How our hobbies can help us innovate
It’s the kind of suggestion your parents might make. ‘Tim, I think you need a hobby’. I do have hobbies, but I never took them up because my parents asked me to. I was genuinely interested in these areas. I dived in. I read. I practiced. I watched videos. My interest grew and over time they eventually they became my hobbies.
Parents just want their kids to do well. They want them to be happy. And a nice hobby or interest can be a great way to spend time and shut off from the normal humdrum (and sometimes stresses) of daily life.
I love photography and I love wristwatches. I can lose hours in these hobbies. Reading books or blogs, watching videos, going on a photo shoot or doing some work on a watch, I get into a zone, and I find it engaging and relaxing. I don’t do anything with a camera to make money. I just like taking pictures. I like learning the art and styles of photography. I practice it and I’ve developed my own style over the years. I don’t consider myself a great photographer but that’s not the point of a hobby. I enjoy it. I collect, service and sometimes modify my own watches. I don’t do it for anyone else. Its’ not a job for me. These are MY interest areas. I’ve had a fascination (some would call it an obsession) with watches since I got my first digital watch when I was seven years old. I’ve been collecting and servicing watches ever since.
Today, we often hear about people becoming specialists. When we move through the school system, we typically pick specialist subjects to line us up for college. Our college courses make us further specialise in an area preparing us for our career. And when we start to work, we can further specialise in a professional area. After years of mastering our specialty or profession, we might earn the title ‘expert’, ‘master’ or even ‘guru’. It takes time to get there but with dedication and focus we can do it.
Being a specialist is great, but it has been shown that it can sometimes stifle innovation. If, for example, we become an expert in a field of science, we are typically surrounded by similar people who read, write and review the same kind of papers and books and discuss the same kinds of topics. We might just see things from the same viewpoint. This isn’t always the best way to come up with something new - to innovate. Some of the best innovators tend to take ideas from vastly different areas, join them together somehow and hey presto – a new idea, solution or product is born. There are many examples of this. James Dyson invented the bagless vacuum cleaner. He had a problem. He noticed that when his vacuum cleaner bag filled with dust it lost suction. Some years later he was visiting a wood sawmill. He noticed these huge extractor units placed over the saw blades. When he inquired what they were, he was told they were cyclone extractor units. He walked out of sawmill thinking - I wonder if I could put a cyclone into a vacuum cleaner. And from that the innovative Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner was born!
It turns out that having broad interests outside of your core area of expertise can help improve idea formation and innovation. And this is where hobbies come in. Hobbies tend to have no obvious relationship with the day-to-day things we do. But they exercise our brain in a way that it's not normally exercised. In our hobbies it tends to be easier to enter ’the flow’ state where we find it easy to focus and concentrate and time passes quickly. We solve different kinds of problems. It’s fun - it’s our hobby. It gives our brain a break and giving our brain a break is a great way to help us form new ideas or solve hard problems. Ideas, viewpoints and techniques from our hobbies can bleed into other areas like our school, college or work life. It’s not always obvious but the fact that our hobbies are real interests means they are always there, in the back our minds and the learnings certainly have some impact in other areas of our lives.
So, does the world need more specialist people or people with a wider range of interests? I think the answer is it needs both. Motivated teams of people with a diverse range of interests tend to perform very well. Scientists call this ‘cognitive diversity’. The diverse team is more equipped to imagine a wider range of solutions and they tend to perform better than less diverse teams. Hobbies help us become more cognitively diverse. They also make us more interesting to others. If nobody had hobbies or interests, wouldn’t the world be a boring place? As the saying goes – all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! If you have hobbies or interests, you are very lucky. If you don’t, go get one. You’ll never regret finding something that gives you some peace and joy and it may even help you become one of the great innovators of the future!