# What You Do in Your Free Time Shapes Your Success. Here Is Why - URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/how-you-spend-your-free-time-shapes-your-success/ - Published: 2023-07-31 - Updated: 2026-09-29 - Category: Personal growth - Publisher: Girişimci Kafası At thirteen, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was studying painting at the art academy in Toulouse. In those same years he had another job: he played second violin in the city's Capitole orchestra. He kept up these two lives side by side until he was sixteen. Then painting won. Ingres went to Paris, became one of France's most famous painters, and for a time headed the French Academy in Rome. But he never gave up the violin. He loved Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and was passionate about chamber music. When Franz Liszt published his piano transcriptions of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in 1840, he dedicated them to his friend Ingres. Ingres left his violin to Montauban, the town where he was born. It is still there today, in his museum. In the early 1900s the violin became an idiom. In French, "violon d'Ingres", or "Ingres's violin", means a pursuit someone follows passionately alongside their real profession: in short, a hobby. The earliest known written uses of the phrase date back to 1906 and 1907. A painter's name gave a language its word for a hobby. Ingres was defined not only by his paintings, but also by the hours when he was not painting. ## Free time is not empty time In working life, free time is often seen as a leftover: what remains once the work is done. Yet what you do in those hours quietly shapes who you are at work. A study published in 2008 by Robert Root-Bernstein and his team showed that Nobel Prize-winning scientists were far more likely than ordinary scientists to have pastimes such as painting, music, crafts and writing. That does not mean a hobby brings success directly. But it is a strong sign that curiosity and different ways of thinking feed one another. How you spend your free time is therefore an investment decision as much as a personal choice. Planning your free time may sound like a contradiction. But just as you put work meetings in your diary, put in your walk, your class and your evening with friends too. An hour that does not go in the diary usually goes to a screen. Here are a few ways to fill those hours. ### Get moving According to the recommendations the World Health Organization published in 2020, adults should do at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate- or vigorous-intensity activity a week. Regular exercise reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety and supports memory and brain health. A long walk lets you look at a problem you could not crack at your desk from somewhere else. ### Make something with your hands An instrument, painting, woodwork, ceramics, cooking. Being a beginner again at something whose results nobody measures brings back the sense of play that gets lost at work. Like Ingres's violin, you do not have to be good at it; it is enough to love it. ### Keep learning A new language, an online course, a field that has nothing to do with your work. The connections you make between distant fields may one day turn into an unexpected idea in your work. ### Read Go beyond the news: biographies, novels, history. If you do not know where to start, take a look at our list of [25 books every entrepreneur should read](https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/25-books-every-entrepreneur-should-read/). ### Leave some space in your mind Meditation, yoga, or simply an hour without your phone. You do not have to fill every minute. A rested mind sees what a tired one cannot. ### Make time for others and for the people you love Volunteering, an evening with a friend, a weekend with your family. When you lift your head from your own problems, you also see your work from a different angle. ### Do not try to do it all at once This list is not a to-do list. If you turn your free time into another arena for performance, you will simply have brought the fatigue of work home with you. Pick one, keep it up for a few months, then look at what it has given you. Ingres's violin was not part of a career plan either; it was simply something he could not give up. ## Work is the absence of leisure In Latin, the word for business, occupation and trade is "negotium". Its structure is surprisingly transparent: "nec", meaning not, plus "otium", meaning leisure or calm. The Romans named work as the state of having no leisure. The word is also thought to be a translation of the Greek "askholia", meaning lack of leisure. The English "negotiate" comes from the same root. The story of the word "hobby" is more playful. In English, "hobby" was first the name of a small, nimble breed of horse. It then became the wooden horse children rode, the "hobby-horse": a horse you ride that takes you nowhere. From 1816 it was shortened and took on its present meaning: a person's favourite pastime. Not getting anywhere is built into the definition of a hobby. Perhaps that is exactly where its value lies. When you do not have to get anywhere, the mind is at its freest. ## A final word In his 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness", Bertrand Russell argued that the belief that work is a virtue had done great harm in the modern world. The same essay contains this observation: > "Leisure is essential to civilisation." Ingres's violin is still kept in his museum in Montauban. What is your violin? And when did you last pick it up without expecting anything in return?