The multi-passionate 5-9 builder's guide to focus

My 4-step process to go from too many business ideas to a goals doc you can act on (plus the Claude prompt that gets you there)

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear path.

TLDR: Having too many ideas is a filter problem, not a focus problem. By the end of this, you'll have a 4-step process for clearing the list and a Claude prompt you can use every time you hit this wall again .

At the start of this year, I dedicated my Q1 to a specific direction for my creator business. I spent months on it, hired externally, lost time and money, and eventually made the call to walk away. The moment I made the decision, I knew it was the right one.

And then I had the problem I seem to have every few years on a large scale, and every few months on a smaller scale:

…What now?

I had a running list of things I wanted to build: A course repackage. YouTube. Workshops. A community. A storytelling side practice. In-person events. Brand consulting. Eight directions after culling down the list… all of them real, all of them with a case for doing them. The possibilities felt endless, which was energizing and paralyzing in equal measure.

I was briefly frustrated, but I wasn’t panicking. I’d been here before when the stakes felt much higher. The blank slate feeling after leaving a job you’d worked toward for years. Knowing you want a new direction but having no idea what.

I’ve cycled through that more times than I can count from a career perspective. This was the same thing playing out on a smaller scale, inside my business.

So instead of just sitting with the spiral, I decided to systematize how I approach it.

If you’re building something outside your 9-5, or thinking about it, you probably know this feeling. You have more ideas than you know what to do with, and thinking about all of them at once makes it impossible to start any of them.

This framework is built specifically for figuring out what to build outside your job, but it adapts pretty easily to career pivots, life decisions, whatever version of “too many directions” you’re currently in.

1. Too many ideas is a good problem to have

If you feel like you have too many ideas, directions or pathways and can’t choose, that’s a good thing.

I mean that, not just in a “silver lining” way.

The alternative is much worse: brain fog, stagnation, malaise, zero pull in any direction. When the ideas keep coming, it means you’re genuinely multi-passionate and excited about each thing. That’s worth realizing before you try to solve it.

Some of the hardest conversations I have are with people who have the opposite problem — no list, no pull, nothing that feels like theirs. Just “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”.

So a full list of things you want to do or build is a gift, even when it feels like a curse.

If you don’t have ideas you’re excited about, Step 1 and 2 of this process might help you too.

2. Being multi-passionate and being a maximizer aren’t the same thing

I wrote a piece earlier this year about the cost of keeping your options open — the maximizer tendency, common among people who came up in banking, consulting, and tech, to collect optionality instead of committing. That’s a real problem, and a very different one from having too many genuine interests.

A maximizer avoids committing because they’re afraid of choosing wrong. A multi-passionate person has multiple things that genuinely feel authentic and wants to build all of them. Committing harder and getting clarity on what you want solves the first. What solves the second is finding the thread that connects what you already have…and a way to sequence it.

3. Your ideas are related

In the moment, all your ideas feel distinct. But zoom out and the things you want to build are usually more related than they appear — they come from you, and you want them for a reason.

The thread is almost always there. It’s just hard to see from the inside.

When I left investment banking to work at a food delivery startup in Mexico City, those looked completely unrelated. The common thread was wanting to tackle something new and challenging where I’d actually feel the impact.

When I moved from a 1,000-person remote tech job to a 50-person startup last year, same thing — both let me work on go-to-market and learn what marketing looks like at different scales.

Even now, my day job (product marketing for a technical fintech startup) and building content for high-achieving people navigating nonlinear careers feel like completely different things on paper. But both come down to telling the story of a brand. One is a company’s. One is a person’s.

When I applied the same lens to my eight business directions, they stopped feeling like competing options. Several were just different expressions of the same thing, at different scales, or for slightly different audiences. The question quickly shifted from “which one?” to “which version” — and then “which one first?”

But in order to see how your ideas connect, you need a manifesto. Here’s my process for writing one and assessing your ideas against it.

The Process

You have to do Step 1 yourself. I wrote a Claude prompt to help you with 2-4!

Step 1: Get out of your head first.

When I feel stuck, my instinct is to keep pushing — keep analyzing, start something, anything. Wrong move (almost) every time.

What I’m actually looking for usually only surfacing when I step away: on a walk, in a sauna, at a random movie, at a dinner where work doesn’t come up. What I keep thinking about without trying or thinking about it from a new perspective. That tends to be more reliable signal than what I think I should be working on.

The more analog and orthogonal to your normal day, the better. A walk in an unexpected neighborhood. A bike ride. Time away from your phone. The goal is to let the right things rise without forcing them.

This is the hardest step because it looks like doing nothing. And it can be the hardest thing to do when you’re hell bent on “solving the problem” and this feels like…not doing that.

Step 2: Write your manifesto.

Once your head is clearer, write an anchoring statement for the next year or even just the next few months. This answers questions like: Who do you want to be? What do you want to learn and grow in? What kind of people do you want to build for? What kind of problems do you want to solve (and don’t want to solve)?

A page or a paragraph. The point is to have something to run your ideas against, so you’re not evaluating the list in a vacuum.

Step 3: Brain dump everything that’s on your brain.

Every direction, every half-formed idea, everything you’ve been talking yourself into or out of. Write them down, say them out loud, tell Claude. Don’t filter yet. Get everything on the table first.

Step 4: Assess and sequence.

Run each idea against your manifesto and your real constraints: time, energy, income needs, what you can actually test in the next 30 to 60 days. Surface the “shoulds” — the ideas that feel like you’re supposed to want them rather than ones you actually do — and cut them. What’s left gets prioritized into a goals document you can start acting on.

The Claude exercise

This past weekend, I ran through this four-phase process to assess my list of eight business directions and turned it into a Claude prompt that you can run for yourself.

HOW TO USE THIS: Copy everything below the line and paste it into a new Claude conversation. Claude will interview you through 5 phases and produce a Manifesto and a Goals Doc. Set aside 20–30 minutes. Answer honestly, not aspirationally. Ideally after you’ve done Step 1 (which Claude can’t do for you!)