Don’t assume your password will be strong just because it is based on a sports hero or author for which you have a strong feeling. Your feeling is shared by millions of others, including hackers who already have that athlete’s or author’s name in their password cracking dictionary.

Just because your love of Beyonce is unknown to even the people closest to you, a password based on her name will not be a strong password because hackers also love her and they’ll guess that you do too.

You probably share your love of one thing with many other people, but you probably have two, three or four interests that, in combination, no one else shares. For example, as long as they cannot be guessed from public information about you, your love of Madchester bands, 3D printing, and Thomas Pynchon novels are probably not shared with anyone else in the world. Therefore, a three-word passphrase where each word comes from one of your different interests is not likely to appear in any cracking dictionary (e.g. rosesplavice), and will be a password you can remember!

…but you should be realistic: if your two interests are football and beer, blending words derived from those interests is not likely to create a unique password.