Be Better at Working, by Not Working

No really, hear me out.

Jun 16, 2021

Hi all!

It officially feels like summer, and a return to normalcy in many ways. People are starting to re-plan for trips and weddings and reunions and that feels so hopeful and awesome! I hope you’ve been able to hang out in glorious weather with the people you love.

As for last week’s poll on preferred timing of the newsletter, it was split pretty close to 50/50 for Wednesday vs Weekend… so I’m going to keep it on Wednesday for now, for the sake of consistency.

This week we’re going to revisit the ‘Purpose’ Venn diagram I posted on Instagram, and wrote about two weeks ago, and dive a bit deeper into the 'what you love’ circle.

But first, a bit more information about how this Venn diagram came to be. When I posted it on my Instagram, I had a few people comment that this was the Japanese concept of ikigai, which translates to ‘life purpose’, or even more simply, ‘a reason to enjoy life’.

While there’s certainly some overlap in philosophy, the expectation that all four of these conditions must be optimized in order to actually achieve your life purpose is a misconception (one that I tried to tease apart in that previous post).

The conflation of the Venn diagram (the original of which was coined by a Spanish author and psychological astrologer, Andres Zuzunaga) and the ikigai concept was caused by this blog post by Marc Winn in 2014, and has since been used by HR professionals, career coaches and the internet at large to describe finding ones life purpose.

The original, simple meaning of ikigai - a reason to get up in the morning, or a reason to enjoy life; has gotten slightly distorted by merging it with the a westernized model of self-improvement and motivation. (Though almost certainly, the combined framework of a multi-faceted life has been used for positive change and motivation).

But the term ikigai means something a bit different to the Japanese. It turns out, it’s not a career or life mapping framework. In fact, in Japan, ikigai is a simple philosophy for people’s happiness.

In a small Japanese town, Kyotango1, where the population has three times more residents over the age of 100 than the national average, a study was conducted that revealed that these happy elders had exceptionally high figures of DHEA, a steroid hormone (also known as “longevity hormone”) - and all of these happy elders also had a hobby they were committed to practicing every day.

You’re shocked, I know 🤨. Westerners took a beautiful simple concept about daily little joys and turned it into a big juicy 4-part goal framework to “strive for”. 🧐

For further clarification, a few more descriptors of how the Japanese relate to ikigai from this great article that dispels many misconceptions:

Ikigai is unrelated to making money
Ikigai is not necessarily about what the whole world needs from you, and in fact, can relate to your community, however you define it (and could be as small as your immediate family and friends)
You don’t necessarily need to be ‘good at something’ for it to be your ikigai, it could be a small daily ritual
It changes as you grow

Ok, I think I know what you’re thinking:

Season 9 Eye Roll GIF by The Office — *SIDE EYE*

Girl, I’m not here to read a newsletter about hobbies, I’m here to read a newsletter about careers!
Janice, I can barely survive balancing my job and my kid, where do I find time for a hobby?

Two completely fair points.

To the first point, I say: I think hobbies can actually make us better workers (better leaders, better managers and even better employees at the junior level)

And to the second point, I say: hobbies don’t need to be full-on dedicated immersions, they can be small side activities. More on that in the “Conversations” section below.

Point #1: Hobbies make us better workers. (i.e. get better at working by not working).

I’m currently launching a hiring process for junior resources at our fund. In this industry, you end up getting pretty similar resumes for pre-MBA or post-MBA candidates. There are certain investment banks or consulting firms (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BCG), and maybe certain certifications (CFA) that many of the resumes will have in common.

While that experience is important, I always find the bottom third of the resume to be the most interesting.

This is an imperfect analogy, so bear with me, but it’s kind of like the smaller name bands on the Coachella poster. Everyone knows the big name bands (size 20 font bands), but some of the best discoveries and concert experiences are from the size 8 fond bands - the little hidden gems that are hustling hard and giving it their all if they have the shot of performing at Coachella.

Is Goldman Kygo? Is McKinsey Eminem? I’m waaaay off on a tangent here, but do me a favour and go listen to Tank and the Bangas, and Chloe x Halle who are now super super famous. GEMS.

Ok, tangent over. Back to hobbies.

(Wait, one more tangent, which is that the CEO of Goldman Sachs is in fact an EDM DJ, and not a bad one at that).

Ok. Hobbies.

T. Harv Eker Quote: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” — *There’s definitely some nuance here, but this is good food for thought.*

I don’t love all motivational quotes, but I do find this one thought-provoking. As I think about hiring, I think about how I can find potential colleagues with experience and potential that we’ll really value.

The top 2/3 of a resume will prove experience, the bottom 1/3 can perhaps be extrapolated to prove potential.

The bottom 1/3 of the resume might tell me:

How you relate to things you’re not experienced in
How you learn new things
What you chase after
How you build experiences outside of work

To test for experience, we’d ask technical questions of candidates that have largely homogenous backgrounds in a multitude of ways. But I believe someone with thoughtful hobbies is likely to exhibit the traits below, which we also want to identify. These are traits someone might take into their day job as well, and traits that we value as part of the team:

Curiosity + Empathy + Humility

Curiosity

My boss (the busiest person I have ever met), spends a good chunk of his morning (probably at some ungodly hour) reading non-work related things. He sends our team tweets and articles all the time across the widest breadth of subject matter you can imagine. Some are tangentially related to work (e.g. advanced science breakthroughs), but just as often, he’ll go down the rabbit hole on hierarchies in ant colonies, for example, or Oreo-eating techniques.

He has a voracious curiosity about how things work that makes him a terrific investor. Investing is largely about navigating risk, which requires asking the right questions. Having deep curiosity, and the willingness to go deep on subjects, and chase things down for answers sets one up to ask the right questions. Curiosity implies a hunger to learn, and something that is important at every stage of career.

Empathy

I recently attempted to upgrade my Spanish skills from ‘utterly non-existent’ to ‘toddler level’ with a combination of app-based tools (Duolingo and Memrise), and an online tutor. I naively fancied myself ‘a natural’ with languages, since I speak Cantonese, and learned French in elementary school.

It turns out that being completely immersed in Cantonese between the ages of 1-6 was pretty critical to learning the language, and that ‘knowing food nouns’ in French, is not the same as mastering it… It turns out learning Spanish (or any new language, and the grammar, structure and the irregularities.. so many irregularities) is extremely challenging, and I, in fact, am not naturally gifted at learning it 😭. Struggling through the basics, though gave me such a deep appreciation for the challenges of immigrants and non-native English speakers in North America that had to learn English (and quickly!) to find jobs to support their families - my parents included.

As we move further along in our careers, and perhaps into more managing than doing, we have fewer opportunities to learn brand new concepts. Learning something new (even in our leisure time!) creates empathy which we can take into our interactions with those that are more junior to us, those that are learning for the first time, and those that have less exposure and experience.

Humility

I recently had this conversation with two good friends about what a ‘skill’ entails. I proposed that it was something intrinsic, or innate, while they argued that a skill might in fact be something you aren’t naturally inclined for whatsoever. It could be something you are perfectly average at, or have no gift for, but with enough practice and dedication, it can become something you’re great at.

(Clearly, given my faulty assumption about my “affinity” for languages (see above), I quickly became convinced that they were right.)

Hobbies are a terrific way to build skills in a less pressurized environment than our day jobs. You can work towards goals, or learning milestones, on your own time. It’s somewhat unlikely that adult hobbies will turn into elite accolades for us (though not impossible, and the book, “Range”, highlights a few examples of extremely successful people whose hobbies turned into career accomplishments later in life, including this renowned artist). So, what do hobbies give us that benefit us in work/life, if we’re not going to become the next Olympian or chessmaster?

Humility

Most of the time, if you don’t have an innate gift, or experience in your younger years, or a ‘head start’, you start right at square one of whatever you choose to spend time on, which is an incredible lesson in humility.

Also, being really bad at something, yet doing it anyway and slowly improving is not only a practice in humility, it’s a practice in resilience. Ideally, you’re advancing in your career which means that you’re always going to encounter something new o

I’ll explore some of lessons learned in starting this newsletter in a future post, but it’s been the best example for me, of the benefit of hobbies. It’s such a great opportunity for me to explore creating something (vs. consuming), that I can do purely for the enjoyment of it (vs. setting goals/metrics around it), that I’m starting with no experience or innate gift in and that I’m slowly learning and trying to improve on!

Conversations

This week’s conversation is more of a… practical brainstorm.

I was having a chat with a good friend of mine, who is juggling a senior finance role at a publicly traded energy company and raising a sweet, (sassy!) three year old. Oh yeah, and navigating a move and a new house and all sorts of life logistics…

When I brought up the topic of hobbies she looked at me like I was legitimately insane.

To be fair, I don’t have children, and want to be mindful that everyone has different amounts of spare time left over after their demanding day job and their home life.

Point #2: There might be practical ways to integrate hobbies (mini-hobbies?) into our day-to-day that doesn’t require a multi-hour commitment, which might not always be feasible

Some thoughts:

Make use of your breaks: read articles, do crosswords, or chess drills while you’re having your first coffee at your desk
Batch your work: Does everyday of your workweek follow the same schedule? Can you ‘batch’ meetings together on certain days, and reserve blocks of free time on others? Some large tech companies implement no-meeting days, while others implement Summer Fridays - can time be carved out of these blocks to dedicate to a hobby?
Tiny daily habits that build: The shortest, smallest hobby I came across while researching this week was the concept of “6 Word Stories” - the concept is self explanatory, and the possibilities are endless. Small writing prompts each day are similar, to just get in the flow of writing something creative, enjoyable or reflective
“Hobbitize” (not a real word, but bear with me) what you already spend time on: is it possible to add a small learning layer to the leisure activities you already enjoy or engage in?
- If you generally listen to podcasts, listen to ones geared towards a specific topic you find interesting (link below)
- If you listen to music while you work or workout, go deep into the canon of a single musical artist you admire, and listen critically, or listen for how the music or lyrics come together (for an awesome and digestible podcast on song construction, check out ‘Song Exploder’, where famous artists take apart their songs and talk through all the different elements that go into the making of a song)
- Replace the occasional Netflix watch with an hourlong course (Coursera has many free classes, and Masterclass has premium classes taught by experts in each field)

None of this is groundbreaking, obviously, but sometimes… I feel like the concept of ‘doing something purely for fun’ *is* a little novel in our culture of grinding all the time.

Again, the ‘goal’ of hobbies isn’t to become a world-class expert, which may not be attainable without a large time commitment, it’s to expand your curiosity, or creativity or simply enjoyment.

Any other thoughts on making time for hobbies? Even if your feedback is “Janice, these are still too time-consuming to consider”, I’d love to hear it!

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