You Only Get So Much Fire

Or why I think three passions are about all any of us can keep lit at once

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

This is Dispatch #25 in a series of personal reflections on passion, meaning, and what it really takes to feel alive. You can read the whole series here.

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Hi friends,

A few weeks ago I had two jiu-jitsu competitions back-to-back. I walked away with silver and bronze and a gnawing disappointment that had nothing to do with the color of the medals.

It never has been. When I started competing three years ago, what I really wanted to know was whether I could show up with all I had to give. Mostly, I’ve proved to myself that I can. This time I didn’t. Not by choice — I just didn’t notice.

Both days, I was up by 6 a.m. to prep for a 7 a.m. Zoom. I wasn’t set to compete until later that afternoon, so the second the call ended I biked to a coffee shop and worked for a few more hours on a project I’m excited about. I figured I had the time. (I did. Time was never the problem.)

What I didn’t have was fire. I’d spent each morning burning hot on that project, and you only get so much heat in a day. By the time I stepped on the mat, I was running on whatever was left — which, it turns out, wasn’t much.

You don’t have to compete at anything to know this feeling.

It’s finally getting to the thing you’ve been looking forward to all week — and arriving empty, because you’d already spent yourself on everything that came before it. Present, technically. Just not really in it.

Both competition afternoons looked the same. But it’s the second one I keep replaying. The Walter Pyramid was already humming when I walked in — thousands of people in gis (the jiu-jitsu uniform that looks like stiff pajamas), some of them with medals already around their necks, all of them lit in a way I wasn’t. Teammates were cheering from the stands. Several people walked by me with acai bowls. The whole building was running hot. And I couldn’t get a spark.

I ran through my warm-up like I always do. Jump rope, burpees, headphones on. This is usually where I lock in — that part has never been hard for me. But there was nothing left to lock in with.

When my rival took the match, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve competed against her enough to know her life right now is as devoted to jiu-jitsu as mine was a few years ago — all of it is pointed at one thing. She brought her whole fire. I brought what was left of mine. She deserved to win.

I walked off the mat more numb than anything.

It would be easy to blame the morning — the early call, the project I poured myself into instead. But forty-five minutes driving home in Los Angeles traffic gave me the distance to realize that the morning wasn’t an exception. It was the rule. For months I’d been doing the same thing on a longer timeline — spreading one fire across too many passions I cared about. I kept showing up to all of them. I just kept showing up a little spent.

Turns out you can’t be fully on fire about everything at once. (You can try. I’ve got the silver and bronze to prove it.)

So how many can you?

I only have my own life to go on here — there’s no study I can point to, just years of paying attention to when I’ve felt most like myself and observing others at their best. The pattern never changes. The seasons where I’ve felt most on fire weren’t the fullest ones. They were the ones with only a few passions in them, each with enough room around it to actually burn. Deep focus, then real recovery. One hard thing at a time. Not five half done.

For me, that number lands at about three.

Not because three is magic. It isn’t. Three is just about as far as my fire stretches before it goes thin. One thing, I start getting a little antsy. Just an athletic focus, and I miss my creative side. Just creative, and my inner entrepreneur won’t be quiet. Three is a goldilocks number for me. A fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and I don’t get more fire, I just get less of it everywhere. Everything I care about ends up with a lukewarm version of me.

Here’s the part that took me longest to accept, and it’s bigger than jiu-jitsu.

The fire is finite because the life is. You only get so much of it because you only get so much time, and every path you choose to burn for is a hundred others you’re quietly choosing against. It’s the thing Oliver Burkeman keeps circling in Four Thousand Weeks: you’ll do almost none of what you could have done.

I can’t be a semi-pro grappler and a circus performer and a novelist and a present friend and a business owner all at once and all the way. Pretending I can just means I do all of them at half-heat. The honest version is choosing a few — three, if you can manage it, maybe fewer — and grieving the rest. And the grief, weirdly, is what keeps the few from going cold.

When I’ve done that well, my three have rotated as I’ve grown: travel, building a business, and fitness; later, writing, relationships, and jiu-jitsu. When I haven’t, they multiply. Right now I’m carrying closer to six — which is exactly why my fire feels spread so thin. I’m writing this from inside the problem, not the other side of it.

So I won’t tell you to go pick your three. I haven’t managed it myself lately. (But now that I’m aware of it, I’m trying to get back to it!)

But I’ll stand behind this much: the choosing happens either way. Either you do it on purpose, or the default does it for you. And the default never lands on three.

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