review at steady intervals, not whenever I remember to. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, and one big planning session every December where I look at the whole year and decide what's getting real focus next.

4. Choose in the moment, not forever. Choosing what gets my attention this week isn't the same as choosing what I am. I can pick genealogy this month and app-building next month without abandoning either.

That last point is the one that actually changed things for me. I wasn't choosing between passions. I was choosing what gets my focus right now, which is a completely different, much smaller, and, most importantly, a temporary decision. Even with a system like this, the pressure can creep back in, especially once a passion starts running on deadlines and audiences instead of your own timing, which is its own thing worth catching early: creative burnout.

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Common Questions About How to Find Your Passion

How do I find my passion if I have too many interests?

Stop looking for the one you're supposed to find. Research on implicit theories of interest shows that believing passion is something you discover, rather than something you build, makes people give up faster when any one interest gets hard. Instead, pick what gets your focus this week or this month, and let the other interests wait their turn rather than trying to eliminate them.

Is it normal to have multiple passions?

Yes. Having a wide range of interests, sometimes called being a multipotentialite or creative generalist, isn't a focus problem, it's a different operating pattern. Career research increasingly points the other way too. In an era where AI can replicate narrow specialties quickly, the ability to combine several areas of experience is becoming the more defensible position, not the less serious one.

Should I pick one passion or pursue several at once?

You can pursue several, as long as you have a system for deciding what gets your attention in a given week, month, or quarter. The mistake isn't having several passions, it's trying to give all of them equal, immediate attention at the same time with no review cadence to sort them.

What if I never find "the one" passion I'm supposed to have?

You might not, and that's not a failure. The framing that there's one predestined passion waiting to be found is exactly the belief the Stanford research found makes people quit early. Passion that's developed, worked at, and returned to over years tends to outlast passion that was supposed to arrive fully formed and effortless.

Ready to combine your passions instead of picking just one?

If you've spent years trying to narrow a long list of interests down to "the one," you haven't failed at focus. You've been handed the wrong question. The real question isn't which passion to keep and which to let go of, it's how to build a system that lets all of them coexist without any of them stalling out.

Book a free 20-minute coaching clarity call, and let's map out what's essential right now, what can wait its turn, and how to build the same kind of weekly, monthly, and quarterly review rhythm that's let me run a dozen passions at once for the last 15 years.

Book your free session

Or if you're not ready for a call yet, grab the free Portfolio Career Starter Kit and start mapping your own combination instead of hunting for a single passion to sum yourself up.

How to Find Your Niche (Or Why Multi-Passionate People Don't Need One)

"Find your niche" is probably the most repeated piece of career and business advice out there, and if you're multi-passionate, it's also the advice that makes you want to close the laptop. I certainly know it was for me. Pick a lane. Narrow it down. Own one thing. Every book, every LinkedIn post, every well-meaning mentor says some version of it, and every time, something in you quietly dies.

I'm Murielle Marie, and I've spent over a decade coaching creative generalists through exactly this question, and even though I tried and tried and tried, I could never truly niche down myself either. So here's a deep dive into this anxiety-producing topic: what the research on niching actually says, why the standard advice backfires for multi-passionate people specifically, and what to look for instead of a niche if "pick one thing" simply doesn't work for you.

What Does It Mean to "Find Your Niche"?

Finding your niche means narrowing what you offer, who you serve, or what you're known for, down to one clear, specific thing. In business, it's "who's your ideal client," in content it's "what's your one topic," in career terms it's "what's your specialty." The logic underneath all three versions is the same: narrow focus supposedly makes you easier to market, easier to hire, and easier to charge more for. Spoiler alert: it's true, but that doesn't mean creative generalists like you can't benefit from it, too!

So, yes, the logic isn't wrong. A niche works. But, and this is important, only when the person choosing it actually has one thing they want to go deep on for years. The problem is that the advice is handed out as a universal rule, as if everyone who hasn't found their "one thing" simply hasn't looked hard enough yet or will never be successful.

Should You Niche Down? Here's What the Research Actually Says

The honest answer is that the research is more mixed than the productivity blogs let on, and it's worth knowing both sides before you force yourself into a lane that was never built for you.

Stanford economist Edward Lazear studied roughly 5,000 Stanford MBA alumni and found the opposite of what "niche down" would predict for entrepreneurs specifically. In his research on balanced skills and entrepreneurship, people who went on to start businesses had taken a more varied course curriculum and held a wider range of past jobs than classmates who went on to work for someone else. The overall probability of founding a company rose noticeably for people whose career paths already showed breadth rather than depth in one lane. Lazear's own framing is blunt: entrepreneurs are jacks-of-all-trades, not specialists, and most of them aren't technical geniuses either, they're generalists who can hold enough of the whole picture to actually build something.

There's a second piece of research that matters here, too, on how breadth shows up specifically in creative and problem-solving work. Researchers Michael Araki and Angela Cotellessa, writing in Frontiers in Psychology on creative polymathy, argue that polymathic thinking, meaning real, integrated breadth across fields rather than a surface-level dabbling, is what lets people solve "wicked," transdisciplinary problems that a single specialty can't touch alone.

None of that means specializing is bad, and here's where I think most niche advice actually goes wrong. Generalists niche down too. We just don't niche down once, for our whole selves. We niche down for each passion separately and keep the generalist part as the umbrella on top. Lazear's entrepreneurs weren't unfocused inside any one venture; they were broad across their careers and specific within whatever they were building at the time. That's the actual pattern. Breadth across your whole self, focus within each individual thing.

Why "Just Pick One Thing" Fails Multi-Passionate People

If you've tried to pick a niche and it never stuck, it's very rarely a discipline problem. It's usually one of these.

You get good at something, and right around the point where most people would double down, a different part of you starts asking for room too, which isn't you giving up too early, it's the actual shape of how a multi-passionate brain works: interest, mastery, and then genuine boredom, not because you failed at the thing, but because you're built to move once you've mapped the territory.

Then there's the shame layer underneath it, the part nobody talks about. Being told to "just pick one" when you can't, over and over, starts to feel like a character flaw. You're not scattered or undisciplined. You've just been handed a niche question that you're trying to answer for your whole identity, when it was only ever meant to apply to your passions, not to you. I see this constantly in my coaching practice: someone shows up convinced they're behind because they never landed on "the one thing," when the actual problem was the framework, not them.

The Real Move: Niche Each Passion, Not Your Whole Self

Here's the reframe that actually works, and it's not "don't niche." It's niche smaller and more often than you think.

A lot of the advice out there treats "generalist" and "niche" as opposites: pick one. They're not opposites. Every passion, business, or offer you have can and should have its own clear niche. What doesn't need one, and was never supposed to have one, is you. The mistake isn't niching down. The mistake is trying to fit an entire, varied person under a single niche that was only ever built to hold one thing.

This is the core of what I coach: combine, don't choose. You don't have to pick coaching over writing, or design over strategy, or one business over another. You get to keep all of them, and you niche each one on its own terms. If you want to trace the thread that connects your different passions in the first place, I've also written about finding your glue, the thing underneath all of it that makes it recognizably you. But the practical move here is simpler than finding one grand unifying thread: niche the individual pieces, and let "creative generalist" (or whatever you want to call the experience of never fitting inside one job title) be the umbrella that holds them, not a niche you have to justify away.

And if the real question for you isn't which niche to pick but which passion to actually chase first, I've written a full breakdown on how to find your passion when you have more than one.

Why I Never (Really) Niched Down

That trying and trying and trying I mentioned earlier wasn't actually me failing to specialize. It was me trying to specialize my whole self, instead of each individual thing I do, and that was never going to work for anyone.

Here's what I actually do, and it's been true across every business I've built. My coaching niche is, tada, creative generalists and multipotentialites. That's a real niche. I know exactly who it's for, what they're struggling with, and how to help them.

Coachmila, the AI coaching platform I've been building, has a completely different niche again: built for any employee inside a company, a much broader, enterprise audience with almost nothing in common with my coaching clients on paper. It still runs on coaching, so it's not unrelated to what I do; it also has its own marketplace connecting people to real coaches, but that's a different niche too, a different slice of "coaches" than the creative generalists I work with directly. Same industry, three separate niches already, and I'm not even done listing.

Then there's Nuumani, a community I'm building for coaches to learn and grow together. Coaches again, but the niche is different this time: not enterprise employees, not a marketplace, just coaches who want to get better at their work and stop doing it alone.

And that's before I get to the parts of my life that have nothing to do with coaching at all: an Etsy store selling vintage art, a small transportation business, a much more woo-woo, Gaul-inspired brand, and a few more I won't even list here. Every single one of those has, or needs, its own niche. None of them needs to relate to the others, and none of them needs to relate to "Murielle Marie" as a whole person either. Five, six, however many businesses I end up running, and none of them waters down the others, because I never once tried to make one message cover all of it.

What I have let myself do less of, over time, is niche my overall personal brand, the "who is Murielle" question that has nothing to do with a specific offer. More and more, when someone asks what I do, I just tell them I'm a generalist. Not "I help X do Y," the whole pitch. Just: I'm a generalist, and here's the handful of things that means. The niche belongs to the business in front of me. It was never supposed to belong to my whole identity, and once I stopped asking it to, the "pick one thing" pressure mostly disappeared.

How to Find Your Niche as a Multi-Passionate Person

If "pick one thing" has never worked, here's the version that actually does.

1. Stop trying to niche your whole self. You are not a business, a content channel, or a personal brand tagline. You don't need a single niche to cover everything you are or all your passions, and trying to find one is the very trap that keeps this question unanswerable.

2. Niche each individual passion or business on its own terms. If you coach, write, and design, each of those can have its own clear "who's this for" answer, even if the three answers look nothing alike, three focused things rather than one blurry one.

3. Let "generalist" (or creative generalist, multipotentialite, or your preferred version of it) be your umbrella identity, not a niche you owe anyone an explanation for. When someone asks what you do, you're generally allowed to just say it: you're a generalist, and here's the multitude of things I do and am passionate about. Save the specific niche talk for whichever specific offer the conversation is actually about.

4. If you're not sure whether you're actually multi-passionate or just avoiding commitment, take the quiz. Worth the five minutes before you build a whole business plan around either answer; take the quiz here.

5. Let your body of work do more of the specialization than a single label does up front. Consistency inside each individual passion builds recognition just as well as a one-word niche does; it just takes visible repetition inside that lane instead of a tagline that tries to cover everything at once.

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Common Questions About Finding Your Niche

How do I find my niche?

Stop trying to find one niche for your whole self, and instead niche each individual passion, business, or offer on its own terms. Each one can have a clear, specific "who's this for" answer, even if the answers look different from each other, while "generalist" stays the umbrella that holds all of them together.

Should I niche down?

Yes, for each specific business, offer, or passion. No, not for your whole self. Niching down works well when you're talking about one particular thing you do, coaching, a product, a piece of content. It backfires when you try to apply it to your entire identity, which is a question niching was never built to answer in the first place.

How to find your niche quiz: is there a real way to check?

Yes. If you're not sure whether you're a genuine creative generalist or just avoiding commitment to one thing, take the free quiz to get a clearer read before you build a business plan around either answer.

Can a generalist have a niche?

Yes, several, actually. A generalist doesn't have one niche, they have one per passion or business. My own coaching niche is creative generalists specifically, while a completely different venture of mine niches to a completely different audience. Being a generalist describes the range across everything you do. Having a niche describes the focus within any one thing you do. Both are true at once.

Is being a generalist bad for business?

No. Research on entrepreneurship specifically found the opposite: people with a wider range of skills and experience were more likely to start successful businesses than narrow specialists. Breadth across your whole self is a real asset. It's focus within each individual venture that still matters, not narrowing your whole identity down to one of them.

Ready to niche each of your passions instead of shrinking to just one?

Most generalists I coach haven't failed to find their niche; they've been trying to fit a whole, complex person into a single niche built for a single specialty. That's exhausting, and it's also completely fixable once you separate the "who am I" question from the "what's this specific offer for" question.

Book a free 20-minute coaching clarity call, and let's map out each of your passions, business ideas, or offers individually, give each one the focused niche it actually needs, and let "generalist" do its job as the umbrella over it all instead of something you have to defend.

Book your free session

Or if you're not ready for a call yet, grab the free Portfolio Career Starter Kit and start mapping your own combination instead of hunting for a single word to sum yourself up.