The Remarkable Impact of Hobbies on Career
[Music]
i vividly remember being nine years old
and getting wrapped up for hours on my
bedroom floor hunkered down with my 21
pack of marker pens creating booklets of
imaginary creatures
or i’d be scribbling down another story
about one of the many adventures of
seymour the fish
or often my face would be buried in the
shiny pages of a kid’s encyclopedia
being blown away by how massive the sun
is compared to our tiny blue earth
i was what they called a well-rounded
kid and my teachers looked at this very
positively
that changes over time though doesn’t it
imagine if you walked into a job
interview for a computer programmer and
they asked you what are your strengths
and you said well i’m great at writing
code but i’m also great at bringing some
taekwondo and quilting to my work
as adults we have been taught that our
careers that one thing that we’re paid
to do
is the priority and if we want to keep
doing any of our other interests those
get categorized as hobby or leisure
activity that we do in our spare time
if we have the spare time
but what i have found firsthand over the
past 30 years is that our hobbies play a
much larger role than is acknowledged
i first saw the impact of hobbies back
in the 90s as a graduate student in
chemistry when most of my time was
supposed to be spent on my research
project i was kind of a night owl so i’d
often head over to campus in the evening
to set up an experiment
most of my work was done in a dark laser
lab up on the third floor of a 1960s
science building and i’d spend hours
shooting multiple laser beams at yellow
solutions trying to figure out what the
molecules were doing in microseconds
but that is only a partial snapshot of
how i’d spend the nights in my mid-20s
many other evenings i was making my way
up a stairwell to another 1960s building
this one off campus and felt more like a
cheap motel
it was our band practice space
a typical night looked like this i’d
swing the door open the hallway old beer
stench slaps me in the face i’m blasted
by heavy metal coming from room one
passed by rooms two’s indie rock and as
i came up on our practice space i’d hear
the familiar entry song being played
where’s karen
my bandmate’s favorite way to remind me
that
yes once again i was late
so i’d sheepishly slink in but pull out
my guitar and soon we were deep in it
running through our set writing new
songs or getting ready for our next gig
my life appeared to be a prime example
of someone maintaining that coveted work
life balance
from the outside it looked like i had a
budding career that had top priority
supported by a side hobby that we used
to blow off steam and spare time just
for fun
but that description was not how it felt
to me
yes absolutely i was studying to create
a lifelong career in science
but my band
it was my lifeblood
it felt just as important to me to play
a rock concert as it was to present at a
scientific conference
it was not easy though to maintain vigor
in both my science and my music
and not just because they’re both energy
intensive
but because i carried a heaviness
a guilt
a feeling that by playing in my band i
was doing something that i was not
supposed to be doing
i was supposed to be collecting data
analyzing results reading papers writing
a manuscript
i felt as if i had a finite amount of
dedication to give and if i didn’t put
it all towards my career
i was actively turning my back on it
i felt shame
so in my next two jobs i often
downplayed or even hid
my musical escapades
i was well on my way down a common path
where careers dominate and our hobbies
shrink and often die
away one excuse many of us use is lack
of time a recent study showed that even
though many people have specific hobbies
they want to engage in they said they
don’t have time for them
and this struggle also shows itself in
taking vacations
it was found that over half of employees
in the united states did not use up
their allotted vacation time
of those who did take a vacation
two-thirds of them continued working
during vacation
and 16 percent
take time off
to do more work
there are many theories as to why so
many of us behave this way but
regardless of why the evidence is clear
we don’t know how to stop ourselves from
working and it’s impacting our job
effectiveness as well as our health and
our happiness
i was able to avoid that trap
i kept my bands going despite the guilt
and ultimately what i have found over
the past couple decades
is that science is my marathon but rock
music is my cross training and without
my cross-training i can’t bring my
a-game to the race
it’s because of my hobby that i perform
well at work
what i discovered is that hobbies
are not just hobbies
they enhance your career
imagine that your hobby is the reason
you get the promotion or that your team
doubles its quarterly goal or that you
receive that award or that scholarship
unfortunately because of feelings of
guilt or that time crunch we drop our
hobbies from our lives and we use those
rationalizations such as i’ll pick it
back up after i get the promotion or
i’ll get back into it after the kids get
older and what happens as the years go
by
how do we feel
just last week i heard how it can make
us feel
i was in an online group conversation
with women around the world and i was
expressing how profoundly playing in
bands has helped me in my academic
position
one of the people in the room dr ikja
signee who is an assistant professor of
cyber security
freaked out
she said oh my god you have no idea how
important it is for me to hear this
message from you right now
she went on to describe how her guitar
was sitting in her office at that moment
staring at
her i could hear the heartbreak in her
voice as she told us about how giving up
guitar for all those years had made her
feel like she was slowly losing touch
with her spiritual side
but
i also heard her elation when in that
moment she felt inspired to bring it
back into her life
feeling like now she not only had the
permission to pick up the guitar
but she was about to feel whole again
every time we let one of our hobbies sit
dormant
we have rejected a part of ourselves
and not a trivial part
even it’s even if it’s something that
doesn’t provide a monetary income
its value is enormous
that’s one of the best reasons to keep
cultivating our hobbies without them we
aren’t functioning as our best whole
selves
when we instead prioritize them we are
able to approach our careers and other
parts of our life in full force
the scientific evidence for this
observation comes from a study published
in 2020 in the journal of vocational
behavior
the researchers were curious about
leisure activities and their effect on
people’s careers
their primary result
was this
above average time spent on leisure
activities
positively impacted people’s careers
now there is a caveat
they found this to be true specifically
for activities that were high in
seriousness
and different from a person’s career
in their studies they defined serious as
activities that had goals aspirations
and where there’s some kind of risk
involved such as engaging in
competitions or performances
and they discovered that by pulling from
varied parts of our lives that have
different skill sets or mindsets we gain
cross-pollination between our hobbies
and careers
this is great news
but what do we do with it
so many of us feel like we can’t or
shouldn’t engage time in our hobbies or
leisure activities but these exciting
results tell us that we can and we
should
after living with this conundrum for
many years living deeply in both worlds
of chemistry and punk rock
feeling that guilt
and even feeling tempted to stop playing
music a few years ago
here’s where i landed
i have three questions that we can use
as a litmus test to help us change our
attitudes towards our hobbies
first remember that the hobby needs to
be conventionally different from your
paid work like our computer programmer
who’s also a quilter
question one
does it help me become better at doing
something
am i developing a skill
two
does it entail a risk of some kind
and three
does it include aspirations and goals
and if your hobby brings you even just
one of those but especially if it’s yes
to all three
it’s a keeper
it’s poised to enhance your career
for me i saw the power of this
integration when i finally welcomed my
punk rock life into my chemistry
professor career
when i told my students about my band
they not only found it to be interesting
and cool
but it served a much deeper role that i
did not anticipate
i discovered its impact about 10 years
ago when i opened an envelope at work
in this modestly written letter from the
carnegie foundation
i was told i had received professor of
the year
honestly i was bewildered
how could i be receiving this award
knowing the amazing professors all
around me were just as deserving
but when i read the nomination letters
from students
i started to understand what had
happened
over and over again my chemistry
students were each saying the same thing
seeing me play punk rock with the same
fervor as my job as a professor
that gave them permission to be a
chemist and a writer
a pilot a dancer an olympic runner a
world traveler
a sculptor
make sure your hobbies
those pieces of yourself
aren’t sitting there silently for years
staring at you
waiting for you
but instead join me and engage in your
hobbies regularly and often
more than you think you should
and together we can build a culture that
inspires our best work
thank you