What's your passion?

After I wrote this post, I realized that it was very similar to what @IDiot already wrote. Here it is anyways:

I can relate to a lot of the feelings you have identified as I also see myself as a “jack of all trades, master of none.” I have ME and ID degrees, and I have also found it challenging to get noticed by hiring managers who are looking for one or the other. Unfortunately I don’t have any advice that relates specifically to marketing this aspect of yourself to hiring managers, but from reading your posts, it seems like you’re pretty good at selling your skills and communicating your passions.

One thing that wasn’t specifically mentioned, but seems to be an underlying requirement for some of the other helpful suggestions people posted, is just simply “be patient.” You’re in your late twenties and still have a lot of career left to go. You’ve said that you have a lot of passions, but unfortunately you need to couple that passion with some skill and experience to make it useful. Skill and experience only come with practice and time, so… be patient.

I also have a lot of interests and have had a lot of trouble in the past focusing enough energy on each one of them so that I feel like I am improving. In the past year or two, I have made a conscious effort to reduce the number of interests I’m practicing at any given time to around two or three. And it has definitely helped! After a full week of work, sleep, eating, time with family/friends, and chores, you might only have 2 or 3 hours left of free time. If you try to split up those 3 hours over 30 different interests, you’ll only get to spend 6 minutes on each one. While you will be improving each skill a little bit, you will just end up being bummed out because you won’t really be able to see any change between practice sessions. However, if you focus on only 2 or 3 interests, then you’ll get to spend 60-90 minutes on each one and you might actually be able to see some progress between sessions. Then, after you’ve advanced to some point that feels satisfactory, you can switch out and move on to improving another skill.

It might be a good exercise to take all of your 30+ passions you mentioned and evaluate your current skill level, your desired skill level, and which ones might overlap or be prerequisites to other interest areas. This might help you figure out how to focus your time and make some measurable progress.

Also, don’t put too much stock Meyer’s Briggs. Its is an interesting way to assign categories to personalities, but I don’t think there is any correlation to overall intelligence or skill. It’s just a way to try to understand your personality, and how you can better interact with and relate to people of different personality types. For reference, I’m an INTJ.