Liken mixing paint to curating your pool of interests.
You can successfully mix up a swatch of paint by combining various concentrated colors in varying proportions.
Let’s talk about quantity first.
To achieve your desired color, you must combine multiple colors. But, there is a threshold. If you combine too few colors, you will not achieve the level of nuance within the color that you want.
If you combine too many, however, the color becomes dull, muddied, and ugly.
Furthermore, the proportion must be finely controlled. You must identify how much of each color will create your desired result. Throwing each color into the mix in equal proportion is almost never the right answer.
Now let’s talk about consistency.
If you add too little water, your paint will be stuck on the brush, inflexible and inapplicable. If you add too much, your paint will be too faint, and ineffective.
The same rules apply for interests.
If your end goal is to make a lasting, effective impact through the pursuit of one or multiple interests, that is akin to having a shade of paint in mind.
Often, you will have to discover, learn, and pursue multiple interests in order to create a new, novel, interesting shade.
However, pursuing too many will lead to a muddied and confusing result, or no result at all.
In addition, in order to achieve this goal you must dedicate a hefty amount of time, effort, and investment. If water is all of life that affects what you are trying to achieve, you must include it in your life deliberately and intentionally.
Too little will coagulate and clump your channel of creation, preventing you from applying yourself with consistency. Too much will dilute and distract your actions from your vision, resulting in a weak result.
But it is senseless and impossible for you to keep all of this in mind from the very beginning. No artist purchases their first paints with their perfect shade in mind. Crafting the perfect shade is a process where the final shade is continuously evolving. The perfect shade may depend on the stage of the painting, the texture of the paper, or the humidity in the room.
The best you can do at any given point in time is to use the colors, tools, water, and knowledge you have at your disposal to craft the perfect shade. Or, if you have sufficient resources and knowledge to figure out which color you're missing, you may go out and purchase another color to use in your pursuit of the perfect shade.
No artist beats themselves up because they may have mixed the wrong color. Merely wipe your palette off and start again.
Interests, like paints, are merely options that we have. We are not chained to them. Just because I spent the last 5 years familiarizing myself with the color crimson does not mean my next masterpiece has to have even a tint of red to it.
Hone your craft. Hone your eye. Hone the ability to identify what paints, what colors, what tools you need to achieve the vision you hold. Mix with intention. Apply with love.
That is the best that any artist, and any person, can do at once.