Why I Stopped Treating Myself Like a One-Job Person

For most of my career I tried to behave like a one-job person.

I picked coding. I went deep. I became a senior engineer, then an engineering manager, then a CTO. The path worked. People paid me well, my LinkedIn looked legible, and there was always a clean answer to "so what do you do?" at dinner. The advice everyone gives — pick one thing, become world-class, monetize — actually delivered the outcomes it promised.

It also slowly made me miserable. I just couldn't tell why for a long time.

The discomfort had a specific shape. Every time I let myself care about something outside the lane — dance, philosophy, building a community, writing, recording videos, throwing events — there was a small voice that said this is a distraction, get back to the main thing. I treated those interests like leaks in the system. The system being: my career. The leaks being: me.

A few years in I noticed how much of my actual energy was going into plugging those leaks instead of doing the leaking. I was using willpower to not care about half of my own life. That's an expensive use of willpower.

The shift didn't come from a productivity book or a coach. It came from reading about Leonardo da Vinci.

I've been pulled back to him over and over recently. Not as a romantic figure — the genius painter — but as a working pattern. The man wasn't optimizing for one job. He was a painter, an anatomist, an engineer, a hydraulics nerd, a stage designer, a botanist, a notebook addict. None of these were hobbies. They were all the work. The notebooks make this very clear: a sketch of a heart valve next to a sketch of a flying machine next to a recipe next to a flood-control diagram. He didn't apologize for the range. He didn't try to "focus." The range was his discipline.

The thing that got me wasn't the talent. It was the permission. He let himself be that.

I started asking what would happen if I just stopped fighting my own range.

So I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn't quit anything. I just stopped treating "doing many things" as a problem to solve and started treating it as the operating mode.

Today my week looks like this. I'm running WeDance, a community and product for dancers around the world. I'm building AI agents that increasingly run my whole portfolio for me. I'm organizing Charanga concerts and dance festivals in Munich. I'm publishing essays. I'm coding. I'm working on Web100, a service business. I'm rebuilding 15x4 Munich, an ideas talk series. I'm in the middle of a long thread of philosophical writing about governance, liquid democracy, and how communities can run themselves. And I'm in a relationship I actually want to keep.

If you tell a career coach this, they will say: you're spreading thin. You should pick one. Where's the focus.

Here's what I've actually noticed by living it.

Each domain feeds the others. The AI agents I'm building exist because I needed someone to run the dance community while I'm offstage; the dance community exists because the philosophy needed a real, breathing test case; the philosophy exists because building products without a worldview produces products I don't respect; the products exist because the philosophy needs distribution. The festivals teach me about people. The people change the products. The products change what's possible in the festivals. None of it is a "side project." The lattice is the work.

What looks like five careers from the outside is one career on the inside. The unifying job is something like: design systems where humans and AI run a portfolio of meaningful things together, and live a life worth living while doing it. Every one of those domains is a probe into that question.

I want to be honest about the cost, because the polymath story usually skips this part.

There's no clean career narrative. I can't put one title on a business card. Recruiters can't classify me, and that's a real friction when I want a thing only the legible world can give me. Each domain pays out slower than it would if I were singularly focused on it. There are weeks where every single project is making progress and not one of them is "shipping." That's psychologically harder than it sounds. The temptation to drop four things and just go monomaniacal on one for a year is real and it visits me regularly.

I also have to be careful about the difference between range and avoidance. Sometimes "I'm working on many things" is real. Sometimes it's just running away from the hard one. The polymath frame doesn't free you from that question — it makes the question constant.

But the cost is bearable. The cost of the alternative — pretending half of me doesn't exist so my LinkedIn parses cleanly — was not.

What I keep thinking about now, the part I haven't figured out yet: this isn't unusual. Most people I actually talk to have a similar shape underneath. They have one job they're paid for and four other things they care about and they treat those four other things as leaks. They apologize for caring about them. They schedule them on weekends. They wait until they're "successful enough" to give themselves permission to stop choking those parts of themselves.

I want to know who is allowed to live like a multi-channel person and what it would take to give yourself that permission earlier than I did. Because waiting until you're "successful enough" to be a whole person is exactly the trap that keeps producing single-channel adults who quietly resent their own lives at fifty.

Leonardo didn't wait. He was just allowed to be Leonardo.

I'm allowed to be Alösha. So are you, whoever you are reading this. The only one enforcing the one-job rule on you, after a certain point, is you.