I’m so thrilled to see my fellow grown-ups picking up new hobbies. We all need something fun and just-for-us to indulge in after working hours.
The excitement of something new is fleeting, though. As the novelty fades, we often find ourselves stuck in the dabbling phase, if we continue on at all. This is totally fine — creativity demands experimentation, and not every experiment will be a win.
Let’s pause here. What if it is a win, and you’re just in the toughest part of the beginner phase, where many of us pack it in?
With most creative hobbies, there’s usually a grind period between fading novelty and the satisfaction that comes from progress and a love of the process.
The grind is all about getting your skills to catch up to your taste. If you can get there, the process becomes enjoyable again.
This requires practice, and practice requires commitment.
If you’re somewhere in this in-between phase, where the excitement has faded but something in you still wants to continue, you’re in good company.
I put together a short 5-part series to help you move through this part of the hobbyist’s story arc, and stay with your hobby in a way that feels natural.
This post is intended to help with the commitment piece.
As we tend to do on this blog, we’re going to split these into practical tips and mindset shifts. I find that one is no good without the other. So let’s walk through:
- The practical aspects that help you go through the motions.
- The mindset shifts that anchor your actions to meaning.
By the way, I recently used these tips to adopt digital art as a hobby, and wrote about that experience last week: Confessions of a Serial Hobbyist: Getting Back Into Digital Art
4 practical tips to stick with a new hobby post-honeymoon phase
As a beginner of many hobbies, these are four practical things that have helped me stick with them after the initial excitement has simmered down.
1. Join a challenge (or create one for yourself)
This is exactly what I did last month as I was trying to improve my digital art skills.
Why it works:
- Setting a goal will motivate you to show up, even when you don’t feel like it because the resistance has you.
- Since you have set a goal for yourself, you’ll naturally look for opportunities to work toward it.
- Some of us are just plain competitive, and can’t resist a challenge.
- Challenges like Inktober connect you with a community of other participants for added motivation.
- If you’re a bit self-conscious about trying something new, a challenge is the perfect “excuse” to try something new and be bad at it. Do it for the challenge!
You don’t have to participate rigidly in any given challenge – you can make it work for you.
The Inktober challenge is technically one prompted ink drawing per day for every day of October, but I was focusing on digital art and had limited time and a bunch of ideas already. So my version of the Inktober challenge was to complete at least one digital illustration per week from my sketchbook. This made it manageable.
Challenges are also great for quick skill-building. You’ll often learn faster if you let yourself do several “okay” pieces of work quickly and learn a little from each one, rather than trying to perfect one piece over a long period of time.
Whether in art or in accounting exams, the key to progress for me has always been to do the thing, over and over, in rapid succession. We expand on this concept here: “Learn by Doing” Works Best in the Absence of Perfectionism
One way to keep pace during a challenge is to set yourself a schedule.
2. Set a schedule
Whether you have a challenge on the go or not, it really helps to block out a little time for your hobby regularly. That could be weekly, or a few times a week – whichever fits!
Why this works:
- You protect the time you’ve earmarked for your hobby, rather than letting other commitments spill into that time.
- You set yourself up to stay engaged with your hobby by making sure you touch on it at least a little bit each week.
- Seeing your time block on your schedule lets you slip past the inner critic that keeps asking you why you bother. Because it’s on the schedule, Steve. That’s why.
- The time limit will help decide when enough is enough, so that you don’t burn out.
Would you be surprised to know that I maintain an editorial calendar in Trello for this blog? Whenever new hobbies or projects arise, I add them to the editorial calendar so that I can easily integrate them into my week.
What if your schedule is unpredictable, though? Rather than rigidly scheduling blocks of time, try habit stacking.
3. Stack your hobby habit
One of the best ways to form a habit is commonly referred to as habit stacking, popularized by James Clear in Atomic Habits. (Which I have yet to read, but it’s on my list.)
Why this works:
We are creatures of habit, and our brains tend to want to travel down the path of least resistance. Our habits are low-resistance paths – we don’t have to think hard about doing them.
So, if you’ve already got a habit in place, combining your hobby with it reduces the resistance to engaging in it, which can be really effective in the beginner stages!
Get creative with it. The example that always comes to my mind is when Danny Gregory stacked drawing with his morning tea-making habit. Every morning while waiting for the kettle to boil, he would sketch his teacup. This was the start of his daily drawing habit, which blossomed into his current career.
A habit need not be daily, though. A few evenings per week, when I had the opportunity, I liked to cozy up and watch the first season of Wednesday on Netflix. I stacked my digital art onto this cozy habit, so whenever I would flip the show on, I’d also work on my illustrations.
If you need an added accountability boost, you might consider sharing your hobby!
4. Share your hobby
This one’s tricky, because the beginning phase of a hobby is really a delicate time. You don’t want to create a habit of doing your hobby for social media – this is perhaps the fastest way to lose your voice or your own style.
But it can be great for accountability.
Could you use some encouragement to share your work? I’ve got you here: Feel Confident Hitting Publish, Even as a Beginner
Why it works:
I see social media and public acts of creativity as a ready-made accountability system. In fact, several of my hobbies over the years got an added boost in this way – I probably would have caved, except that I had made some sort of public statement that I would do it.
So I followed through.
This blog is a testament to that! I started it back when I knew I needed a creative outlet, but I struggled prioritizing my creativity while working a demanding career. I’m a rather private person, but writing my blog publicly (even without readers) instilled a sense of commitment that brought me to where I am today.
You don’t have to share your work for this to work – just talking about your goals can be enough. But if you do decide to share your work, an added benefit is that it will help you finish things.
To post something, you want it to be more-or-less complete, so creating a goal to make something publishable will push you to find the point where the piece feels “finished”, rather than languishing on your hard drive for years on end.
Not that I would know anything about that.
These tactics help you show up, but really staying with a hobby often requires a deeper shift.
That’s the shift I explore in a short 5-part series, moving from the initial spark into a lasting creative practice.
4 mindset shifts to help you commit to a hobby through the beginner phase
These tips are all about embracing the beginner phase of a hobby. Sometimes all it takes is a little mindset shift to keep progressing, and to keep your motivation high.
1. Get curious about the process
Loving the craft moves you to start, and loving the process commits you to it.
Getting curious about the process of creating realigns your focus away from striving for an outcome, and toward the actions that will get you there.
I wrote more about the common advice to love the process and how it’s impacted my creative life here: Adventures in Writing: Love the Process, They Say
Let’s use the wonderful world of writing as an example.
Focusing on a particular outcome could mean I want to write a novel. This is your entry point into the craft – why you started. But “just plugging away at a novel” for days (or months, or years) on end can feel like spinning your wheels in the mud.
You know, putting in a lot of effort and creating a huge mess, but not really getting anywhere. And that is actually part of the process, but if you can’t see it that way, you may be tempted to give up.
So instead of focusing on that end-product, get curious about the process you need to get there. See if you can visualize which part of the journey you’re in right now.
This will help you be okay with the feeling of flailing around, of feeling lost, and of feeling like progress is too slow.
You can also focus on the mundane processes which, all together, are the stuff that novels are written from.
There are the processes that happen internally: the ideation, character and plot development, the writer’s block, and the breakthroughs.
Then there are the processes that happen externally: the creative rituals, the time spent at your computer, the daily word-count goals, the drafting, the editing, the rearranging.
The cup of emotional-support coffee that will get you through today’s sticky bit.
It’s the process of writing that makes you a writer, not the finished novel. The same is true for any craft, really.
(Any craft that doesn’t come with some sort of credential or certification, that is.)
2. Find the balance between ambition and skill level
My greatest challenge with this mindset was in art. I frequently have Big Ideas that I want to execute, but they’re also complicated and require a lot of skill to pull off in the way that I want.
As a beginner, those are skills I don’t have!
This is tricky, because if it’s the Big Ideas that are motivating you to pick up a paintbrush in the first place, who am I to tell you not to pursue them? But I think we can find a balance.
Using art as an example, there are a couple ways you could go about this balancing act:
- Pick painting ideas that sort-of match your skill level, and you can get progressively more complex over time.
- Work on your Big Idea, but check your expectations, and while you do this, sprinkle in some more beginner-friendly pieces to practice the basic skills, and give yourself a confidence boost.
If you’re fixated on a grand outcome but can’t execute, this is a surefire way to give up your new hobby.
Let’s give ourselves permission to make basic art and find the beauty in it. Or to make bad art and appreciate the intention behind it.
Find creative ways to let the basics shine! You don’t need advanced skills to make art that you love. Or great art at all, really.
3. Trust the process and embrace rest
I’m not sure what it is that makes this happen, but skills compound, especially if you rest in between.
I’ve been running fairly consistently again, and I’ve noticed that it’s not the third run of the week when I see improvements – it’s the first run after a longer break.
To tackle their 4-day, 16-hour uniform exams, Chartered Accountants used to take two months of work leave to study. The study schedule was 9-to-5, five days per week, with a quick lunch break.
Not six days, and certainly not seven days.
But you didn’t see steady progress over the two months. In fact, many of us made very little progress in the first month, causing panic.
The key to passing the exam? You had to trust the process, with rest built in. Every time I was tempted to study an extra day, I was advised by my trusted mentors not to.
They were right. Students who didn’t take weekends off tended to struggle. But if you did trust the process, and you took time to rest, you’d find that suddenly, between one and three weeks before the exam, everything would start to click and come together.
The same is true in creativity: it’s beneficial to give yourself some distance and embrace rest periods as golden opportunities for everything you’ve learned to coalesce.
For more on rest, you might also enjoy this read: The Creative’s Guide to Rest: 7 Ways to Restore Your Energy
4. Document the process
This is more a mindset than practical advice – every time you settle in to practice your new hobby, you can remind yourself that you’re making something to document the experience of being a beginner at it.
Privately or publicly.
Creativity is soul work, so I think that sharing your creative work is like giving a little gift to the world – a little piece of your most authentic self.
To share your work as a beginner, when the work might not “be very good” by social media’s standards, when you’re unsure of your journey and your voice and your style, when you’re “just learning”, is extra generous, because it carries an implicit vulnerability.
(This is a whole thing, and I will link to a follow-up post on this concept soon.)
You don’t have to make your beginner work public. You can document your process privately, just for you.
The point is to adopt this mindset when you don’t feel like showing up because you’re just not where you want to be yet.
Document the frustration.
Or, document your current skill level with optimism, knowing that if you stick with it, you’ll be able to look back here next year and be so proud of your progress.
And if you feel like you’re continually creating “bad” work, see it as creating an archive of “bad” work that you’ll be able to reminisce with one day. That’s how you’ll know the good work when it comes out.
As for publishing your work, in addition to being a generous gift to the world, know that you’re creating encouragement and a sense of belonging in the world for all the other beginners out there.
If you’re ready to return to a hobby and stay with it in a way that feels meaningful, I’d love to walk through it with you.
I’ve created a free 5-part email series that walks through the hobbyist’s story arc, with small shifts and simple practices to help you build something that actually fits your life.
Parting words
The beginner phase is challenging, but it’s worth it. The next phase, where you actually start to feel happy with your work, and you realize you’ve found your thing – is exhilarating and joyful!
Thank you, beginners, for being brave enough to begin. I hope what you create lights you up.
What’s next?
What’s a hobby you keep coming back to, even if you haven’t quite stuck with it yet? Comment your thing below — I’d love to know.
If you wish to continue exploring hobbies and creative habits, this is a great place to start: Make Space to Create
