The Art of Absence

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Do you need to be working so hard?

I have a running joke with Nick, my business partner, that I should stop working so hard.

Every time I leave, we somehow hit our record sales day, land a key account, or have some big company win.

And it recently got me thinking… do I need to be working so hard?

So I started looking into this. Both in history books and talking with a few friends.

Asking The Question: Are there people who take a lot of time off, have plenty of hobbies, and are still wildly successful?

Turns out, this is extremely common. So today I’m going down the rabbit hole on a simple idea:

After enough time working, most leaders would be better off distracting themselves and picking up “non work” hobbies in order to grow more.

Why I Struggle With This

I have a monkey brain.

Bred over billions of years. Trained & reinforced over the past 28. I like to find problems & solve them.

And, as if Darwinism wasn’t enough, I get an insane amount of internal positive reinforcement when I “achieve” something.

On top of that, there have been 15 years of scrolling entrepreneurship & hustle culture on social media, hearing business founders saying stuff like:

Combine the 2 and it makes sense to see how a young money-hungry kid develops the belief:

Hard work & long hours are required for me to achieve my goals.

And the positive reinforcement from hitting some of those goals reinforced that belief.

And I still believe you need to work hard on Day 1 when you have no money, no network, and no leverage.

BUT – Most people should unlearn that as they progress in their life in order to achieve their goals.

And the best way to do that?

Introduce more planned absence & hobbies into your life.

Science Behind This:

There are countless effects & laws that support the idea of creating time off in your professional life:

Incubation Effect: You Solve Problems Better When You Stop Thinking About Them (think shower thoughts or long walks).

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

We are taught that taking time off feels lazy.

But as you progress in your career, you should be focusing on more strategic things.

You shouldn’t be writing the emails, you should be hiring a copywriter.
You shouldn’t decide which softwares to use, you should be setting the 2026 strategy on what your company focuses on.

Simply put, you have leverage. And leverage lets you do fewer & more important things.

But those important things are done over a longer time horizon.

If you’re “doing strategy” every day… that means you’re constantly changing directions and urgency. Which means you’re probably creating chaos in your company/team.

Most great companies will agree that focus is the #1 thing that teams need.

And if you don’t have that many things to do daily, the brain is really good at finding things. And sometimes, those are things that feel important, but aren’t. And can distract the team from the main mission of focusing.

Here are a few examples of people who embody the idea that distracting yourself with hobbies or taking time off will make you better at your job.

Hobbies → Excellence

🎱 Woodrow Wilson – 28th President– Billiards

He was literally prescribed to play billiards by his doctor. Played nearly every afternoon like clockwork.

According to Woodrow Wilson: “ Billiards kept me from meddling with my team when my mind was hot”.

🏄 Yvon Chouinard — Patagonia Surf Trips

If you haven’t read Let My People Go Surfing yet, you should check it out.

Chouinard was adventurous through and through. Spending surfing seasons in Baja, Steelhead fishing in British Columbia, exploring the Himalayas, building trails, etc.

He was so hobby-centric that it forced him to build a decentralized company from Day One. He simply didn’t want to be the bottleneck for all decision making.

🐘 George Easton – Kodak – Safaris

Kodak feels like an older company now. But at the time of it’s peak it was the 30th largest company in the US

And for the 30 years that Easton worked on it, he was notorious for taking several extended camping & hunting safari trips annually. Some that lasted weeks & even months.

In Easton’s biography, they mentioned that one of his greatest skills was finding & recruiting great talent. But he hated being in the meetings & would often micromanage small projects when he was around.

Absence → Achievement

On top of rock climbing or billiards, sometimes simply getting the hell out of the way is what is needed most.

🇬🇧 Winston Churchill: This man was a serial napper. According to him: “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do.”

🎧 Rick Rubin Leaves The Studio.

Rick Rubin is the record producer and creative director behind Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Johnny Cash, Jay Z, etc. etc.

He would be extremely hands-on in the process during recording. And when the time came to move the album to post-production, he’d leave the studio almost entirely. For days or even weeks on end.

He wanted to come back in with a clear head of a “first time listener” and not meddle in the engineering process

💰 Warren Buffet & Charlie Munger — Sitting Around Doing Nothing

I love the wisdom that comes from the Billionaire late-Munger “Our job is to avoid stupid decisions, not make brilliant ones”

That means for most of the years they are trying to distract themselves. Playing Bridge. Reading Annual reports.

Their investment philosophy is very anti-action. And has led them being some of the best investors in the last century.

🧠 Sarah Blakely & Bill Gates 

Both Billionaires. Both plan their absences.

Gates has been taking his coined “Think Weeks” since the 1980’s where he goes away for a week with a pile of books and his thoughts.

Blakely has dedicated Distraction Days. She lives 5 minutes from here office but has reported waking up early to drive for hours to simply think. She literally made a fake commute.

Simply put, there are people at all levels across all disciplines who get out of their own way when it comes to building & leading great things.

Model The Climb, Not The Summit

I know it’s easy to read this piece and think “welp, you just rattled off 8 billionaires and presidents. Must be nice.”

And I get it, you should model the climb not the summit.

But I think one of the commonalities between all of these individuals is that they didn’t retire into absence, they built it into their lives throughout their career.

I’m not going to sugar coat it, if you’re taking month long trips in the first year of building your company, that’s not the best idea.

You need leverage for this to be more effective.

But once you have momentum… a team, a product that’s selling, etc.

You need to bake in some welcomed distractions.

This is basic management 101 disguised as fun.

Hire great people. Build great systems. Set the strategy. And then get the hell out of the way so that you can live your life and be a better leader.

Till next time,

Connor