Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, and Satya Nadella feel their hobbies make them more successful. Science says they’re right

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says playing cricket taught him lessons about teamwork and leadership—put your team first, and bring out the best in other people—that have stayed with him throughout his career.

Richard Branson says spending several hours a day doing physical activities he enjoys actually expands his day by making him more energetic and productive.

Warren Buffett says playing bridge is “the best exercise there is for the brain,” since each turn forces you to continually adapt to new information and circumstances.

Granted, that goes against conventional wisdom. To many, achieving remarkable success requires going all in—no distractions, no diversions, laser-focus on the prize.

But maybe not. A study of more than 5,000 entrepreneurs over a 15-year period published in the 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 typically play 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, with hobbies including singing, acting, creative writing, painting, and woodworking.

So yeah, hobbies are great. Depending on the nature of the hobby.

Remarkable success is typically based not just on achievement, but also on longevity. (Warren Buffett calls it the “Methuselah Technique.”) Accomplishing anything difficult requires both effort and time. For example, you can’t build a thriving business overnight.

In business and entrepreneurial terms, that means you must be able to sustain your career. As the authors of a 2020 study published in Journal of Vocational Behavior write, a sustainable career is one in which people “remain healthy, productive, happy, and employable throughout its course, and that fits into their broader life context.”

In simple terms, staying power matters. No matter how talented you are, if you burn out along the way, you won’t succeed.

That’s where a hobby comes in. The study found that hobbies can boost self-efficacy—the willingness to take on challenges, persist in the face of difficulties, and recover from setbacks.

In short, hobbies can help you develop greater self-belief.

But there is a catch.

If your hobby is too similar to what you do—if it involves demands and skills similar to those of your profession—then the study found feelings of self-efficacy suffered. The same is true for the level of seriousness of the hobby, both how difficult it is and, more importantly, how central it feels to your sense of identity. The more serious the hobby, the more compelled you feel to engage in it, and the more your identity is tied to skill and achievement. (Training to run a 5k? That’s a hobby. Training to run a marathon in under three hours? That’s a serious hobby.)

Similarity and seriousness go hand-in-hand. Ideally, your hobby is low in both seriousness and similarity to your current work. For example, if you’re an accountant and you like growing roses, your hobby provides a respite from your work and increases your sense of self-efficacy… unless you get too serious and decide you need to win the American Rose Society’s annual competition.

In another example, if you’re a lawyer and you like playing board games, your hobby provides a confidence-boosting break… unless you get too serious and decide you want to become a chess grandmaster. Or if you’re a coder and you build apps in your spare time, you’re probably not getting the kind of mental (and emotional) break that will increase feelings of self-efficacy.

More of the same—especially if that “same” is only different by degree—is a recipe for burnout.

As you consider taking up a new hobby, or consider the value of maintaining a current one, evaluate the intersection between seriousness and similarity:

• The more similar the activity is to your day job, the lower the stakes you want riding on the outcome.
• The higher the stakes, the less similar you want the activity to be to your profession.

Again, ideally your hobby will be both dissimilar and low-stakes. In his newsletter, Epstein tells the stories of a world-class runner who took up knitting and an Olympic cross-country skier who built a house. Both were “too good” at focusing on training, to the exclusion of everything else. As the skier’s coach said:

… if you have just sport and nothing else, it’s very hard to persist for many years. She was 30 years old, and I said, “You have to do this. You have to find some interest. Build the house. Go searching for the material and for everything. You have to do this so that you don’t have only sport.”

The same is true for you. If you’re running a business, you can’t only have running a business. You need something to take your mind off your business, if only for short bursts. If you’re struggling to build your business, you need something else that allows you to feel successful. Your hobby should take you away from your day-to-day and involve different tasks, different skills, and different people.

Granted, the time you spend not focusing on your business might seem like wasted time. But choosing the right hobby could allow you to focus better when you are working on your business—and be able to maintain that effort over the long-term.

—Jeff Haden