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Inc.: Want to be successful? Science says you really, really need a hobby
05 Mar 2025
Especially because you’ll need to avoid burning out along the way.
Originally found at Inc.
To be remarkably successful you need to go all in: no distractions, no diversions, eyes always, always focused on the prize.
Or not.
A study of more than 5,000 entrepreneurs in a 15-year period published in Academy of Management Journal found the startups of people who kept their day jobs were 33 percent less likely to fail than those who went all in. A study of more than 6,000 athletes published in PLOS One found that world-class athletes played 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.”
Then there’s this. 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: hobbies like singing, acting, and creative writing, or “craft” hobbies like painting, woodworking, and glassblowing.
A lot depends on the nature of the hobby, though.
Continue reading the original article at Inc.
Read the original research in Academy of Management Journal.
Read the Academy of Management Insights summary.
Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:
- Joseph Raffiee, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Jie Feng, University of Wisconsin, Madison