The Myth of Focus: How to learn multiple skills in parallel

There’s never been an easier time to start learning. Ask ChatGPT how to code, write, draw, or invest, and you’ll have a step-by-step guide in seconds. All that’s left is to show up to practice.

Despite this, few people take full advantage of the opportunity they have for learning across multiple domains.

Why not? The myth of focus:

“Pick one thing.”

“Don’t spread yourself too thin.”

“You can’t master everything.”

This advice is everywhere, and to be fair, it’s not wrong. If you want to become world-class in a specific domain, say—a jazz pianist or starting a bakery—then yes, focus is fuel.

But that’s just one path. And it’s not the only one that works.

What if you’re still exploring? What if your energy naturally spreads across domains? For multi-passionate people, the “just focus” mentality becomes a trap. What energises us isn’t narrowing down. It’s branching out. It’s learning across domains. It’s circling back to the paths we left behind.

Picking up the pen after years in marketing. Finally taking that photography course you shelved when law school started.

Still, the myth lingers. We’re told that to get good at something, you need long, unbroken stretches of focused time. You’re a writer for five years. Then a podcaster. Then maybe a filmmaker. This kind of linear progression assumes clarity, commitment and usually no competing interests. But that’s not most people’s reality.

Lifelong skills don’t come from tunnel vision and sprints. They’re built through long arcs of consistent, habitual practice—something you return to again and again, across months and years. You can’t shortcut your way through a ten-year skill.

And here’s the real problem: If you’re only allowed to work on one thing at a time, you could go years, even decades before you even touch what you really care about.

That’s not a learning path. That’s a bottleneck.

This isn’t an argument against focus. Deep work is still vital. But the assumption that you should focus exclusively on one skill at the cost of every other interest is limiting. Especially for people who draw energy from variety.

Multi-passionate people thrive on exploration. Our energy doesn’t come from staying in one lane—it comes from building a world. A constellation of hobbies, talents, and creative instincts.

We want to explore energising, meaningful crafts—writing, design, filmmaking, running, baking, philosophy. The things we’ve quietly wanted to try but never gave ourselves permission to pursue. Only because they felt like colossal commitments we couldn’t make.

So which is better: single-skill focus or parallel learning?

If you want to be world-class at one thing. Yes, focus.

If you’re in exploration mode, or building a creative foundation, parallel learning can actually accelerate growth.

The key is not to choose one forever. It’s to recognise which season you’re in. Some skills grow best under focused pressure. Others thrive when cross-pollinated.

There’s no shortage of learning advice, frameworks, tactics and tools. Yet the biggest realisation I’ve found about learning multiple skills at once wasn’t tactical. It was motivational.

Learning isn’t just about what you do. It’s about staying in the game long enough to keep doing it.

Why we quit

Earlier this year, I gave myself a challenge: to learn as much as I could—not just one skill, but several. I didn’t have a perfect plan. What I did have was a few guiding principles:

I wanted to build multiple lifelong skills in parallel.

I wanted to explore uncharted career paths.

And above all, it had to be fun or I wouldn’t stick with it.

That meant throwing out the traditional playbook. I dove into writing, coding, illustration, and philosophy. At first, it was thrilling. I shipped projects. Sketched pages. Wrote drafts. Built small things and watched them come to life.

Then came the dip.

The dip is an idea by Seth Godin. It’s the invisible stretch where motivation fades, progress gets fuzzy, and effort feels unrewarding. The dip isn’t about laziness or disinterest. It’s built into the learning curve—when you’ve past the excitement of the start, but haven’t yet hit visible competence. Novelty fades, but mastery hasn’t kicked in.

Progress feels invisible. Outcomes appear distant. And without clear feedback, your brain starts to disengage. You’re stuck in uncertainty, unsure if you’re improving or just spinning your wheels.

The dip hits every learner eventually, but in parallel learning, it cuts deeper. Progress splinters across projects. It wasn’t that I gave up. I just lost track of where I was—and why I was doing it.

Jumping between skills made it hard to keep track of where I began or left off. That made it difficult to tell if I was improving. Then came the overhead: more planning, more juggling. Eventually, I started to question whether any of it was working. Bit by bit, the motivational fuel that kept me going began to burn out:

You lose the story of why you’re doing this.

You lose structure.

You lose sight of your progress.

That’s when things unravel. One stalled habit quietly pulls the others down with it.

And yet, if you can hold that thread—if you stay connected to your purpose, your progress, and your path—parallel learning becomes something rare: a system for long-term creative growth. If you can learn to navigate the dip, you unlock the hidden power of learning multiple skills at once.

Power of the multi-passionate learner

First, you need to embrace your identity as a multi-passionate learner, and recognise that this path comes with real advantages. But you have to build around it intentionally.

Research backs it up:

The spacing effect: Spreading out your learning helps you remember more. Cramming feels productive, but your brain needs space to consolidate knowledge. Short, frequent sessions beat long, infrequent ones.

Interleaving practice: Switching between skills—like writing, coding, and drawing—creates stronger mental connections than focusing on just one.

Transfer of learning: Skills reinforce one another. What you learn in one area can make you better in another.

There may be slower gains in each individual skill, but faster long-term growth, more durable learning, and higher creative ROI. Each skill strengthens the others. Your brain—and your creativity—will thank you.

The key is to protect your expectancy—your belief that success is possible in each skill.

That means you have to keep giving yourself small wins regularly. Keep accomplishing small projects on a regular schedule so you can reaffirm your ability to succeed. Making a small amount of meaningful progress towards multiple learning goals can be incredibly motivating.

Borrowing focus: your primary + satellites

You don’t have to build everything at once, or give it all equal weight.

Most multi-passionate learners already have a core skill from their career or creative background. Let that be your anchor.

When one skill is strong, others grow faster around it. They feed each other. Writing strengthens design. Storytelling sharpens programming.

You can borrow the focus of a primary skill (like design) while layering in adjacent ones (like writing, storytelling, or illustration).

Think of it like a solar system: one center of gravity, surrounded by creative satellites.

Structure supports motion

You need structure that matches your energy. Here are three that I rely on:

Project structure: Where learning is tied to a specific outcome or goal—like publishing an essay or building an app. You’re working toward something tangible.

Habitual structure: Turning learning into a weekly routine. Show up at the same time, keep the sessions small. Over time, this compounds.

Casual structure: You dip in and out, following interest and energy. It’s flexible. It works when your motivation is high and your stress is low. And sometimes, that’s exactly the kind of structure you need to stay in motion.

You’ll shift between them depending on the skill, the season, and your energy.

Think of running. You might train for a marathon (project), run three times a week (habit), and sometimes head out at night just for a jog to clear your head (casual). All of those count toward building the same long-term skill.

Each structure has its place. Once you’re aware of them, you can make each a bit more intentional. But switching between them can still feel scattered or invisible. That’s why you need one more thing.

The smallest unit of progress

In every structure, you need a way to track the smallest unit of focused work. A reliable metric of progress.

The key is to make each mini-goal big enough to feel like real progress, but small enough that you have a reasonable expectation to complete it. You want to be able to say, “I did a solid amount of work” and “I knew it was doable.” That’s what makes it motivating, and why completing it feels good. This might be:

For writing: 500 words or a 1-hour session

For reading: 10 pages + one takeaway

For coding: fix one bug, refactor one function

For drawing: one gesture study or 1 hour of sketching

These mini-goals only work if they’re visible, meaningful, and achievable. This keeps motivation alive: not by pushing harder, but by succeeding more often.

The power of the multi-passionate learner is not chasing everything at once, but building slow, intentional momentum across many paths. Layering skills, not scattering them.

Now that you understand what multi-passionate learning really requires—identity, structure, and visible progress—it’s time to think about systems.

Gaming the system

When progress is visible, motion sustains itself. That’s why you need a system for perpetual motivation—a loop you can trust. A good system is a way of organising your time, attention, feedback, and motivation so that learning becomes easier to do consistently.

A system that works with your attention, not against it. It’s about making your progress visible, your growth trackable, and your learning playable.

That’s when it clicked: Where else do we obsess over small wins, track experience, and level up bit by bit?

Games.

Games don’t just reward effort. They give you a map—a clear path, a sense of direction, and a structure for unlocking new skills that build on each other.

What if learning worked the same way?

What if you could break each skill into branches?

Turn each into mini-challenges?

See your progression to each level clearly?

That’s what we’ll do next

Next week: How to build a skill tree for your real-life learning journey.