Hobbyists change the world.
They create new inventions.
They shape trends.
It was a hobby that created Apple.
In 1971 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs met each other for the first time. But it was in 1975 when Wozniak started attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, and got inspired to build a complete computer.
The Homebrew Club was an early computer hobbyist group in California, which played an influential role in the development of the microcomputer revolution and the rise of the Silicon Valley. It wasn’t a place where cool kids hung out. It was where geeks gathered, and being a geek wasn’t cool then.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates met and collaborated on projects before starting Microsoft because they were crazy about computers.
Uber and its competitors exist today because Garett Camp was keen to reduce the cost of black car services. He realized that sharing the cost with people could make it affordable, and his idea became Uber.
I started publishing on the web with Geocities because I was curious about it as a medium. It was before blogs emerged on the scene. Online publishing led me to explore blogging. I started blogging because I was curious not because I wanted to be professional blogger 🙂 Maybe this is part of the reason that I can still blog because if we can’t do something for fun then it becomes even harder to do it to achieve a goal.
My blogging hobby gave me a start into the digital marketing world and it came to a point that it became one of my career paths.
A lot of successful bloggers of today started before it was cool to blog and they are still blogging while social media took over because a part of it is still their hobby.
I started meditating as a teen because I was curious about it, long before it became cool to meditate.
This is how Steven Spielberg got started into filmmaking. Spielberg recalled to a magazine interviewer,
“My dad’s still-camera was broken, so I asked the scoutmaster if I could tell a story with my father’s movie camera. He said yes, and I got an idea to do a Western. I made it and got my merit badge. That was how it all started.”
At age 13, Spielberg won a prize for a 40-minute war film he titled Escape to Nowhere… using a cast composed of other high school friends. That motivated him to make 15 more amateur 8 mm films.
Even Leonardo Da Vinci, the most well known polymath, was super curious about the world.
What are you curious about? What is your hobby?
If you are having a hard time finding the answer within then it is time to change. Time to stop running after trends.
Now is also the perfect time to unbundle your life and find the time to wander. Because wandering takes us in the direction of our curiosities. That’s where flow, happiness and real wealth is.
