There are two men I keep coming back to.

One was the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century and the other was one of the most bankable movie stars who ever lived. Neither of them needed a hobby, but both of them had one anyway.

In both cases, the people around them thought their hobbies were a waste of time.

They were wrong.

Richard Feynman arrived freshly from Princeton at Los Alamos in 1943 as a 24-year-old physicist and the youngest group leader on the Manhattan Project. He was also, quietly, watching his wife die.

Arline had been diagnosed with tuberculosis before they married and she wasn't expected to survive two years. Feynman married her anyway, arranged for her care in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, and drove the two hours across the New Mexico desert every weekend to sit with her. He did all this while helping to design the first atomic bomb.

There are local legends of Feynman bringing his bongos out in Los Alamos during those years. He was by all accounts a prankster who spent much of his time there getting into trouble (learning how to pick locks was another skill he acquired during this time). Underneath the pranks and the percussion was a man who had already learned something most people take a lifetime to understand: that you are going to die, that the people you love are going to die first, and that given this, the hours you spend doing things you don't actually love are not a neutral choice. They are a costly choice.

Arline died in June 1945. One month before the Trinity test that saw the first successful detonation of an atomic warhead.

Feynman returned to the lab the same day. He didn't cry about her death for months. When it finally hit him, he was walking past a department store in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and saw a dress in the window that he thought she would have liked.

After the war he went to Cornell as a Professor and couldn't work. He was burned out and emotionally hollowed out. He later wrote that the breakthrough came when he decided to stop trying to do important work and start doing things that were simply interesting to him. Not for what they'd produce, but because he liked them.

He picked up the bongos again, he started drawing, and he also took a sabbatical to Brazil where he learned to play a Brazilian street instrument with such skill that he was chosen over local musicians to play in carnival band competitions in Rio. He competed without mentioning he was a Nobel Prize winner, because he wanted to be judged on the playing itself. He also drew under a pseudonym for the same reason.

His colleagues thought these hobbies were eccentric at best. One of them complained: "Feynman is supposed to be a brilliant physicist and we need his input at Caltech. But what does he do? He goes off and spends all his time with go-go girls and bongo drummers and artists. He wastes so much time."

The colleague was looking at it wrong, because the bongos weren't what Feynman did instead of the work. They were how he stayed the kind of person who could do work worth doing. They kept him curious, playful, unbothered by prestige, and unwilling to perform a version of himself that other people found more appropriate.

This is the same man who, decades later, would refuse to let a presidential commission rubber-stamp NASA's explanation for the Challenger disaster and wouldn't sign the final report until his dissent was attached. The book he wrote about that experience is called What Do You Care What Other People Think? He meant every word of that title.

Paul Newman discovered racing at 47.

Not in some prodigious youth story like we all get fed to increase our urgency to create more output. Paul was already one of the most famous men in the world. He was Academy Award nominated, unmistakably good looking, and with more film offers than he could take. He turned down projects that would have paid him significantly more to pursue the racing work that actually interested him.

Despite all that, he started in a Datsun 510. A wealthy Hollywood star who could have bought himself into a Porsche chose instead to begin at the bottom and earn his way up through club racing.

He spent years in SCCA events before anyone took him seriously as a driver. He drove under "P.L. Newman" at early events, without the entourage, without making a thing of it. A journalist once told a waitress who asked about the man at their table (dressed in a McDonald's shirt and an old baseball hat) that he was just one of the painters working out at the track. Newman heard this in the parking lot and laughed all the way back.

"I'm not a very graceful person," he said. "I was a sloppy skier, a sloppy tennis player, a sloppy football player. The only place I ever found real grace was at the wheel of a racing car."

He was 54 when he finished second at Le Mans overall and he was still racing even at the age of 82, with his age as the number on his door. He never made a dollar from racing that mattered to him financially. Mario Andretti said of him: "This isn't some Hollywood rich boy out there posing. The guy just loves cars and racing."

There’s no faking that. When the people inside the world you love, the ones who can sniff out the real, say that about you then you know you’re living your truest version of yourself.

I've been thinking about why I keep coming back to these two guys.

It's not because they were extraordinary at their hobbies. Newman actually was legitimately competitive at a professional level, but Feynman was a guy who couldn't read music and played percussion in street carnival bands. The greatness of the pursuit isn't the reason why you should be motivated to do it.

The point is that both men had more than enough external validation to spend every waking hour performing their primary identity. Feynman was a Nobel laureate and Newman was Paul Newman. Neither of them needed a second act and nobody demanded one from them.

They chose one anyway and in both cases the choice wasn't made from abundance or leisure. Feynman started playing bongos while his wife was dying and he was living on a military base in the New Mexico desert, working on a weapon he had complicated feelings about. Newman started racing in his late forties, past the age most drivers retire, turning down film money to do so.

The productivity culture I spent the last decade consuming had a quiet assumption built into it: everything you spend time on should compound into something valuable. Every hour should be building toward something. The only point of rest is as recovery so you can produce more. Hobbies are acceptable if the skills transfer, but if they don’t then they're indulgent.

Feynman and Newman are exhibits A and B for why that's wrong.

The bongos didn't make Feynman a better physicist in any direct, traceable line. The Datsun 510 didn't make Newman a better actor. Despite that, both men came back to their primary work as fuller versions of themselves. More curious, more willing to start at the bottom, and more immune to the particular kind of ego-brittleness that makes excellent people stop taking real risks.

You can't trace the line and make the direct links, but you can see the shape of a life that made time for what mattered versus one that didn't.

Since last fall I’ve been playing guitar consistently again.

Not as practice for anything I hope to do or as a skill I'm developing or because I have some plan to document it and eventually turn it into content.

I’m playing purely because I like to. My wife doesn't love the songs I choose and I'm not particularly good anymore but I don't care about either of those things.

I have noticed, in the days I play, that I show up to everything else slightly differently. Not better in any measurable way, but more like myself.

That's what I think a real hobby does. It keeps the operator from becoming the only person in the building and allows you to build a home you enjoy operating out of.

What's the thing you'd do even if no one ever knew you did it, no one paid you for it, and it never made you better at anything else?

That's the thing worth protecting.

Until next week,

Ian