Would You Trust Someone With No Hobbies?

An exploration into the value of hobbies in relation to work.

Finding Flow Through the Immersive Experience of Our Hobbies

The title of this piece is slightly provocative. Of course, trust is more nuanced than a predilection towards having hobbies. But hobbies do give rise to a sincere self-expression beyond the restricted societal roles we inhabit, giving others a more rounded view of who we are and what matters most to us. Are hobbies are more than quirky interests.

In this piece, I’m just dipping my toes into one of the ways we try to make intuitive social judgements about one another and explore a few thoughts around the personal and societal value of pursuing hobbies and interests outside of the one role we inhabit which seems to dominate all others during much of our adulthood, our job title.

Stolen downtime

For many, this period between Christmas and the new year will be a reprieve from everyday work obligations. And once we’ve served our family duties we just might get a little downtime space to indulge our hobbies, our space to explore our true passions, unencumbered by social constraints to freely indulge our gifts. We choose our hobbies from volition, nobody forces us into birdwatching or crocheting. We are not socially compelled to paint, write, collect stamps, or forage for mushrooms - it’s a personal choice. How we choose to spend our downtime speaks volumes about our inner depths - our character, our talents, and our aspirations.

Our freely chosen hobbies are often our means of experiencing flow, deeply engaged in the moment with an intense but easy focus, feeling connected and expansive, and deeply immersed in our own world to the extent that we lose track of time. Here is our opportunity for personal expression, for becoming who we truly are, our place for experimentation, for pushing ourselves, for finding meaningful breakthroughs, and for personal growth.

For many, however, our downtime is limited. We experience it as stolen downtime as it often only arrives after a long working day or at a weekend when there might be a little time to get started on something, but not enough to invest sufficiently in completing our projects. It can feel like a cruel tease where you momentarily gain sight of what you could become, of who you could be if you had sufficient time, only to face the crude reality of the treadmill as Monday morning seems to arrive at an ever greater pace.

A glimpse of the person behind the CV

When I was a hiring manager, the first thing I would look for, beyond scanning for relevant experience and evidence of capability, was the person’s ‘Hobbies and Interests’ section. Perhaps it’s a personal bias of mine but for me, this is the part of the CV where I can hope for a little authenticity. If they’ve felt they can write truthfully about their passions, there’ll be a scintilla of the actual person, their true character, their true aspirations.

Usually, I’m disappointed as I’ll typically discover a predictable list of bullet-pointed cliches such as ‘reading’ and ‘travel’, and increasingly the section will be omitted in favour of technical acronyms and lists of exaggerated performance-based achievements that give me little to distinguish the person’s character and could have been written by AI for all I know.

One thing I’ve noticed during formal job interviews, however, is how a candidate’s stance changes when I ask about how they indulge their spare time. Their posture will change, and their face will come to life. Unshackled from the structured formalities of the interview they will reveal their true selves. Their speech will flow more easily as I inquire into what inspires their interest and how they apply themselves to their hobbies. I am really asking them about applied mastery - how they learn, how they prioritise their time, how far they push themselves to perform, their comfort with self-determination, and their appetite for risk, challenge and self-inquiry. I am learning so much about their character.

Yet increasingly, talk about personal interests and hobbies in job interviews seems to be becoming disgcouraged - I’ve found the interview process has become more tightly structured and formalised in recent years as HR departments try to control the process and remove biases, often in the supposed interests of diversity, equity, and inclusion - In my last role I was forced towards using dry templated questions to give all candidates a ‘fair’ chance and I merely found this to divert me from actually getting to know the candidate. Personally I don’t think that structuring an interview process does anything to support diversity, diversity is about building rounded teams of diverse and interesting people - people with hobbies, people with character.

Hobbies are a window to character

Watching a recent Triggernometry episode, featuring Nigel Farage, best known for his relentless pursuit to reclaim the UK’s sovereignty from the EU which culminated in Brexit, I was particularly interested when he was discussing a certain social set of Tory MPs and he drew particular attention to his observation that, in contrast to MPs of old, they had no hobbies.

‘No hobbies!’, Nigel emphasises a few times. The erudite host

Konstantin Kisin

, who writes in his eponymous substack at

Konstantin Kisin

, responded with the comment “It’s quite suspect really, in a way”. I take Nigel’s assertion about the hobbyless Tories with a pinch of salt, it’s quite a generalisation and it’s hardly uncommon to dehumanise and mischaracterise one’s political opponents in this way, but Konstantin’s reaction is similar to what mine would be if such an assertion were true. The idea that the political class are pouring all of their creative passion into maintaining their status with the artistry of machiavellian manoeuvres, with nothing left for a noble hobby, paints a grim but believable picture. Nigel’s implication was that they have no hobbies, and therefore no soul, no heart, no passion - inhumane.

Neuroaesthetics and hobbies as a sanctuary

In an interview with Stephen Bartlett on his podcast, Diary of a CEO, Neuroscientist, Dr Tara Swart introduces the new field of neuroaesthetics which suggests that having some form of creativity in our regular schedule and living a life that is aesthetically pleasing to our brain is good for our health. She raises the idea that evolutionarily speaking, this could be connected to our need for safety. If we are dedicating scarce mental resources to the appreciation of beauty, that would signal to our bodies that we are in a safe and secure environment, thus helping us manage stress and well-being. Perhaps this speculative idea might also be extended to indulging our frivolous hobbies - what better way to indicate that we are safe than to have the luxury of indulging in flower arranging?

In a world that seems so screwed at times, our hobbies offer hope. For many on the treadmill of life, hobbies are our haven and what keeps us truly alive. Our hobbies give us a purpose that we are not always fortunate enough to find at work. Our hobbies bring meaning, fulfilment and a creative outlet.

The human brain is multipurpose. A brain utilised solely for politics, or work, may be less flexible than one developed with the inclusion of hobbies outside of work. Through the neuroplasticity of the neural networks of our brains, the variety and challenge we find in our hobbies creates the development of new neurological patterns, giving us greater versatility in how we solve problems at work.

Our hobbies overlap and outlast our job titles.

The anti-mastery ecosystems of modern work

We find true mastery in our work when we have found work that feels like a vocation, rather than a transactional exchange of our energy for money. When work is our vocation we can become an artisan, with a craftsman’s care for the product of our labour connected with a profound sense of purpose in every aspect of our endeavour. But we rarely get the opportunity to practice mastery at work with this refined taste of the artisan because so often we are subject to forces that are anathema to mastery.

We are so often time-pressured to produce quick wins or quick fixes. The financial machinations of The City work to quarterly targets that trickle down to ordinary employees as short-term objectives which need to be delivered with urgency. Function over beauty. We can’t experiment, and we can’t fail. Everything is performance. It is rare to find a true Learning Organisation in the Spirit of Peter Senge or the Deliberately Developmental cultures described by Robert Kegan. Companies might have a Learning and Development budget but so often this is constrained to online courses which are out of context with the day-to-day realities of work. A tickbox exercise rather than deliberate effort to create a culture where employees can truly learn and develop. The idea of deliberate practice associated with mastery, with repeated routines in a safe environment and immediate feedback, is rarely available in a work setting. Despite the ‘fail forward’ and ‘fail often’ vernacular of the boardroom, the reality on the office floor is that people are usually avoidant of taking risks or making experiments which might lead to failure. We cannot practice, because we are rewarded only for performance.

So many of us find that we can only truly practice with a spirit of mastery outside of work, in the pursuit of our hobbies and interests. This is a great shame as the workplace offers so much potential for the pursuit of mastery. It’s not just the skills associated with our work where mastery is useful, it’s also in the host of other areas which are key to successful careers. Mastery of relationships, mastery of communication, mastery of customer care, mastery of leadership, mastery of complexity, to give names to a few. However, conversations about mastery in the workplace are rare to find amidst all the conversations about performance, productivity, and efficiency. I believe that in the interest of creating more human-centric workplaces, we should be elevating conversations around the topic of mastery to the highest priority.

My own experience in blending hobbies and work has been mixed, but mostly very positive. When I’ve been comfortable sharing my hobbies with others at work I’ve felt more connected, and seen as a human being rather than just a resource. I can recall a few negative experiences from the 90s when hobbies outside of work were frowned upon. I remember a manager criticising my weekend spent in the recording studio to make a CD as a sign that I wasn’t committed to my profession - yet the prevailing culture of weekend binge drinking seemed to go unquestioned. I also recall being asked in an interview whether my hobby of long-distance running was not a bit anti-social. Fortunately, the dinosaurs who proffered these thoughts are likely long gone.

One of my most positive experiences of blending hobbies with work was during the Covid era, being asked by our CEO to organise some other musicians at work to create a video for our annual company day. I laid down a piano track and then collected contributions from others, recorded in their homes and in the office. We had planned to perform live but this was precluded by the lockdown. The result was the linked video below, a performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water, and it seemed to have a positive effect on all involved, as well as creating a good vibe around the company. It sent a strong signal that the company valued people as people:

Workplace Mastery

I will be exploring some ideas around Workplace Mastery in forthcoming articles as well as announcing a range of mastery-related services that I intend to be offering to organisations. I have been writing in this blog for almost a year and in the background have been formulating ideas on how to translate the principles and practices of mastery for both public consumption as well as in organisational settings. I will be offering a modified version of the Ordinary Masterclasses to corporates to initiate conversation and exploration around mastery-focused initiatives at work.

Should you wish to chat about applying the principles and practices of mastery in your work environment then please let me know by responding to this newsletter or contacting me via LinkedIn.

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