Pick Up A Side-Project

Marcus Hollinger is a modern day renaissance man. He’s got a steady gig as SVP of Marketing at Reach Records, and then he just casually started an incredible coffee company on the side. When I asked him about how he handles the pressure cooler than Steve Jobs bouncing between Apple and Pixar, he said, “It actually helps to do different things, to be forced to solve different kinds of problems in different spaces. It keeps me fresh. I come back to Reach with more ideas because of the coffee business.”

I’ve written before about picking up hobbies as an empirically-demonstrated way of promoting divergent breakthroughs (Herbert A. Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, said, “I can always view my hobbies as part of my research.”), but this is different. Just as Bette Nesmith Graham got the big insight which launched Liquid Paper while she was working a side-job painting a bank’s window displays, alternative employment is a legitimate means of making creative progress.

In his TED talk on what he calls “slow motion multi-tasking,” author Tim Harford described the findings of psychologist Bernice Eiduson’s longitudinal study of research scientists thus: “Sixty years ago, a young psychologist by the name of Bernice Eiduson began a long research project into the personalities and the working habits of 40 leading scientists. Einstein was already dead, but four of her subjects won Nobel prizes, including Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman… One of the questions that it answered was, ‘How is it that some scientists are able to go on producing important work right through their lives?’

“…The pattern that emerged was clear, and I think to some people surprising. The top scientists kept changing the subject. They would shift topics repeatedly during their first 100 published research papers. Do you want to guess how often? Three times? Five times? No. On average, the most enduringly creative scientists switched topics 43 times in their first 100 research papers.” 

This stands in stark contrast with the common refrain of focus. Or perhaps, it offers a countermelody: context-switching is a powerful way to trigger fresh connections, which is the bedrock of breakthrough thinking. If you're having trouble breaking through in just one job, then pick up another.

Related: Dirty Your Hands With A Hobby
Related: Redefine What’s “Work”
Related: Visiting Other Fields

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