Do you have a hobby? By “hobby,” I mean something that you enjoy doing enough that it is mentally engrossing, that requires (or gets) your entire mental focus? If not, you may be performing at less than top capacity.
This was proven to me again yesterday. I’ve always been a big believer in the need for people to have things in their lives that encompass us when we do them; there are real business benefits to doing so. I read an article about 10 years ago (and I’m sorry, I can’t find it again), but essentially, a psychologist was suggesting that the existence of mentally encompassing hobbies or activities actually aided our problem-solving capabilities at work. The idea is that, when you have a problem at work, sometimes the best thing is to get completely away from it and focus on another activity that takes you entire focus. While your conscious mind is working on your hobby, behind the scenes your subconcious is still wrestling with the initial problem – with the advantage of not having the immediate deadline to take part of the focus. If you’ve ever been playing golf, playing catch with your kids, etc., and had the solution to a problem jump into your mind, you know what I’m talking about.
This was proven to me again yesterday. I have a couple of encompassing hobbies; one is bowling and one is working on cars. Yesterday, I was wrestling with a particularly difficult problem on a car. Two components essentially wanted to share the same space, and it was impossible for them to do so. But, I couldn’t figure out how to remount one of them to make the situation work. After about an hour of positioning and repositioning the components, and finding lots of ways NOT to make the situation work, I stopped. I went upstairs, had dinner, and then after dinner started working on some training materials for a program I’m putting on next week.
After about a half an hour of engrossing myself in business, bingo – the right solution to the car problem hit me. It’s simple, elegant, and will require about $5 worth of new steel and 10 minutes of fabrication. It’ll even look good. I quickly made a couple of notes – I didn’t even have to look at the car again to know it would work – and then went back to work on the training materials. This, of course, is an example of the problem solving process in reverse (the work helped me solve a hobby problem), but it has worked the same way with business more often than with hobbies. Visitors to my workshop are sometimes entertained by me stopping my work in the middle, running over to a pad and pen on the workbench, making some notes, and then getting back to my work. This is also why, if you see me eating lunch alone, you’ll see me reading the Wall Street Journal frequently. It’s mentally engrossing, and that gives my mind a relief valve to work on solving problems in the background.
The point of all this is that, sometimes, the least effective people are those who are 100% focused on their work, all the time. Without a mental escape route, your mind can’t solve the problems that you encounter. Considering that all of business is about solving problems and inventing solutions, if you don’t have a hobby – consider getting one, or find some activity that can act as an escape valve.
