How to Find Your Thing, When You’re Good at a Lot of Things

Struggling to find your passion? These 3 keys will guide you

Herbert Lui
5 min readNov 9, 2022

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Photo: Denys Nevozhai/ Unsplash

When I was growing up, my parents would describe me as a “generalist.” They didn’t mean it in a bad way — they were too! — though it also meant it wasn’t so obvious where my career would go, or what my skills were. I could develop my skills at most things I tried to do, especially with practice.

One of the challenges of being a generalist, of course, is the optionality; there are so many things you could do, so it becomes very difficult to stick with one. By contrast, if you’re a specialist, you have no choice — you clearly excel at a few specific things, and you learn to appreciate it.

The one thing

When I hear questions like, “How do I find my passion?” or “How did you know you’d become a writer?” I can empathize. I faced this challenge myself.

Pedantically speaking, passion is an emotion that comes and goes; when a person uses the word “passion,” they usually mean finding…

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Herbert Lui

Covering the psychology of creative work for content creators, professionals, hobbyists, and independents. Author of Creative Doing: https://www.holloway.com/cd