Get a hobby

You will be better at your job

Most of the best marketers, CEOs, and sales leaders I know have one thing in common. It is not that they spent the weekend testing the newest AI workflow or building something in Claude Code.

It is that they are deeply obsessed with something outside of work.

Photography.

Woodworking.

Running.

Cooking.

Surfing.

Music.

Something that forces them to think differently.

That might sound unrelated to business performance. But there is actually strong research behind why this matters.

Psychologists call it psychological distance. When your brain steps outside the domain you normally operate in, it becomes better at forming connections across unrelated ideas and experiences. That process activates what researchers call divergent thinking, which is one of the core mechanisms behind creativity and problem solving.

A well-known study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people thinking about problems from a more distant or abstract perspective produced significantly more creative solutions. The brain literally becomes better at generating novel associations when it is not trapped inside the same immediate context.

There is also the concept of incubation.

When you stop actively working on a problem and shift your attention elsewhere, your brain continues processing the problem in the background. That is why ideas appear during a run, while cooking dinner, or halfway through a long walk.

Research suggests this happens through something called the default mode network, a system in the brain that becomes active when you are not focused on a specific task. That network is heavily associated with idea generation, reflection, and connecting distant concepts together.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what good marketing requires.

Marketing is not fundamentally about tools, despite what LinkedIn might make you believe right now.

It is about perspective.

The problem is that many people in marketing spend all of their time consuming the exact same inputs as everyone else.

The same newsletters.

The same LinkedIn posts.

The same podcasts.

The same frameworks.

The same AI prompts.

Over time, their thinking starts collapsing into the same patterns as everyone around them. That is why so much marketing today feels interchangeable.

But people who spend meaningful time outside that ecosystem often develop stronger and more original thinking.

A photographer learns how framing changes perception.

A woodworker develops patience and precision.

A runner understands endurance and pacing.

A musician develops rhythm and emotional timing.

A chef learns balance, sequencing, and experimentation.

None of those things are marketing directly. But all of them shape how someone sees problems. They create new mental models. They help people recognize patterns others miss. They introduce analogies and perspectives from completely different worlds.

That is where many of the best ideas actually come from.

Not from staring harder at the same problem everyone else is staring at.

But from stepping far enough away from it that your brain can return with a different lens.

So… go get a hobby other than vibe coding.

Thanks for reading,

Adam