A long list of geniuses insists their hobbies played an essential role in coming up with their greatest ideas.

BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM@ENTRYLEVELREBEL

For Inc.

Photo:  Albert Einstein playing the violin, 1932. Photo: Getty Images

Asked to picture a genius and nearly all of us will picture Einstein at his chalkboard (or, thanks to that famous photo, sticking out his tongue). If you have a more artistic bent you might imagine Mozart at his clavichord or Baryshnikov on stage. What you’re much less likely to do is picture geniuses goofing off, noodling around, or hanging out at the Victorian equivalent of an OTB parlor.

But as a fun recent Big Think article illustrates, geniuses aren’t all work and no play. Just about every Nobel Prize winner or exceptional achiever you can think had some kind of beloved hobby.

Einstein was an accomplished violinist. Alan Turing, the mathematician that cracked the enigma code in World War II, was a world-class marathoner. Computer pioneer Ada Lovelace lost “approximately £280,000 in today’s money, literally betting on the wrong horses,” Big Think reports.

It’s fascinating to get a more human glimpse of some of the figures who shaped the modern world, of course. But according to many of these geniuses themselves, their pastimes weren’t just stress relief or meaningless trivia. Some of the world’s most impressive intellects insist that their hobbies were an essential part of their creative process.

What you can learn from the hobbies of geniuses

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