For years I absorbed the advice. Find your passion. Niche down. Pick your lane. Be known for one thing.
The people giving this advice were not wrong, exactly. Specialization is real. Focus is powerful. Having a clear identity makes you easier to hire, refer, and follow.
But the advice never quite fit me. And I have come to think it does not fit a lot of people, particularly the ones who are most interesting.
The Myth of the Single Lane
I am good at a lot of things. I care about a lot of things. I get bored easily. I see connections between fields that seem unrelated. None of these is my “one thing.” All of them are me.
The pressure to collapse that into a single identity always felt like a loss. Like being asked to turn down most of the signal to make the broadcast easier to receive. And every time I tried to narrow, something felt off. Not because I lacked discipline, but because the narrowing itself was eliminating the thing that made my perspective distinctive.
What I have noticed is that the most interesting people I know tend to operate at the intersection of multiple things. They are not dilettantes. They go deep in several areas. But the unique value they create lives in the combination, not in any single thread. An AI researcher who also deeply understands education policy. A designer who studied cognitive science. A business strategist who spent a decade in clinical psychology. These people are not confused about their identity; they have a more complex one. And that complexity is exactly what makes their work valuable.
What the Research Says
David Epstein made this case rigorously in Range, drawing on decades of research across domains. The evidence is compelling: in complex, unpredictable environments (which describes most of the interesting domains in the modern economy), breadth and the ability to transfer learning across contexts is often more valuable than narrow expertise.
Specialists win in well defined, rule based domains. Chess, golf, firefighting with standard procedures. Generalists win where the rules are unclear, where the landscape is shifting, and where novel problems require connecting ideas from different fields. Given that the economy is becoming less predictable and more interdisciplinary every year, the case for range is only getting stronger.
Epstein cites research from Abbie Griffin and colleagues, published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, on “serial innovators” in large corporations. These are the people responsible for breakthrough products. The consistent finding was that serial innovators had broader interests, more diverse experience, and a greater tendency to draw analogies from distant fields than their more specialized peers. The innovation did not come from depth alone; it came from breadth combined with depth.
Why the “One Thing” Advice Persists
The niche down advice persists because it is genuinely good advice for a specific context: building a personal brand for a specific audience, getting hired into a specific role, or becoming the go to expert in a defined space. In those contexts, clarity beats complexity. The market rewards people it can easily categorize.
But there is a difference between how the market categorizes you and how you should actually build your skill set and intellectual life. Many of the most successful people I know have a public identity that looks focused while their actual intellectual life is much broader. The focus is a communication strategy, not a reflection of how they actually think or work.
The danger of taking the “one thing” advice too literally is that you start to prune parts of yourself that are actually the most generative. The curiosity that pulls you into a new domain. The side project that teaches you something unexpected. The conversation that sparks an idea precisely because it is outside your usual context. These are features, not bugs. And treating them as distractions can cost you the most interesting work of your life.
The Multipotentialite Advantage
Emilie Wapnick coined the term “multipotentialite” to describe people with many interests and creative pursuits. Her work resonated with millions of people precisely because the “pick one thing” advice had been making them feel broken. The reality is that a significant portion of the population is wired for breadth, and pretending otherwise does not make them more focused. It makes them less effective, because they are fighting their own nature instead of working with it.
There is also a practical argument for range that goes beyond personal fulfillment. In a world where industries are converging, where technology is reshaping every field simultaneously, and where the most interesting problems are inherently interdisciplinary, people who can think across boundaries have a structural advantage. They see opportunities that specialists miss. They can translate between domains in ways that create new categories of value. They are natural synthesizers in a world drowning in fragmented expertise.
Consider how many of the most significant innovations of the last decade have come from combining ideas across fields. The most interesting work in healthcare is happening at the intersection of medicine and machine learning. The most compelling education products combine cognitive science with software design. The most effective marketing increasingly draws on behavioral psychology, data science, and storytelling simultaneously. None of these innovations would have emerged from a single discipline working in isolation.
How I Navigate Multiple Interests in Practice
In practice, operating with multiple interests requires a different organizational approach than the standard career advice provides. Here is what I have found works:
First, I maintain a small number of active projects (usually two or three) and a much larger list of ideas that are intentionally dormant. The dormant ideas are not abandoned; they are waiting for the right timing or the right combination. Having a system for capturing and parking ideas without committing to them immediately relieves the pressure to either pursue everything now or let things go entirely.
Second, I look for projects that sit at the intersection of multiple interests rather than projects that serve only one. A project that combines my interest in psychology, technology, and entrepreneurship is more energizing and more sustainable for me than a project that is purely in one of those domains. The intersection is where my distinctive perspective emerges.
Third, I have stopped apologizing for changing direction. Changing your focus is not a sign of failure if it reflects genuine learning and evolving understanding. The stigma around “pivoting” in your career or interests is a holdover from an era when career paths were linear and predictable. That era is over. The ability to redirect your energy based on new information is a feature, not a flaw.
The Combination Is the Thing
I am not suggesting you avoid developing deep skills. Breadth without depth is dilettantism, and that is genuinely unproductive. What I am suggesting is that the anxiety about not having found your “one thing” might be misplaced. For some of us, the thing is the combination.
My own work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, psychology, education, and technology. I did not plan that intersection; it emerged from following my genuine interests over many years. But looking back, the most valuable work I have done has always been at the edges where those fields overlap, not in the center of any single one.
The world has plenty of specialists. What it lacks is people who can see patterns across domains, translate between different fields, and synthesize ideas that specialists in any one area would never think to combine. If that describes how your mind works, it is not a problem to solve. It is an advantage to lean into.
I stopped looking for my lane. I started paying attention to what happens when my different interests collide. That is where the interesting work lives. And I suspect that if you are the kind of person who has always felt a little guilty about not being able to pick just one thing, you might find the same is true for you.
For anyone who has spent years feeling guilty about their inability to narrow down to one thing, I want to be explicit: that feeling of guilt is itself a “should” worth examining. The question is not “what is my one thing?” The question is “what combination of interests and skills makes my perspective distinctive?” The answer to the second question is almost always more interesting, more honest, and more useful than the answer to the first. And in a world that is becoming more complex and more interdisciplinary every day, it is also more valuable.
The world does not need more people who have successfully narrowed themselves into a single, easily categorizable identity. It needs more people who can see connections that others miss, who can translate between domains, and who bring a richness of perspective that only comes from genuine breadth of interest and experience. If that describes you, lean into it. Your range is not a bug to be fixed. It is the foundation of your most distinctive and valuable work.
The career advice industry sells certainty: find your passion, follow your purpose, define your niche. But the most fulfilling careers I have observed are not the ones built on certainty. They are the ones built on curiosity, on a willingness to follow interesting problems wherever they lead, and on the confidence to trust that the pattern will become clear in retrospect even if it is not clear in advance.
Laurie Stach 