The Lazy Genius Podcast - #178 - How to Start a Hobby

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

I hear a lot of you say you wish you had a hobby but you’re unsure of where to start or how to start or you feel like they could be a waste of time. We want them, we need them, but a lot of us don��t have them or know how to get them. So that’s what we’re going to do today. Let’s get a hobby! Stuff Mentioned Both versions of my chocolate chip cookie recipe if you want it (trust me, you do): “I Want Them Now” version and the original 72-Hour version. The bread book I’m using for my bread baking hobby this year. Get your copy of The Lazy Genius Way or grab one for a friend! Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon presents Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen. These little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Hello, welcome to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius

about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 178. How to start a hobby. I hear a lot of you say, I wish I had a hobby or I need a hobby or I have no idea how to start a hobby. I'm 39 years old. Or I have no idea how to start a hobby. I have a million children in no time. So many sentences about hobbies. We want them. We need them. But a lot of us don't have them or know how to get one. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to get a hobby. Let's get a hobby. All right. So first question, why? Why do you need a hobby? You have to answer this for yourself like everything else we do around here. There are so many reasons why you might want or need a hobby. But without naming the reason, you could very easily choose a hobby that you could very easily choose a hobby that

just doesn't make sense for you. Some thoughts on why you might need a hobby. Do you need something that works a different part of your brain than normal? Do you need something that will slow you down or speed you up depending on the typical speed of your day? Is your brain the thing that is too fast or too slow in contrast with your schedule or your body? Do you want to feel good at something? Do you want to try something new? Even though you'll likely not be great. but flexing that that imperfect muscle is just really good for your spiritual formation. There are just so many reasons why you might want a hobby. So name yours.

Why? Why do you want a hobby? Why does it feel important? Put words to that before you decide anything else. Okay, so that's the why. Now we move on to the when. Now, at first I had the what coming first. Like, I mean, we need to decide what the hobby is, right?

but a lot of us have specific blocks of time that are available to fill with a hobby. Also, how often do you want to engage in your hobby? If your hobby is birdwatching, but you only have time to engage in it at night, that's not going to work, right? Obviously, that's like a really weird example, but you get the idea. You need to think through your typical day and your typical week and see when you would like to engage in your hobby. have a time sort of framework that makes sense.

Now, it doesn't mean you're committing every evening from, you know, 730 to 930 to watercolors or whatever. But you can reasonably say that you could have time to do something on certain weeknights after the kids go to bed, right? Be flexible. Right now you're just gathering information to see what makes sense and what will get you excited to do this thing that you want to do. for your own reasons you have already named. Okay. So we did the why and the when. Now we're going to do the what.

What would be a good hobby that fits in your reasons for wanting a hobby in the first place and fits in the time that you have in your life right now? brainstorm some stuff. Ask a friend or a partner or a sister to help you come up with ideas. Don't commit to anything yet or automatically say no to something, just brainstorm a list of possibilities and kind of sit with them. Or it may be that your hobby, like, is so crystal clear at this point, which that's great too. Just give yourself some space to choose what your hobby is and feel zero guilt about it taking a little bit of time. You're not really supposed to automatically know. It's okay if you don't automatically know. Also, remember that what you choose, it doesn't have to be the only. way you spend your free time for the rest of your life. This is another situation where we put so much

pressure on a thing to fulfill us forever, where it's going to work perfectly the first time, or it's going to give us the purpose we've been craving right away. But really, you might just cross stitch for three weeks and then be done. It doesn't have to be a massive thing, especially considering what your why is in the first place, right? Okay, so we've done the why, the when, and thinking about the what. And that's really all you need, isn't it? Depending on the hobby, you might involve the who, like someone to do it with. You might choose a where, if that's important for the hobby. But all of your other decisions are really based on on why you want a hobby when you have time to do one and what it actually is. Okay. So now what about

how? How does one incorporate a hobby into one's life? If you have named your reasons and you've gone in the right order with how you make this very low risk decision. How you do it will feel a lot easier than trying to commit to some goal or finish line or something. A hobby, it's supposed to be like a chill way to spend extra time. It's something that is only for the purpose of itself. It doesn't make you money. It doesn't make you an expert. It doesn't really have an end goal. It's just there for you to use for your own purposes when you need it and want to enjoy it. Like it's supposed to be enjoyable, you guys. So when I ask how, like how do you stick with your hobby and you're truly worried about that?

I want to ask you to consider if you really want to do that hobby or if your expectations of yourself are hobby level expectations, right? Are you afraid to try watercolor because you want to be amazing? and you secretly hope that you're going to get like a little Etsy business out of it. Okay. That's just fine if you want to get an Etsy business out of it. But if you pretend like you don't want that when you actually do, your experience of your hobby is going to have a lot of unnecessary pressure

because what matters isn't what really matters. So be honest about the purpose of this whole thing. Okay, so to wrap up in this very short episode, I'm going to share with you a hobby that I'm pursuing for the rest of 2020. Just to give some context. Okay, so first my why. Why do I need a hobby? Why do I need a specific way to spend my time when I'm not working or managing a home or caring for tiny humans or, you know, doing those things that are lovely, but can drain me pretty quickly day after day? my why is that I want something that's slow that has nothing to do with a computer since so much of my job is in front of a screen

I want something that benefits my family because I like to bring them into my stuff sometimes I don't want to be too like isolated from them and then I want something that builds on itself but it doesn't require a regular schedule so like I want to learn something and continue to grow and understand it more, but I want it to not be a big deal if I don't do my hobby for two weeks. You know what I'm saying? I need my own timetable for it. Okay, so those are my, those are my reasons why. I need to slow down. Now, what about when? Now, I actually have a lot of flexibility weirdly with my when. I have some nights. I have some mornings. I have some afternoons. I have some weekends. Like I have a pretty flexible, varied life that doesn't really always follow the patterns in terms of time. I'm home most of the time. So I'm not restricted by time in any

particular way, which is good for me to name. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and in heaven. the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now, when I was thinking about my what, what am I going to do? My list was very short.

So this was what was on my list. I thought about knitting because I find knitting to be such a Laura Ingalls hobby, you know. I loved the little house books when I was a kid. I love things that feel homesteady, especially since, I don't know, know. Like, I would not be super great at living a homestead life, like all the things at one time. I mean, I don't garden. I feel like you need to be a gardener to be a homesteader. But that said, if you give me one thing, you know, like I like to do hobbies and pastimes that feel like they're from another age, that feel like they've been done for generations before me, which is why knitting

was on the list. It's like the one thing. I don't have to raise chickens to. I can just knit by itself. However, knitting is something I would do at the same time that I normally read. Right. If I'm going to reach for knitting, that's actually when I would normally read on the couch at night, in the carpool line, in a little break in the middle of cooking dinner. And I love reading more than I love knitting. I know this already because I've tried knitting before and I would rather reach for a book. Now, could I do both? Sure. You know, life can be accepting of two hobbies. That's fine. But I already. desire more reading in my life. So taking that time away for knitting, it just doesn't make a lot

of sense for me personally as I thought about it. I did for a hot second. Think about gardening, as I often do when I want to get a hobby. But I dismissed it like pretty much right away because it's almost winter and gardening requires, you know, like sun and stuff, I guess. And then also it requires regularity, which is one of those things I don't want. You know, you can't forget about your garden for two weeks. I have. It doesn't work. It's just not for me. But it did pop up as an option because it always does because it's it follows those things that I said that it's of the earth and it's from generations before and it's very slow and all of that. But when I thought about my why and the time that I have and what I want from this, it just helped me realize this is still not the time to do it.

This is still not the time to try and be a gardener. All right. So my hobby, the one that I, like I kind of already do a little bit, I have done at various intensities over the years, is baking. I love baking so much. I haven't done it a lot lately. For a really long time, I was baking a lot of desserts. And then I just stopped. I still bake my chocolate chip cookies. They're on the blog. But baking desserts in general, it just hasn't, it hasn't been serving me in the way that it used to. But do you know what does? Do you know what is grounded and centuries old? what can happen at various times of the day, but doesn't have to happen regularly for it to count? Do you know what is slow and calming and also benefits my family?

Bread. Bread does all those things. So my hobby for the rest of 2020 is to bake more bread. Specifically, I am going to bake my way through a book by one of my favorite Instagram follows, Bonnie O'Hara from Alchemy Bread. She has a book called Bread Baking for Beginners. and even though like I have a decent understanding of baking bread, I've done it. I still want to sort of start from the beginning and experience the process of learning

to bake from the most basic breads to the more difficult ones, which is how her book is laid out. I can do this at my own pace. My entire family likes bread. Every single human in my family likes bread. I rarely feel more excited about being home than when bread is baking. It just makes the house feel like home. And Bonnie is like the kindest. best teacher. So it just all seems to work out. Now, here is something important to notice.

I'm excited about this. I'm excited about this hobby. This is not work for me to try and fit it into my life or stick to a schedule or anything like that. Please remember to put a hobby in its proper place. It is lovely and enjoyable. It is something you look forward to. Naming it and doing it is just simply giving intention to something that matters to you at a pace and for a purpose that makes sense in your life right now. If you have to force yourself into a hobby, I just don't think it's a hobby. It's something that's carrying weighty expectations you haven't named yet. And you're allowed to do it for a little while and then stop, you know, or do it for a while, put it down for weeks and weeks and then pick it up again for no reason other than you want to.

If you feel pressure from your hobby, I'm just not sure it's the right hobby for you. So just take your time and be kind as you make your choices with it. For a long time, I was doing, like at the beginning of pandemic especially, I was doing pen drawings of trees. That was like my thing. Several nights a week, I would just go out on my porch and draw a tree. Like, I don't know. Were they great?

No, I don't know. But I loved it. the drawings weren't very good. I mean, actually, honestly, I don't even know if they're good, but drawing a good tree wasn't the point. Drawing a tree was. And then I stopped, and I haven't done one in several months. Does that mean it was the wrong hobby? No. It just means it served me until it didn't. So I stopped. There's no failing, no, not carrying out your goals or sticking to a plan or whatever. Hobbies are kind. Hobbies don't want your stress. Just do something fun that brings you joy until it doesn't anymore.

But if you need some direction on what it is, do what we just talked about in this episode. Ask yourself first why you want a hobby and when you want to enjoy it. And from there, you can name what you might do. And then just try it out. That's the right order for this. And remember, we learned in the lazy genius way that going in the right order is a principle that can be applied to so many things, including choosing a hobby. Another principle from the book that applies here is to start small. If you want to knit, don't buy every color of yarn and 20 needles and three instruction books.

Buy one thing of yarn, whatever they're called. Buy like one side of needles and then try something simple like a scarf, you know? Start small. If you start big with a hobby, you will likely quit and then feel guilty. for buying all the stuff that you needed to start a big. So start small. I hope this gives you some permission to engage in a hobby for no other reason than it's fun because that's what hobbies are for. Just choose based on what matters to you. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. And if you haven't read The Lazy Genius Way, I will put a link in the show notes for you to check it out.

It's a book I wrote that came out in August of this year. It has almost about 650 reviews on Amazon, which is amazzing. It is a New York Times best seller, which is still insane as well. But the point, the reason I'm telling you this is because people have really loved this book and have really resonated with this way of approaching life. It is practical, it is helpful, it's full of permission, and I encourage you to check it out if you haven't yet. All right, y'all, until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. And I'll see you next week.

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