A Theory of Leisure

David shares his thoughts on some bad advice he hears involving the focus on pursuing personal passions in business.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, I would have thought if either of us were going to put forward a topic on a Theory of Leisure, it would be me and not you.

[laughter]

David Baker: Why?

Blair: Being a man of leisure.

David: Oh, a man of leisure.

Blair: Yes.

David: A theory of leisure sounds a lot like me, doesn't it? It's like this faux academic cloak over whatever the softness in my justification, I just wrap it in academic sounding stuff. People are impressed.

Blair: I know you have some pseudo-academic citations in here too, so you put some effort into this.

David: It's a justification for my own life. That's just in case my wife listens to this.

Blair: Yes, one day. You and I have had this conversation for many years now. I've also seen you have the conversation from a stage where you have said to me and many others that the advice, do what you love and the money will follow is horrible advice.

David: It is, because there's a lot of people following their heart that are poor as all get out. Like, who made up this advice? You have this guy who loves riding bicycles and he hates his job, so he decides to buy a bicycle shop that somebody's selling. This is doing what he loves and success will follow. Now he can't ride his bicycle on Saturdays. He's in the store. I got to hire these people. I'm the only one that understands these high-end carbon frames is like, "No, they're just separate." You just love getting me going, don't you?

Blair: What you're saying is do the drudge work, make the money-

David: And don't have any fun. [laughs]

Blair: -and be unhappy. Is that what you're saying?

David: No, I'm not, but I'm just saying, let's uncouple them. You've got to enjoy what you do at some level, but the primary criteria is not that you love it. The primary criteria is, do you know what you're talking about? Can you make money doing it? Can you move the needle on behalf of the client? Now if you do all those things, it's my belief that you probably will enjoy it because humans love to have impact and they love money too.

If you get that turned around and you're pursuing things because you love them, then it just leads you down all kinds of strange paths that just don't end in a good place. Anyway, I have sort of sworn off talking about this for a while. I just fell off the wagon again. Now I've got to start the clock over. It's another three years before I can get any credit.

Blair: There's a lot of nuance here. The first time I heard you say this, I thought, "Yes, that's absolutely true." Then I sat with it for a while and I thought, "Oh, I can see some areas where this doesn't apply." I can see some ways in that this might not be the best advice, but the magic is in the nuance. When you go through the nuance of it, it's hard to imagine coming out the other side of this conversation, anybody continuing to disagree with you.

Although I suspect there are a lot of people bracing themselves right now. Maybe some of them have even turned this off who are just so offended by the idea. You Americans in particular, you live in the land of opportunity. It is your God given right to love what you do and make money at it, no?

David: Right. It is, yes, and you Canadians.

[laughter]

Blair: You're right. There is some nuance. Would you like to hire somebody to do something around your house or your farm or your business for you? They loved what they did. You would, right?

David: Sure.

Blair: Yes, absolutely. I want to acknowledge all that. I don't want to be stupid on the other side of this with some simplistic retort to all of this. I have this weird thing that I do. Somebody makes some big statement. One of the first things I always do is, "Okay, all right, you're saying that applies to everybody in the world. Let me think about that for a minute. There's somebody in an indigenous tribe in Indonesia. How would that work?" Like, "Oh, all of a sudden it falls apart." That person is just as much a human as you are.

If you wanted to change that piece of advice and say, "In a fully developed culture, nobody should have to do the things that they don't love doing." All right, then I'll let you defend that too. If I try to apply the advice you're giving to any human and it falls apart, then maybe we need to think a little bit more about it. The fact is that in the world that we live in, there's really lots of different times happening, right?

Nowadays, how much time are we spending? You don't, but most everybody else spends time watching TV. That's so that we are entertained and we don't go out and steal from each other's houses and stuff. It's just to keep us--

[laughter]

David: Is that why there's peacock so we don't steal from each other?

Blair: Right. It just keeps us busy, but our productivity as humans has just gone through the roof. It's plateaued nowadays if you talk to economists. We have all this time to do it. Now, if you had said this same piece of advice 300 years ago to somebody and said like, "Only do what you love and you'll find success." A lot of people would have starved because they were spending every waking minute just trying to raise enough food to feed their families.

The truth is that part of the world has changed and part of the world hasn't. I think universal truths don't change all that much, so let's just be careful about all this.

David: I really love the way you frame that. I think the first time I heard you articulate this point of view was you referenced your upbringing in a remote village in Guatemala, and you're saying, "Everybody's working hard," it's subsistence living. You're growing something. You're repairing something. You're offering some other service and you're trading. The idea that you sit there and think, "You know, I'm going to go do something that I love." You're just not afforded that advantage.

What goes hand in hand with this is something I've observed for years and I've talked to all my kids about it, and that is human beings are horrible predictors of what they will and will not like. You think, "Oh, I'd really love to go do X." You get into X and you realize, "You know what? It's not as fulfilling as I thought it would be." One of your points, and maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves here, is that, you don't have to love the work, but it needs to be fulfilling. That's probably enough. Am I putting words in your mouth?

Blair: No, I think that's exactly right. You almost have to anticipate what's fulfilling. I find the work I do for my clients really fulfilling because I'm moving the needle and I'm making good money. I could think of 20 other things I could do that would meet both of those criteria too. My choice is a little bit accidental. I don't think it's divine. It's just a little bit accidental. There's lots of things you could do that you would enjoy if you're making a difference.

I do think there's something in us as humans that wants to make a difference. We want to be noticed. We want to help people. We want to be rewarded for that. There are many avenues for sort of scratching that itch. Some of this goes back to, there's a lot in economics around, especially in the 1800s, talking about the theory of competitive advantage. Then we haven't heard that phrase all that much, but we've heard the phrase division of labor a lot.

Back when there were economists in the early days writing about this, the illustration they used was, okay, Portugal is really good for wine and England, the climate is really good for wool. Maybe England farmers ought to raise a lot of extra wool and maybe they ought to trade it to the people in Portugal who have lots of extra wine. That seems like such a simple concept right now, but that was really the beginning of the whole notion of specialization.

Imagine a farmer before this who was trying to grow wine, had a little bit of wool, was trying to grow animals to eat and everything and was sort of like good enough at all those things to not starve, but wasn't amazing. Then you think about the transition after the transition, this farmer, all of a sudden, this farmer knows everything there is to know about wool. All of a sudden, it's really interesting to talk to him if you want to know about wool, but it's really boring if there's anything else to talk about.

The world around us has changed a lot. This is where a theory of leisure comes in because we have extra time and the world is demanding that we know very specific things about specific topics and we have to go really deep to master those. We can dig so deep, we don't even know what's happening above ground in the world around us. This is my theory of leisure.

Everybody for hundreds of years has talked about the division of labor, but they haven't really talked about the theory of leisure. I think we need to wed those two concepts so that we understand that leisure is what keeps us sane. That's maybe an overstatement. [laughs]

David: We talk about the specialization of labor. You're referencing David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. It's not just specialization of labor. It's that specialization that you choose based on the comparative advantage, the relative advantage you have. In the example, England has an advantage over Portugal in the production of wool and Portugal has an advantage over England in the production of wine. They specialize in those areas and then they trade.

The question of, why can't we just specialize in something we love? Is that addressed at all? You're saying the advice of do what you love, the money will follow, it is not the appropriate path for choosing a specialism, a career of any kind. It's not what you love. It's something in which you have a comparative advantage. That's a skillset and observation of the marketplace, whatever. Is that what you're saying?

Blair: Yes, you could picture this farmer in England who just has no use for wool. He finds it itchy, but he loves wine, so he says, "I love wine. I'm going to do that." Good luck. Where are you going to grow it in England? There are many factors, they're what you're good at. They're what life has handed to you. It's the time in which you live, the place in which you live, your experience. You have to weave all these things into something.

Weaving all that together doesn't yield just one answer. It yields 20 different answers, and you pick one. The deeper you get in there and the more you realize about this subject that other people don't know, and you can move the needle and you can make money, it's like, "Wow, I really like this. I'm surprised by it. I never would have expected that this is where I would head when I was in school."

David: You're saying instead of pursue your passion and the money will follow, it's pursue the opportunities to have an impact on somebody else's life or business, and that will drive the financial reward, and from that financial reward is when you build your life of leisure. Am I getting this right?

Blair: Exactly right. The model you just described, if we just play that out for a second, whatever you choose to do is going to be fairly efficient because you're good at it. You're going to have some time to do other things, and it's also going to be economically viable. Essentially, you're going to have the money. You may not need the money to do whatever you do from a leisure standpoint, but let's assume you do. Now you have the time and the money. Now, what are you going to do with that?

This is one of those areas where I think as an industry, we really get it wrong because we let the business become consuming and we got into this field because we loved it. Many of us wanted to be fine artists or programmers or whatever, and we couldn't find a market to do that without clients, so we reluctantly built businesses around it. We are scratching that leisure itch from work because we love it, and all of a sudden, we start treating clients a little bit differently, and we get frustrated when they don't want to do the things that we think they should do.

We treat it as more than a business rather than the model that you were describing a second ago, where we have a very viable business that yields extra time and extra money that we have sitting in front of us now, and we can do something with that from a leisure standpoint. It's not as if we don't have fun with our work. We do, but that's not the primary source of leisure or fun. We enjoy it because of what it accomplishes, but we have a very interesting life outside of work.

There's another element in here too that I think is important because the deeper our expertise, the world is demanding deeper and deeper expertise. The deeper our expertise, the weirder we are, and we need those external forces to help us retain that humanity.

David: What do you mean by that, the weirder we are?

Blair: It's like somebody who--

David: We solve really obscure problems for a very small market of businesses.

Blair: Yes, think of like an SEO firm. There's so much technical stuff in there, and Google's changing the algorithms on average every two or three days, and we have to learn more, and we get lost in this. All of a sudden, we forget how normal people live. It's like you go to a baseball game with a neighbor, and they don't want to talk about SEO. They want to talk about what's going on in politics or sports or the community or whatever it is, and we need to be grounded humans.

I'm as nervous about generalists who are trying to be relevant in the world. I'm also just as nervous about specialists who don't put their deep knowledge in a broader context. The safest experts are the ones who have a broad, weird, almost unrelated life outside of their specialization to anchor it, to put it in perspective.

David: They're not completely lost down that rabbit hole of specialization. They're not all consumed by it. They come up out of the hole, if I'm hearing you correctly, and then do other weird, interesting, and varied things, often in their personal life. That's how they stay plugged into other parts of the world and bring other context into their specialization.

Blair: Yes. You said that in about 15 seconds, what I tried to say in five minutes and didn't get across. [laughs]

Blair: This makes sense to me, and I think I'm going to ask you to explain how we should think about the role of leisure in our lives. I think the nut of this is you're saying that many of us are making this mistake of the thing that leisure should do for us, fascinate us, challenge us, consume us in a healthy flow state way, bring us all kinds of enjoyment and relaxation. We're often looking to work to get that job done for us rather than leisure time.

We're conflating our work life and our leisure life by thinking that the enjoyment that we get in our leisure life were somehow owed or should pursue this idea of the same level or even type of enjoyment in our work. Is that fair enough?

David: Yes.

Blair: You and I are both old. Remember the whole digital nomad movement when it started?

David: Yes.

Blair: Everybody's on a laptop and there's Wi-Fi everywhere. There are all of these dreams of, "Oh, you can work from the beach." I remember taking my laptop to the beach once and thinking, "This is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever done. I'm going to go back to the office. I'm going to get my work done. Then I'm going to come back to the beach without my stupid laptop." That's what you're talking about, isn't it?

David: [laughs] Yes, but it's, oh, it's hard to do that if we achieve primary enjoyment from our work or if we don't draw boundaries around our work. It just consumes us. This is a really deep topic.

Blair: If we have a life of leisure, and you specifically cite hobbies here, and we'll talk about that. I've heard you say this before so you've said, "Your personal life should be so deep and rich and interesting that you resent when work intrudes into it."

David: Right. Yes, and that's the time argument. I also think there's sort of a money argument where you really want to do something and the business is not profitable enough to fund that.

Blair: Oh, yes.

David: Mainly it's about time. I think that's so true. That's why nobody's going to pick a hobby that they don't enjoy. That is not a problem in our world. It's not just something you enjoy. It's something that's so consuming that you don't think about work either. I just think that brings a healthiness.

I wrote an email, my weekly email and one of the things I said towards the end of it is like, "You know it's okay. No matter how much your firm is struggling these days and a lot of firms are not doing great, it's okay just to close the door in the evening, walk away. That's okay." Even if you aren't as busy as you normally are, just steal a day or two and do whatever you want and don't report to anybody. We need more hobbies in our lives and we need them for specific reasons.

Blair: Yes. Just one more thing before we get into the role of leisure. As you know my wife and I were recently on an eight-day ocean kayaking trip with four biologist friends. We're out there seeing whales and other marine mammals. Afterwards I realized, "I didn't have a single work thought."

One of the thoughts I did have when I was out there enjoying nature, which is one of my favorite things to do is I'm looking at these biologists and I'm thinking, "This is their work in some ways." They're all bat and bear biologists so they're not marine mammal biologists, but this is their work. I had this moment of envy thinking, "I could have been a biologist." When I was a kid, I wanted to be a conservation officer. I wanted to work outdoors in nature. Then I realized, "No, but I also want to be rich."

[laughter]

David: Yes. Those two are mutually exclusive.

Blair: I want to be able to fly anywhere in the world and do all of these things. I'll take what I've got. I'll work hard. Then I had in this moment, eight days of leisure, I didn't have a single work thought. When I came back from it, I was in such great shape. That idea of balance. Enter the role of leisure. What are we looking for when we're trying to build a life of leisure?

David: I love listening to people's lives of leisure. I can seldom guess what they love doing outside of work. It's so fascinating and so esoteric too. If you've got the right kind of hobby, this is what happens, time stops. You have no idea the world is going on around you. The other thing is that expense is justified. This is me anyway.

[laughter]

Blair: This podcast is for Julie, right, your wife?

David: It's a $13,000 lens, like that is justified. [laughs]

Blair: It's camera lens, people.

David: Camera lens, right. You seek new friends who are just as weird as you are and at the same time, they mock and admire your commitment. Jonathan right now is collecting esoteric poker chips.

Blair: Really?

David: Yes. You can go down that rabbit hole like, "It's crazy." There's people all over the world, there's collectors, there's discussion boards. You saw he's sending me pictures, it's really interesting. Stuff that I never would have guessed that there were people that did that.

Blair: I feel like I need to separate him from some of his money. I don't know why that just triggers something in me.

[laughter]

David: You know stuff that very few other people care about. You argue stupid shit that absolutely hardly anybody else cares about. You're on discussions board about this stuff. Like if I enjoy motorcycle riding, for instance, and I go down that rabbit hole, I look at somebody and I watch how they manipulate their left hand and their right hand, what we're doing with their right foot, how they're moving on their feet. When they start to apply throttle, like stuff that other people just wouldn't notice.

Then when you die, here's where it gets great. When you die, your family's going through all your shit and they realize how deep you were in those hobbies and they're just shaking their head, selling this stuff for pennies on the dollar and wondering how you hid all of this from them. That is somebody with a deep hobby.

[laughter]

Blair: You're really talking about yourself here. Your family's going to throw out all the woodworking.

David: You know what your hobby is? We've laughed about this before. It's biological medical experiments on yourself.

Blair: Yes, and so what's left behind when I'm done? There's nothing to sell. It's like, "How come we can't cremate this body? Because he was ingesting so many different obscure things."

[laughter]

David: Okay, so the other side of this though, why do people not have hobbies? There are certain people that don't have any. They go to work and they're not always consumed with work, but they have work and that's it.

Blair: They're putting in the time, making the sausage.

David: I just want to be clear about this because there are times in your life when you can't have a hobby. That's like when your kids are young. You're lucky just to be alive. You got no extra energy. You got no extra money. If you really want to get divorced, then head off and do your hobby and leave the other person there.

[laughter]

Or a very intense period in your life where something happened and you're moving a lot, your job is unsettled, whatever it is, right? I'm not saying that everybody needs to have one all the time. I'm just saying that healthy people have really strange hobbies that I find interesting to learn about.

Blair: I don't remember this from David Epstein's book, Range. You and I did our only ever book review episode on that book. You've got some notes here. He's citing the, what is it, Nobel Prize winning scientists are far more likely?

David: Yes, read this to us. This is interesting.

Blair: Studies have found that Nobel Prize winning scientists are 25 times more likely to sing, dance, or act than the average scientist. They are 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry, and four times more likely to be a musician.

David: Isn't that interesting?

Blair: That's absolutely fascinating. They're specialized in their work, but they have this really interesting personal life. I'm trying to think of examples, Richard Feynman was a bongo player. He also participated in some plays. I think he was a bit of an amateur dramatist. I'm sure, obviously, there's a lot more examples.

David: Do you dance? This is one of the things. I've danced once. My daughter's-in-law dragged me up there, and they never tried again after they saw me. It looked like I was having an epileptic seizure or something. Do you dance?

Blair: Depends on what's in my body.

David: Oh, okay, so you do after certain things, right? Yes.

[laughter]

Blair: Yes, it's not natural. Okay, so you go deep into hobbies. Your two big ones are motorcycle riding and photography.

David: Yes, those are the two that have been a part of my life since I was a little child. Motorcycle is how we got around in Guatemala. Then my dad, we didn't even have electricity. We had this little generator he would fire up every once in a while. He had a Leica enlarger that somebody had given him, and he had a couple Nikons and Nikkormats. I just loved it.

There was just something about creating an image. Those are the two that have stuck with me my entire life. Then there's some other things that I really enjoy too. There's certain kinds of literature I love. I am very obsessive and prone to just wear everything out. I discovered the world of the French Revolution both on land and sea. I've read hundreds of books on that era. I just love every part of it.

Blair: I think you're alive during that era too, so that probably helps. I've noticed this about you for a very long time. I've known you 20 years now. You go deep into your work life, but then you walk away from work. I just got this text from you the other day, and you're off on some motorcycle adventure or you're on a plane flying to a country just to take pictures.

You've always struck me as an example of this have your leisure life be so fascinating, so interesting, so rewarding, that you're resentful when it intrudes into your work life. Then when you are working, you are intently focused.

David: Yes, I don't know that it's a great human trait to be so obsessive about anything I'm doing.

Blair: No, I think the balance is though, because as you said, you are obsessive. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are obsessive. Be obsessive about work, but keep that in the box and keep a big chunk of your life available for leisure time and get obsessive about your hobbies, if that's your thing. For some people out there, it's just their hobbies might be lying on a beach doing nothing.

David: I'm more in that camp.

[laughter]

This kind of people that have those interesting lives, they're so interesting to talk to. Some of my favorite conversations are meeting somebody, asking a few questions, and then having a two-hour conversation with this person where neither one of us is talking about our work at all. We're just talking about something else, and it's like, "Wow, this is an interesting person. I want to stay in touch with this person, and I know nothing about what they do for a living, but I know about their hobbies and their pursuits and what they love and so on."

This field is so rich, and that's one of the reasons why I do what I do. I want them to be able to put a cage around their business so that they can pursue their really interesting lives. The people that you and I serve, my God, they have really interesting lives, and they deserve to be able to pursue them.

Blair: Well said. Let's end on that note. Thanks for this, David.

David: Thanks, Blair.