3 hobbies every ambitious person needs

If you're ambitious, then these three hobbies give you an unfair advantage. As a Cambridge student, scientist and entrepreneur, these are the three hobbies I prioritize. Not because I enjoy them, but because of what they train my brain to do as well. Number one, I play racquet sports, whether that's tennis, squash, badminton or paddle, or even pickleball. Unlike running or cycling, these are known as open skill sports. Open skill sports are defined as those in which players are required to react in a dynamically changing, unpredictable and externally-paced environment. Every point essentially forces your brain to predict, adapt and make split-second decisions based on what your opponent does next. And there was a study done which found that tennis had the strongest association with increased life expectancy after all of the sports they studied. Look, if your career depends on making better decisions under pressure, why wouldn't you train your hobbies to do that too? The second is hiking. Most ambitious people don't need more information. They need less mental noise. And psychologist Steven and Rachel Kaplan found that experiments that show that walking in nature or viewing pictures of nature can improve directed-attention abilities as measured with a backwards digit-span task and the Attention Network Task, thus validating attention restoration theory. Nature helps your brain recover from mental fatigue and wide, open landscapes are one of the reasons why. For me, some of my best ideas have never came while I've been sat at my desk, they're usually halfway through a hike where my phone is away and my brain finally has room to think. The third is to create with your hands. Whether it's paint, you draw, you knit, pottery, or interior design. Anything that lets you create with your hands. And there's a professor at University College London who has spent years researching creativity and well-being and she showed that creative activity can help regulate emotions, reduce stress and support psychological recovery. And for me, creating is where my brain slows down enough for my ideas to finally catch up. So some of my best ideas have come while I'm painting, redesigning a room, not because I was trying to solve a problem, but because I'd finally stopped forcing the answer. See, ambitious people spend most of their lives consuming information, and the right hobby is actually help you think faster, clearer and think more creatively, which in an AI-filled world is incredibly important. And that's an unfair advantage you should carry into every meeting, every decision, every part of your life.