I spend a significant amount of my free time thinking about how to effectively combine and pursue my different interests. Up until this point in my life, I've never felt an extreme passion for one subject or topic; instead, I'm typically drawn to and excited about multiple subjects and the intersections between them.

Growing up, I always found myself at the crossroads of multiple interests in different disciplines. Having two humanities professors as parents while simultaneously attending a science-focused high school, my interests were constantly changing. I spent most of my free time nerding out about politics during the height of the 2016 election as a freshman, my sophomore and junior years learning how to code, and my senior year devoted to academic and history trivia.

While in retrospect, I'm incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity and space to explore these different areas earlier in my life, I used to struggle with defining my identity around a certain field or aptitude. Most of my friends and peers in high school had identified their aptitudes and were pretty certain about the exact path they wanted to take, whether that be to pursue medicine, business, academia, or something else. On the other hand, I felt lucky to have some knowledge about a few of these subjects but felt frustrated that I wasn't gravitated in one direction.

At university, I chose to pursue a combination of math, computer science, and history. I had enjoyed my freshman year classes in both math and political science and was excited about the opportunity to be exposed to a breadth of courses through the remainder of my degree after taking a year-long American History course in my sophomore year. Having the flexibility to study all these subjects as a part of my college degree felt like a true gift, but as I talk about below, it also required an elevated level of discipline and intentionality that I didn't account for.

Here are a few lessons from the last few years that I've learned when it comes to trying to pursue multiple interests over a sustained period of time.

Dive Deep in One Interest at a Time

Over and over again, I've made the error of trying to go deep in various interests at the same time. I remember the countless times when I would set a weekly schedule, consisting of trying to spend one day learning physics, the next math, the following politics, and so on. This is a recipe for disaster. Ultimately, any form of expertise or insight can only be developed through focus, not glazing over multiple intro chapters or easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials. Learning anything well requires consistency and discipline - this cannot happen with daily context switching and trying to cram tons of information about a subject in a short period of time. Also, I've found that most of my learning has happened when I've spent hours frustrated, struggling to understand even the simplest or most rudimentary detail about a new subject. You can only go through this process if you give yourself an ample amount of time to freely learn about a singular topic - not by manufacturing an "optimized" schedule of learning multiple things at once.

In my own life, a concrete example of this was when I was learning to code. My first real interest in technology was in my sophomore year of high school when I became excited about building software to teach high school students about personal finance. My early attempts at learning to code were totally fruitless. I would spend an hour on Codecademy, write a few lines of Python or JavaScript, and then would quickly move on to understanding how to "apply" my "knowledge" of software to personal finance. As you may guess, spending a few hours here and there on coding tutorials didn't really get me anywhere. On the other hand, in junior year, I made it a goal to try to write Python code, in the form of solving basic algorithm problems, as a way to become better at coding. Most days of doing this, I would struggle to solve even the easiest of LeetCode-style questions. But ultimately, over a year-long span, I became a lot better and more confident about writing code, and it ultimately gave me the ability to work on, and focus on building a startup called MoneyScents, a platform that gamified the process of learning personal finance.

Similarly, in my current role at Check, where we work on a lot of different types of technical and business problems such as payments infrastructure, productized support and data migration, and third-party integrations, I'm often tempted to spend my days reading through our internal Notion database about all the projects and products that our different teams are working on. In reality, the days and weeks where I actually learn and absorb the most are when I focus on going very deep into one or two domains in Check's business, whether that be through shipping code, talking to our customers, or working closely with our operations and engineering teams.

Ultimately, even if there are a ton of things you want to learn about, I believe it's almost always better to invest a sustained amount of focus on a few areas and learn through serendipity, rather than trying to perfectly craft your schedule and time around learning everything in a very manufactured way.

Don't let your career choice narrow your interests

In school and college, we're often given the advice to follow our multiple interests, with the goal of eventually finding a job or career that will try to encapsulate as many of our passions and aptitudes.

This sounds great but is completely idealistic. In reality, especially at the college level, even in the earlier years, we're nudged to carve out a narrow path for the rest of our lives. For example, if you choose to study life sciences, the majority of your schedule will be taking chemistry and biology classes. Your peer group will also most certainly be studying the same things and talking about the same career paths. This can be said about most degrees and subjects, especially at the post-secondary level.

While it's incredibly important to take as many classes in your discipline and learn with your classmates, the downside of how this education is structured is that it warps our perception of the possible career paths we can pursue. For example, I noticed that most of my classmates who studied computer science only thought about becoming software engineers. And of those classmates, the majority of them aspired to work at big tech/FAANG type companies. I say this as someone who fell into this trap earlier in my college years, after doing two internships at Microsoft. I felt myself naturally planning my life around bouncing between big tech companies for the rest of my career but felt unnerved by the reality that I may never have exposure to my other interests like politics or history in any of my future jobs.

I feel very fortunate to now have had the experience of working at two different startups after my internships at Microsoft, where I get to build at the intersection of software and non-technical subjects I'm excited about. Within the realm of technology, my interest in history and social sciences has manifested itself through a fascination with building software that radically transforms the ways small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) operate. At my current employer, Check, I've been incredibly lucky to work on building software and tackling problems that ultimately improve the payroll product offerings for SMBs, and feel truly grateful to work on a domain that combines my diverse set of interests.

Overall, while I believe it can be incredibly valuable to choose a specialized career path that fits a few of your core interests, I think it's equally important to find out how you can expand your role or job to encompass other passions or aptitudes, even if it can only happen later on in life.

Build an interesting network

Finally, something that I've found really effective in trying to think about how to combine and pursue a variety of interests is trying to build and maintain a diverse network. Often, the most valuable and thought-provoking insights on how to approach my career and life come from my friends, family, and mentors who are in entirely different professions and share almost no overlapping passions or hobbies.

I want to conclude by saying that I am nowhere near figuring out the right balance or approach for combining interests. This post is simply a reflection of my experience so far.