Active Hobbies And Being Interesting
Every so often, I go outside and meet people.
It’s a scary experience, but over the years, it’s gotten far less daunting.
One thing that people I’ve known for a while mention again and again is that I seem to have a lot of hobbies and interesting stuff to talk about since the last time they spoke to me.
Now, I’m not particularly interesting, so that’s a scary thought, but a lot of people aren’t interesting in the slightest.
If you want good conversations, I suggest you hang out with high quality, interesting folk. If you’re scared about being one of the most boring people ever, then this article is for you.
It’s my approach to doing stuff and not being boring.
Active Hobbies Versus Passive Ones
The biggest issue by far that people face when it comes to their free time, hobbies and the like is that they’re all passive.
You watch TV. Your friends listen to music. Your boyfriend goes out to restaurants and irritatingly photographs his food.
In business stuff, there’s the adage that you must go from consumer to producer.
This is true of your hobbies as well.
So, let’s take music as an example. Almost everyone says they love music. Couldn’t live without it.
And yet very few people actually know anything about music. Sure, they can name a band and song, and some of them even have a collection of festival tickets.
But they can’t play an instrument, can’t pick out an instrument from the song and don’t know the slightest thing about how writing a piece of music goes.
That’s because the hobby is passive. It doesn’t engage most people’s brain.
If you want to be more interesting, you swap passive for active.
This is the biggest step and the most important.
For music, you pick up a guitar or something. You strum a few chords. That said, I’d recommend learning piano/keyboard instead of guitar, because it’ll help you understand the rest of the music thing a lot faster and easier.
But the minute you do that, you go from being a passive hobbyist to an active one. It requires your brain to be engaged but it enriches the experience.
The same is true with listening to foreign songs, getting into sport (imagine if every fantasy football guy started playing 5-a-side with his mates instead.)
So, passive to active. Good start.
Fundamentals
If you want to maximise your general benefit from learning something, you should concentrate on the fundamentals.
You can apply this to any hobby or interest really, and for the most part, it’s all you ever need.
Examples:
- Music theory is infinitely complex but to be honest you can grab a couple of basic books and know 90% of what you’d need to for most applications
- Language learning is a mix of vocab + grammar. Again, infinitely complex with each language, but fundamentally, you learn structure and then add vocab
- Exercise: unlimited options for using your body, but each body part only moves in a limited amount of ways. Alexander Cortes gives the best descriptions of this.
- Programming; you need a couple of books to learn the fundamentals, and then probably some nerdier guy has already uploaded the code for whatever you need to GitHub
For most hobbies, the fundamentals will take you everywhere you want to go, and the more niche applications are where the complexity exponentially increases.
Again, as an example, if you want to be a virtuoso guitarist, then you’re probably going to need extreme OCD and hours upon hours of drilling arpeggios, learning the tech behind your equipment, advanced music theory, and so on. Also, get used to competing with kids who’ve been forced into it since they were six.
At those higher levels, the music-as-fun-social-thing gets lost entirely and the people in those circles are almost universally unhappy.
Most guys would better be served learning 5-10 classic pop-rock songs very well and then making up some strum stuff.
If you’re thinking about learning guitar to impress people at parties, don’t, if you’re thinking of learning it to impress girls, absolutely you need the bare minimum.
Let’s move on, because we’re not just in these hobbies for the girls.
Progressive Resistance
You’ve concentrated on the fundamentals but you’re now stalling, having played My Heart Will Go On for the 100th girl in a row, and you’re starting to feel unsatisfied with how interesting you are.
Good job, because we’re leaving civilian territory now.
If you want to remain interesting, you need to progressively up your intake of stuff.
This can be vertical (i.e. you get better and more proficient – which isn’t that useful past a certain point) or lateral.
By lateral, I mean you swap to a different, tangentially related subject or hobby.
You’ve learned how to paddleboard, now learn how to surf.
You’ve learned how to order a meal in French, now learn some Spanish.
Now, some would say this will make you a lifelong dabbler. That’s true to an extent, but not really.
You see, you learn one thing and it adds to your body of knowledge and experience. This helps you with the first skill.
If you learn to surf, your body will be fitter and you’ll be better at paddleboarding.
If you can accurately tell me the differences between French and Spanish grammar, then you will have to know both languages better than you think.
When you learn to write code, suddenly you can pull data and have it in front of you that’s useful for any subject.
These things add up.
Time Frame
The problems most people have with all of the above mostly centre around wanting immediate gratification. So they’ll try and learn Italian because they saw a cute waiter guy when they went for pizza, and obviously you can’t just learn Italian in a day girls, and so Fabio leaves your mind when it’s too tough and you go back to being the same girl you were before.
Think on a further out timescale. There’s no real hurry to be more interesting because it’s not a project with a closed end date.
You learn a couple of things for a month, then swap. Maybe do some things for three months or more. Maybe you’ll love one thing and get obsessed with it for a year.
Over the course of a year or two, suddenly you’ve tried ten new things. This is interesting.
You get positive feedback.
You keep going.
That’s all there is to it, folks.