The Inspire blog

For the past week, I’ve been drowning in a familiar feeling, the exhausting guilt of having too many hobbies. Interested in everything, master of nothing. I’m the person with a guitar in the corner, half-finished crochet projects in a basket, coding tutorials open in seventeen tabs, blog drafts sitting unpublished, and a keyboard waiting for me to finally learn that song I promised myself I’d master. Oh, and that YouTube channel I started? Let’s not talk about the upload schedule.

The weight of being “just average” at everything got so heavy that I almost did it. Almost gave up guitar, the one thing that’s been with me the longest, the one that still makes my heart race when I nail a difficult chord progression. The thought of letting it go broke my heart, but maybe that was the price of finally becoming “good” at something?

My inner critic had a favorite weapon: “A jack of all trades is a master of none.”

I HATED that quote. But it guided my thinking anyway. (Look, don’t judge me for letting a cliché run my life. Sometimes these things just… stick.)

Then, scrolling TikTok one night (yes, I know, but hear me out), I saw a post about that exact quote. The video said something like “Everyone forgets the second part of this quote.”

Second part? What second part?

I rushed to google, and there it was… what the quote ACTUALLY says:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” – William Shakespeare

But oftentimes BETTER

The Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves

How many other half-truths have I been living by? This quote, this incomplete piece of “wisdom” had been shaping my self-worth for a while. Making me feel like my curiosity was a character flaw. Like my inability to choose just one thing meant I was somehow failing at all of them.

But here’s what I’m learning: We live in a world that loves specialists. We’re told to find our niche, build our brand, become the go-to expert in exactly one thing. And sure, there’s value in deep expertise.

But what about the magic that happens when you’re a creative cocktail of interests?

The Hidden Superpowers of Being Multi-Passionate

When I code, I could think like a musician, see patterns and rhythms in the logic. When I play guitar, I might be able to problem-solve like a programmer. My crochet could teach me patience for debugging. My blog writing can make my code comments clearer. My keyboard practice might help my typing speed (obvious, but still).

Each hobby does not dilute the others. They actually cross-pollinate.

The person who only knows guitar might play beautifully, but the person who knows guitar AND coding might create an app that helps others learn. The person who crochets AND blogs might write patterns that actually make sense to beginners.

We’re not scattered, we connect dots others don’t see.

Permission to Be Everything

So here is my note to self (and maybe to you, if you needed to hear this too):

Your worth isn’t measured by how deeply you drill into one area. Sometimes it’s measured by how broadly you can reach, how many different ways you can see the world, how many languages of creativity you speak even if you’re not fluent in any single one.

The full quote gave me permission I did not know I was waiting for. Permission to keep my guitar AND my crochet hooks AND my keyboard AND my blog. Permission to be someone who creates in seventeen different ways.

This week, I’m not choosing between my hobbies. I’m choosing all of them. Imperfectly. Joyfully. Unapologetically.

Because it turns out, being a master of none might actually be my superpower.

And it might be yours too.

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What half-truth have you been living by? What would change if you discovered the rest of the story?