Get a Life

Why a life full of hobbies is its own kind of professional development.

Do you ever pick up a book and feel as though the author wrote it specifically for you? One that seems to find you at exactly the right point in your life, and puts words to something you had been struggling to conceptualise. It doesn’t happen to me often. Rutger Bregman ’s Moral Ambition was one of those books, and David Epstein ’s Range is the most recent.

I have always been someone with a lot of interests and a lot of hobbies. Growing up, I was very fortunate that my parents supported all of them, which meant my wonderful mum spent most of her afternoons and evenings carting me and my friends to and from various after-school clubs. I started learning the guitar at seven, played literally every sport my school offered, did kickboxing outside of school, and in an average week I was probably doing somewhere between five and seven different activities. As I grew up some hobbies stuck around and others got replaced, but the sheer variety of interests I have in my life today is basically the same as it was when I was a kid. Hobbies, and learning a new skill, have always brought me an immense amount of joy. In fact I think it’s when I’m at my happiest.

What this means is that I’m pretty good at a lot of things, good but not great. I wouldn’t describe myself as a standout at any one thing in particular. For long stretches of my life that felt like a failing, and I have at various points felt alienated by an educational system, and a wider culture, that places enormous importance on specialisation. I felt like I was doomed to failure, because I have never been in the top 0.01% of anything, and so much of the productivity literature says that to succeed you have to find the one thing you can do better than everyone else. It was the theme of the coaching that eventually led me to the path I’m on now: I’ve got so many interests and passions, how is any of this supposed to manifest professionally?

Epstein opens Range by contrasting two of the most dominant athletes of all time. Tiger Woods was swinging a club as a toddler, and became the case study for early specialisation: start early, practise narrowly, log your ten thousand hours, and the success will undoubtedly follow. Roger Federer played a spread of sports as a child, treated tennis casually for years, and later in his childhood started to take it more seriously. The studies behind the Woods model get quoted throughout productivity literature as though they apply everywhere. They don’t. The broad, wandering route that Federer took is at least as common at the top, and in most fields it is more common still.

There is a real case for the Woods model. Some domains reward starting early and drilling one narrow skill, and they share three features: the rules hold still, the same situations repeat, and the feedback is fast and unambiguous. Golf is the clearest example. You strike the ball and within two seconds you know whether it went where you intended, and you can run that loop ten thousand times until the motion is burned in. Chess works the same way, with a fixed board, recurring patterns, and an immediate sense of whether a move improved your position. Psychologists call these kind learning environments, because the world hands you clear lessons quickly. In a kind environment the deep narrow groove is exactly the right thing to build, and the sooner you start the better.

Most of what we do for a living looks nothing like golf. Think about running a team, or building a business. You make a decision, and the result, if it arrives at all, turns up months later, tangled together with a dozen other things that were changing at the same time, so you can rarely tell which move caused which outcome. The rules keep changing, and you rarely face the same situation twice. Psychologists call these wicked learning environments, and they are where most careers and most lives are lived. In a wicked world the narrow groove that makes a great golfer can work against you, because the instincts you spent years building were tuned to a stable world, and this one will not hold still. What pays off here is variety. The people who do best tend to be the ones who can draw on several fields at once, take an idea from one and apply it somewhere unexpected, and adapt quickly when the ground moves, because they were never locked into a single way of seeing things.

The codifiable, recognise-the-pattern skill that narrow specialisation produces is exactly what machines have become very good at. For decades the frontier of artificial intelligence has moved fastest in the closed, rule-bound worlds where human specialists shine, first chess and then Go, games with fixed rules, recurring structures, and instant feedback. The open-ended, shifting, many-sided problems are where machines still struggle and where people keep the advantage. So the deep, repetitive skills are the easiest kind to automate, while the work that pulls many fields together at once is what machines are worst at. When I read that, the variety I had been chasing suddenly looked like an advantage I had been building without realising.

It also explained why building things had always appealed to me far more than any conventional career. Building something is about as wicked as a domain gets. Everything moves at once, the rules are mostly unwritten, the feedback is slow and noisy, and no single specialism comes close to covering it. You are pulling on a bit of everything at the same time, from product to sales to keeping a small team functioning, and the spread of interests that once looked aimless becomes the thing the job needs, because building rewards having a foot in lots of areas.

None of this helps anyone in practice if it ends at “so embrace your range.” The advice that people with a lot of interests hear most often is to follow their passion, and it fails them because it fixes on the wrong layer. It sends you looking at the surface activity, the guitar or the weekend five-a-side, trying to get paid for that exact thing, when almost none of those activities turn cleanly into a living. So you conclude that your interests are a distraction from real work, when the problem is only that you were looking at them in the wrong place.

The place to look is underneath. Your interests usually have very little in common on the surface, and yet the reason you are drawn to them tends to be remarkably consistent once you go looking for it. The constant for me has never been any one pursuit. It has always been the pull of learning something from scratch, that early stretch where you go from useless to competent and can feel yourself improving by the week. The activities were interchangeable, and the through-line underneath them was the part that stayed put. When you can name that for yourself, you stop trying to monetise a hobby and start noticing a way of working that travels into almost any field you point it at. My friend Charlie Rogers calls this “the golden thread”.

There is also the part of your interests that feels like play to you but reads as work to everyone else. Most people have at least one of these, some capacity they exercise without noticing any effort while others find it tedious or hard. That gap is where capability and a market overlap, because the things that come easily to you and cost other people real effort are precisely the things they will pay to have done. You are looking for the thing you do lightly while other people strain at the same task.

For a generalist, the biggest edge runs directly against picking a single thing. It is far more likely to come from the combination of your interests than from the perfection of any one of them. There are thousands of people better than you at each separate thing you do, but the number who sit at the exact crossing of your three or four interests is small, and that intersection is where you have almost no competition. Name the place where your interests meet, and treat that as the territory you occupy.

If the economy keeps paying for the things machines cannot do, then a broad base and a knack for combining across fields move from a liability to one of the more valuable things a person can have. The systems we built for the opposite belief will start to strain. An education system that asks you to choose a narrow specialism at sixteen, hiring that screens for a straight unbroken line on a CV: both were designed for a world that paid for a single deep specialism, and that world is narrowing.

"Get a life" is usually aimed at someone buried too deep in a single thing, a half-insult that tells them to go and find some other interests. The more the world tilts toward problems that no single specialism can solve, the more a full and varied life starts to look like sensible preparation for it.

Helping people see that is the problem I spend my days on. With my co-founder I have built Rumbo, a tool that helps you find the thread running underneath your interests, the parts that feel like play to you, and where they might combine into something only you can offer. If you have spent years feeling like your range was a problem to fix, it is built for you. You can try it at rumbocareers.com.

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