Auraiya Madrid describes herself as a “Hobby Hoarder.” Parkour, pole, straps, lifting, gymnastics, arts and crafts, music, acting, dog training. Sometimes every hour brings something different. Sometimes she focuses on one area for weeks because there’s a performance scheduled or a specific skill she’s chasing. But mostly, she switches.

“When I use like one part of my body, my body tires out and I’m less effective at learning, not just physically but also mentally. So switching kind of helps like reset me. I do the same thing in just like in life and I’m more productive the more that I switch.”

Wait. More productive the more she switches? In movement culture, we’re taught the opposite. Pick a practice. Go deep. Ten thousand hours. Mastery through repetition. The people we celebrate are the ones who chose parkour or climbing or dance and committed, who show us what’s possible when you focus all your energy on one discipline rather than scattering it across many.

So what’s happening here? Is Madrid just dilettante-ing her way through hobbies, or is she onto something about how learning and creativity actually work?

Consider what she’s describing: not aimless wandering, but strategic switching. She’s not avoiding depth—she pursues specific skills, schedules performances, works toward concrete goals. But she’s discovered that her body and mind learn better when they’re not hammering on the same thing constantly. Physical fatigue is the obvious limitation—you can’t do upper body work indefinitely. But the mental fatigue is more interesting. Your brain gets less effective at learning when it’s stuck on one problem, one movement pattern, one way of thinking.

Switching resets both. You come back to pole with fresh eyes after spending time on parkour. The lifting informs the gymnastics. The acting changes how you approach performance. These aren’t separate hobbies existing in parallel—they’re a system where each practice refreshes and informs the others.

This challenges the assumption that mastery requires singular focus. We’ve conflated “doing one thing” with “going deep,” as if breadth and depth are opposites. But Madrid’s approach suggests they might be complementary. You can go deep into movement by exploring multiple movement disciplines. You can develop sophisticated understanding of performance by moving between performing, creating content, acting, and music. The depth comes from the cross-pollination, from the ability to see patterns and principles that only become visible when you’re looking at them from multiple angles.

There’s a skill here that gets overlooked when we focus on specialization: the skill of switching itself. Knowing when to stay with something and when to move on. Recognizing when you’re in productive struggle versus when you’re just grinding against diminishing returns. Understanding which practices refresh which other practices. This meta-skill—the ability to navigate between interests strategically rather than randomly—might be its own form of mastery.

Consider creativity specifically. Madrid emphasizes that “creativity is definitely a skill set—anyone who doesn’t think they have it just means they haven’t practiced it.” But how do you practice creativity? Not by doing the same thing repeatedly until you perfect it. Creativity requires new inputs, unexpected combinations, fresh perspectives. It requires exactly what hobby hoarding provides: diverse experiences that your brain can connect in novel ways.

The movement person who only does parkour has one vocabulary to draw from. The person who does parkour, pole, straps, lifting, gymnastics, acting, and music has multiple vocabularies that can combine and recombine. That arts and crafts project might teach you something about composition that changes how you frame a video. The dog training might teach you something about timing and communication that transforms how you coach. The switching isn’t dilution—it’s expansion of the available palette.

This has implications beyond movement. In professional life, we’re constantly told to niche down, specialize, become the expert in one specific thing. That’s sound advice if your goal is efficient productivity within existing frameworks. But if your goal is innovation, creativity, adaptation—anything that requires seeing patterns others miss or connecting ideas in new ways—maybe you need the opposite. Maybe you need to be a hobby hoarder.

The risk, of course, is never developing competence in anything because you’re always jumping to the next shiny thing. Madrid avoids this by being intentional about her switching (one of her three words to describe her practice). She’s aware of what she’s doing and why. She pursues specific goals within each domain. She’s not avoiding challenge—she’s distributing it strategically.

What makes this work is that she’s not trying to become the world’s best at any single thing. She’s trying to live a creative, diverse, intentional life where movement and art and performance all feed each other. That’s a different kind of mastery—not mastery of a discipline, but mastery of learning itself. Mastery of maintaining curiosity. Mastery of the reset.

In a culture that celebrates specialists, maybe we need more people willing to say: I’m a hobby hoarder, and that’s exactly how I develop my practice.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Intentional with Auraiya Madrid,” published July 20, 2023.