Why Successful People Have Hobbies

Ryan Holiday  October 1, 2019

My new book Stillness is the Key just debuted at #1 on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller lists. The piece below is based on some of the ideas in it. Check out the book, and please leave an Amazon review—it helps a lot!

Winston Churchill was a mediocre painter and a worse bricklayer, but to these two hobbies, the world owes a great debt.

“It is a pushing age,” Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, “and we must shove with the rest.” His ambition was legendary. Multiple times, he shoved his way to the top of British politics, when Britain was the world’s dominant power. Once he was there, he did not let up. During war-time, it was not uncommon for him to work 110-hour weeks. Between 1940 and 1943, he traveled something like 110,000 miles by air and sea and car. A bodyguard once said that Churchill kept “less schedule than a forest fire and had less peace than a hurricane.”

It’s this exhausting workload that is worth examination in a time of “millennial burnout,” and digital distraction. More and more people fear that taking their foot off the gas for even a second will only cause them to fall further and further behind in a rigged economy that cares little for individual happiness. Certainly, it’s something I’ve wrestled with as I look back on my very busy twenties (six books and three careers) and look forward towards my thirties with children.

So how did Churchill manage? How did he not burn out and die early?

How did a man with so many responsibilities that on a piece of notepaper he once sketched himself a pig, loaded down with a twenty thousand-pound weight, not only survive the workload of two wars, five kids, 10 million written words and live into his 80s, but do so without ever losing his trademark joie de vivre?

The answer is simple: The restorative power of a good hobby.

As it happens, Churchill believed in the power of hobbies almost as much as he believed in British exceptionalism. He was an avid practitioner too. Writing in one of his lesser known books, "Painting as a Pastime," Churchill explained that, “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is...a policy of first importance to a public man. To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”

A few centuries before Churchill, Aristotle said that this was in fact the main question of life: What do we fill our non-working hours with? What do we do for leisure?

Churchill knew the power of cultivating a good hobby, because painting saved his life. In 1915, reeling from the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, which he had championed and then watched helplessly as it cost some 46,000 men their lives, Churchill had what might appear to be a nervous breakdown.

Blamed for unspeakable tragedy, his competency questioned, his name suddenly radioactive, Churchill described feeling like a “sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure.

I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.” It was in this moment of crisis that his sister-in-law handed him a toy set of oil paints. They had given her children much fun, she said. Maybe they could help him.

Churchill, and indeed Western Civilization, reaped the fruits of this sweet offer. A few years ago, a study conducted by professors at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and published in the Psychosomatic Medicine Journal, found that people who made time for leisurely activities — defined as “activities that individuals engage in voluntarily when they are free from the demands of work or other responsibilities” — experiences increased life expectancy and life engagement.

It improved them physically, mentally and spiritually — as anyone who has pursued a hobby has experienced first hand. The research is even clearer when those hobbies are related to art in some way or another. Studies show that even just looking at art helps produce psychological resilience, but creating it is even better.

A 2016 study of 700 adults conducted by Dr. Christina Davies published in the BMC Public Health Journal found that those who recreationally engaged in some form of art (even just two hours per week) experienced significantly better mental well-being.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/01/why-ambitious-people-have-unrelated-hobbies/