13 steps for getting WAY into a hobby

I’ve spent the last month in self-imposed dance camp.

I started watching West Coast Swing dancing videos this past winter after shoulder surgery. “I can totally do that!” I thought as I sat on the couch in a sling, scrolling to the next video with my non-dominant hand.

Time marched on, the sling came off, and I started researching classes in the city until “Oops gotta run and pick up Arden.” The tab stayed indefinitely open.

And then one month ago Arden left for sleep-away camp for the fist time. I had two working arms and an empty nest. So what’s a girl to do?

Dance Camp!

I didn’t sign up for a few classes, I signed up for ALL the classes, everywhere. Over the last four weeks, there have only been a handful of days I have NOT danced. Turns out parenting was taking up all my dancing time!

For clarity, I love a totally inconsequential, casual hobby like jigsaw puzzles, but that’s a topic for another post. Here, I’m talking the all-caps, might-be-a-little-bit-obsessed, HOBBY.

It hasn’t been since the start of writing Today Was Fun that I’ve been so enraptured with a project. West Coast Swing combines so many of my great loves: dance, physical comedy, improv, and crop tops. I could do it endlessly.

But perhaps what I feel most delighted by is that it’s the first time since college I’ve felt this kind of captivation with something that wasn’t career-related. I really want to get good at it, and when I do, it will do absolutely nothing for my brand presence, inbound leads, or revenue. It will, however, do wonders for my joy.

Also, I love that “swing dancing” is the antonym of “AI-optimized workflow.”

Arden is now back from camp and I’m sure I won’t be able to keep up my grueling yet intoxicating pace. But I think I have my claws in deep enough that I won’t lose my grip.

Do you have something like this in your life? A hobby, fascination, or even side-gig that HAS YOUR ATTENTION? If not, wanna come have what I’m having? Here are 13 steps for getting bit by a hobby “bug”:

Perhaps you’ve been keeping a running backlog of hobbies you want to try when you have the time. If so, great! Pick one of those. But if you’re not sure what would be captivating, think back to your younger years. What activity could you do for hours on end? Is there an identity you had as a kid (“I’m a painter!”) that no longer feels true, but maybe could be again?

You know when you’re watching someone struggle to open a jar and you’re trying to be all chill and supportive but your inner hulk is screaming “JUST GIVE IT TO ME”?! That’s your inner “Can I try?” instinct. Not that your new hobby should be opening jars, but note where it pops up in other places too: seeing someone rock a calligraphy pen, looking over someone’s shoulder doing a crossword puzzle, or watching someone cook something on Instagram. (This is one of the few positive use cases for social media: hobby bait)

Sometimes our brains and bodies know what we crave long before the little executive function person in our heads says, “I want this!” I was about 57 West Coast Swing Instagram videos deep before I thought, “Wait, could I be a dancer again?” and subsequently started looking up studios near me. When is the last time you found yourself in a rabbit hole? Were you getting way nerdy about rock formations? My friend, get yourself to a national park!

If you’re just getting started with hobbies I highly recommend a “show up alone” hobby like weekly classes of some sort, maybe open wheel time at a pottery studio, or biking. There is only one step: go. This is far more habit-friendly than deciding you’ll take up tennis with a friend and then have to coordinate a day, reserve a court, etc. Worried about that first-day-at-a-new-school feeling that accompanies showing up alone? Me too! It’s nerve-wracking, and also, it’s ok.

I mean, tell everyone if you want! But also, sometimes the quirkier the hobby, the more time we need to privately wrap our own heads around our newfound nerdiness, or our newfound terribleness. Which brings me to…

Having grown up in a “you can do anything!” parenting era, I generally assume I can do anything. What’s extra fun is secretly wondering if you’re an undiscovered savant at your new hobby… only to find out that you’re significantly worse than other beginners. I find the best ingoing assumption is that you’re going to look like an idiot. It’s only up from there.

I took my own advice and went in assuming I’d look like an idiot swing dancing. And then one evening, on day seven of classes, I found myself down a rabbit hole of a professional dancer’s Instagram, frustrated that I didn’t dance like her. So I did what most people do these days in a moment of personal crisis: I asked Claude what to do. It responded that given I was only 6 months into swing dancing, it’s not realistic to compare myself to someone who has the word “dancer” in their Instagram handle. I then had to correct Claude that I had actually only been dancing a week and it LAUGHED AT ME: “The fact that you have any frustration about not being good yet is almost funny. That’s like judging your French after one week of Duolingo against someone who has ‘bilingual’ in their bio.” Touché, Claude. 😉

My husband Brad told me a story of when he was starting Jiu Jitsu as a white belt and rolling with a purple belt. When he inevitably lost he turned to his coach, frustrated: “That was rough.” His coach responded, “Well you didn’t expect to win, did you?” (Secretly probably yes? Logically of course no! But maybe hoping is part of the fun?)

Remember y=mx+b of middle school math? Given getting good at a hobby is indeed part of the fun of a hobby, it’s worth considering how good, and how fast, will feel gratifying. Some people love to dabble, and learning new things slowly and consistently feels great. Others (like me) love to claw their way up a steep learning curve, in which case the important thing is not the y-intercept (how good you are when you start) but your rate of learning, or your slope. Even if you’re the red line starting off clumsy, a high rate of learning means you’ll be swinging in no time. It’s up to you what you want your slope to be!

The Olympic gold medalist, Alysa Liu, is famous for how much fun she seemed to have while, you know, competing for “best figure skater in the universe.” She had fun performing. She had fun training. She even had fun when she wasn’t having fun. In her words, “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.” (watch here)

I like to think of struggle as the foreplay of success. It’s your championship status playing hard to get. A little will-they-won’t-they with your most inspired work. The trick to flirting with your hobby is staying in your “zone of proximal development,” or that band of challenge that isn’t so easy that it’s boring and isn’t so hard that you give up. Like an IRL video game, you want to feel like “I’m so close to the next level!” And when, one day, you finally nail that Dirty Dancing lift? Ecstasy!

If, however, the spark has gone out and your struggle feels like struggle, well then quit! It’s a hobby, silly.

One of the best things about serious hobbies is that there are often delightfully nerdy communities that surround them, ready to welcome you in. I can confirm this is true for improv, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, competitive crossword puzzles, and of course West Coast Swing. I’ve found the communities generally very inclusive, and optionally intense in the best kind of way. Sort of like if a cult had a well-adjusted cousin.

“Just get 1% better every day” and “all things in moderation” is great advice for many people pursuing many hobbies, but personally, I find the intoxication of getting into something a big part of the fun! I was in a rare empty-nester, manageable workload situation which I know is a luxury, but even if you don’t have a ton of time to say spend hours in a pottery studio, one hour a week there + some delicious Instagram scrolls of other people making pottery + making one new friend who also does pottery + buying a few pieces you like to have around + subscribing to a few pottery newsletters all amounts to not a ton of time expenditure, but a whole lot of hobby surround sound! (Note: If you have a young kid or kids, parenting might have to be the hobby for a few years. But for better or worse, that time doesn’t last forever.)

I mean this in the most cheerful way. There will be a day when you’re fully leaned into how terrible you are, wearing your #newbie4life pin, and you look around only to discover there are other, newer, more terrible people than you! And when you stick with a hobby, you keep getting better while the newest people stay terrible! Of course this is not a moment to look down upon anyone or gloat—the proper response is to remember exactly what it was like to start and support them—but it’s also kind of fun to realize you’ve graduated from “terrible” to “not always terrible”!

I don’t really enjoy watching or following sports, but Brad does, and I was trying to understand what’s so fun about it for clearly so many people. One of the things he talked about was the intense fun of caring so much about something that matters so little. Like, we will still have a loving, healthy, stable family, EVEN IF last night a person he doesn’t know threw a ball and, instead of it going inside a metal circle, it went outside the metal circle. And even if it’s infuriating, the whole idea is that fury feels like an investment in one day the ball going inside the metal circle and that feeling AMAZING.

At best, we can think of hobbies as we’d think of amenities on a cruise ship: “Ooh, did you know they have a water acrobatics class? And pool tables? And a Mah Jongg club? So much to explore! So much fun to be had!” Which is the exact feeling I hope we all have about being on this Earthship. I imagine every newborn being handed a pamphlet with all the amenities the planet has to offer: Pickleball! Beatboxing! Book binding! Cake decorating!

What a world we live in. Too good not to explore. ❤️