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- Caroline Mercer via Fast Company
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- Business·5 min to read
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Hobbies May Be the Secret to Long-Term Business Success, Research Suggests
ReHobbies May Be the Secret to Long-Term Business Success, Research Suggests
Leaders like Satya Nadella, Richard Branson, and Warren Buffett credit outside interests for sharpening their professional performance. A growing body of research suggests they are onto something — provided the hobby is different enough from work and low-stakes enough to recharge rather than drain.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that playing cricket taught him lessons about teamwork and leadership — putting the team first and bringing out the best in others — that stayed with him throughout his career. Richard Branson has described spending several hours a day on physical activities he enjoys as a way to expand his day by making him more energetic and productive. Warren Buffett has called bridge «the best exercise there is for the brain,» because each turn forces players to adapt to new information and circumstances.
That runs against the conventional wisdom that remarkable success demands going all in — no distractions, no diversions, laser focus on the prize. But a growing body of research suggests the opposite may be true. A study of more than 5,000 entrepreneurs over a 15-year period, published in the Academy of Management Journal, found that startups founded by people who kept their day jobs were 33 percent less likely to fail than those whose founders went all in.
Other research points in the same direction. A study of more than 6,000 athletes published in PLOS One found that world-class athletes typically play 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.» 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, including singing, acting, creative writing, painting, and woodworking.
The reason may come down to longevity. Remarkable success is typically based not just on achievement but on staying power — what Buffett calls the «Methuselah Technique.» Accomplishing anything difficult requires both effort and time; a thriving business cannot be built overnight. In business terms, that means sustaining a career over the long haul. As the authors of a 2020 study published in the 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.»
Hobbies can help by boosting self-efficacy — the willingness to take on challenges, persist in the face of difficulties, and recover from setbacks. In short, they can build greater self-belief. But there is a catch. If a hobby is too similar to what you do — if it involves demands and skills similar to those of your profession — the study found that feelings of self-efficacy suffered. The same is true for the level of seriousness: how difficult the hobby is and, more importantly, how central it feels to your identity. The more serious the hobby, the more compelled you feel to engage in it, and the more your identity is tied to skill and achievement. Training to run a 5k is a hobby; training to run a marathon in under three hours is a serious hobby.
Similarity and seriousness go hand in hand. Ideally, a hobby is low in both. An accountant who grows roses gets a respite from work and a confidence boost — unless the hobby becomes so serious that winning the American Rose Society's annual competition starts to feel mandatory. A lawyer who plays board games gets a break — unless the goal becomes becoming a chess grandmaster. A coder who builds apps in their spare time is probably not getting the kind of mental and emotional break that increases self-efficacy. More of the same, especially when the «same» differs only by degree, is a recipe for burnout.
As people consider taking up a new hobby or maintaining an existing one, the research suggests evaluating the intersection of seriousness and similarity: the more similar the activity is to your day job, the lower the stakes you want riding on the outcome. The higher the stakes, the less similar the activity should be to your profession. In his newsletter, Epstein tells the stories 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 put it, if you have just sport and nothing else, it is very hard to persist for many years. The same holds for running a business: you cannot only have running a business. You need something to take your mind off it, if only for short bursts — something that involves different tasks, different skills, and different people.
