🎢 Good luck, have fun

On Friday I posted a video on my YouTube channel about why you shouldn’t try to “develop yourself” through a hobby. It’s a good one — I genuinely recommend watching it, though unfortunately it’s in Russian for now :)

Today I want to talk about a related topic: why you shouldn’t choose a “development-oriented” hobby in the first place. Let me start with a question: what do you think chess develops in a person above all else? If your answer was intelligence, discipline, or strategic thinking — you lose. The main thing chess develops is the damn ability to play chess. Second question: what, in your opinion, does a passion for the game show “What? Where? When?” develop first? By now you’ve probably noticed the pattern: it develops the ability to play that exact game.

If you want to learn skill X by doing activity Y, you’re taking an irrational route — just practice X directly. I’m not touching the obvious “training” scenarios here, like using a flight simulator before flying a real plane — managing risk and gradual exposure are part of proper training.

Once we understand that you learn an activity primarily through that activity itself, we can ask: but surely a hobby can teach you something, right? Why not start dancing to improve body control? And that’s a valid question — but the answer is simple: if the only goal is body control, then there’s probably a much more efficient training program for that. But if you enjoy dancing for its own sake — then you should absolutely go, and you’ll get the body control as a nice side effect.

A hobby should be — or remain — a safe place, a way to take care of yourself and actually rest. And I don’t know a single hobby that doesn’t make you grow in some way. Any sport teaches you to handle loss and enjoy victory, dancing teaches social interaction, debates, stand-up, and quiz games train your ability to think fast and connect facts. But the moment you start measuring your hobby not by the joy it brings, but by its “output,” your rest turns into exhausting work.

Yesterday I wrote that exhausting work is not something we can sustain for long. So it’s better to choose things that genuinely bring you joy.