2025/04/27
2025/03/22
2025/03/17
Want to Be Successful? Science Says You Really, Really Need a Hobby
Want to Be Successful? Science Says You Really, Really Need a Hobby
Want to Be Successful? Science Says You Really, Really Need a Hobby
Especially because you’ll need to avoid burning out along the way.
EXPERT OPINION BY JEFF HADEN @JEFF_HADEN
Photo: Getty Images
To be remarkably successful you need to go all in: no distractions, no diversions, eyes always, always focused on the prize.
Or not.
A study of more than 5,000 entrepreneurs in a 15-year period published in Academy of Management Journal found the startups of people who kept their day jobs were 33 percent less likely to fail than those who went all in. A study of more than 6,000 athletes published in PLOS One found that world-class athletes played a variety of sports before choosing one. As reporter David Epstein writes in his 2019 book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, “Among athletes who go on to become elite, early sampling across sports and delayed specialization is by far the most common path to the top.”
Then there’s this. A study published in Creativity Research Journal found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists were nearly three times more likely than their non-prize-winning peers to have outside interests: hobbies like singing, acting, and creative writing, or “craft” hobbies like painting, woodworking, and glassblowing.
A lot depends on the nature of the hobby, though.
Long-Term Success Requires “Sustainability”
Success is typically based on achievement and longevity. Accomplishing anything difficult requires both effort and time. You can’t build a thriving business overnight, nor become a Nobel Prize winner. Warren Buffett calls it the Methuselah effect.
In business and entrepreneurial terms, that means you must be able to sustain your career. As the authors of a 2020 study published in Journal of Vocational Behavior write, a sustainable career is one in which people “remain healthy, productive, happy, and employable throughout its course and that fits into their broader life context.”
In simple terms, staying power matters. No matter how talented you might be, burn out along the way and you won’t succeed.
That’s where a hobby comes in. The study found that hobbies can boost self-efficacy: willingness to take on challenges, persist in the face of difficulties, and recover from setbacks. Think: believing in yourself.
Hobby Similarity and Seriousness
But there is a catch.
If your hobby is too similar to what you do—if your leisure activity involves demands and skills similar to those of your profession—then the study found feelings of self-efficacy suffered. The same is true for the level of “seriousness” of the hobby: both how difficult it is and, more important, how important it feels to not only do, but to your sense of identity. The more “serious” the hobby, the more compelled you feel to engage in it, and the more your identity is tied to skill or achievement. Training to run a marathon in under three hours is one serious hobby, for example.
Similarity and seriousness go hand-in-hand. If you’re looking for your hobby to have a positive effect on your success, the more serious your hobby is, the less it should be related to your work. The more related your hobby is to your work, the less serious is should be. Ideally, your hobby would be low in seriousness and low in similarity to your current work.
For example, if you’re an accountant and you like growing roses, your hobby provides a respite from your work and increases your sense of self-efficacy—unless you get too serious and decide you need to win the American Rose Society’s annual competition. In another example, if you’re a lawyer and you like playing board games, your hobby provides a confidence-boosting break—unless you get too serious and decide you want to become a chess grandmaster. If you’re a coder and you build apps in your spare time, you’re probably not getting the kind of mental—and emotional—break that will increase feelings of self-efficacy. More of the same, especially if that “same” is only different by degree, is a recipe for burnout.
As you consider a new hobby, or consider the value of a current hobby, evaluate the intersection between seriousness and similarity. The more similar the activity is to your day job, the lower the stakes you’d want to have riding on the outcome. The higher the stakes, the less similar you’d want the activity to be to your profession.
Again, ideally your hobby would be both dissimilar and low-stakes. In his newsletter, Epstein tells the story of a world-class runner who took up knitting, and an Olympic cross-country skier who built a house. Both were “too good” at focusing on training, to the exclusion of everything else. As the skier’s coach said:
… if you have just sport and nothing else, it’s very hard to persist for many years. She was 30 years old, and I said, “You have to do this. You have to find some interest. Build the house. Go searching for the material and for everything. You have to do this so that you don’t have only sport.”
The same is true for you. If you’re running a business, you can’t only “have” running a business. You need something to take your mind off your business, if only for short bursts. If you’re struggling to build your business, you need something else that allows you to feel successful.
You need something that takes you outside of your day-to-day: different tasks, different skills, different people …
The time you spend not focusing on your business? It might seem like wasted time. But if you choose the right hobby, it will allow you to focus better when you are working on your business—and be able to maintain that effort over the course of your lifetime.
The takeaway? If you want to succeed, find a hobby. The right hobby, for you.
-
Arizona's huge new dark sky observatory: See the construction progress Renderings & Floorplan The 22,000 square-foot IDSDC will ac...
-
The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers is a c. 1672–75 oil on canvas painting by the Dutch Golden Age...
