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May 14th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

⚠️ The Hobby-Hustle Trap

A couple of years ago, I tried pu’er tea at a friend’s place. It’s a fermented tea produced in China that can sell for thousands of dollars. I loved it.

Over the next few evenings, I read about its history, the aging process, the difference between sheng (naturally aged over decades) and shou (artificially processed to speed up maturation). I watched importers unbox vintage cakes on YouTube.

Then my curiosity led me to another rabbit hole. Why is it so hard to buy pu’er tea in Europe? Maybe I could import it. Maybe I could start a small online shop. Before I knew it, I was looking at wholesale pricing and shipping logistics from Yunnan, and I hadn’t even finished my first cake of tea.

I know from reading the discussions in the Ness Labs community that this experience is very common. You start learning something new because it feels fun – photography, baking, pottery, gardening. Then you start asking yourself, should you build an audience around it? Could this be monetized?

Before you know it, a hobby that started as pure curiosity becomes a hustle.

Part of the reason is cultural. We live in a world where productivity is rewarded so heavily that hobbies can feel like a waste of time and energy unless they produce something measurable in return.

But hobbies play an important psychological role precisely because they exist outside those expectations. They help create what psychologist Patricia Linville calls “self-complexity”: having multiple dimensions to your identity rather than building your entire sense of self around a single role.

When work becomes your primary source of identity, professional setbacks threaten a large part of how you see yourself. But personal interests give you other places to stand. They make you less fragile when another area of life gets difficult.

The problem is that monetizing a hobby changes your relationship with it. Once customers, deadlines, metrics, or expectations enter the picture, the activity starts carrying pressure. Your level of enjoyment becomes tied to performance.

I noticed this with pu’er tea: the moment I started thinking about logistics and marketing, I had less mental space to enjoy the tea itself.

So how do you avoid turning every hobby into a hustle?

• Keep one hobby completely offline. Resist the urge to immediately post about it. No Instagram stories, no “content” about it, just you and your hobby. Protecting something from external validation helps preserve the sense of play that made you enjoy it in the first place.

• Embrace nonproductive hobbies. Pay attention to the moment your thinking switches from “this is interesting” to “how can I make this productive?” That shift is often where extrinsic pressure starts to replace intrinsic curiosity. Just noticing it is usually enough to loosen its grip.

• Build more identity outside of work. To develop self-complexity, spend time developing parts of yourself that have nothing to do with your career. The more dimensions your identity has, the less any single setback can destabilize you, and the less likely you are to turn hobbies into hustles.

• Let yourself stay amateur. Hobbies occupy a rare space where exploration matters more than outcomes, and that’s part of what makes them restorative. Do things badly and just have fun without needing visible progress. Remember that not every project needs a learning curve with milestones.

There’s a simple test for whether something is still a hobby: would you do it on a day when nothing comes of it? No audience, no progress, no output. If the answer is yes, protect that.

You don’t need to stop being ambitious, but we all need at least one corner of our life where ambition isn’t the main drive.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to reconnect with curiosity without turning it into productivity.

No posting, tracking, or trying to turn it into something useful. This experiment helps create distance between curiosity and performance, so you can enjoy a hobby for its own sake. Want to dig deeper? ​​Get your copy of Tiny Experiments​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

SIMONE STOLZOFF

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job, whose latest book How to Not Know (out this week!) explores the surprising value of uncertainty in today’s world.

1. One idea that keeps you up at night? When we want to grow stronger, our muscles need time under tension. But in the world of AI, it’s all too easy to eschew cognitive tension. Perhaps in the future we’ll need “cognitive gyms” to keep our minds sharp.

2. One strategy to restart your creative engine? Whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I immerse myself into art. But rather than just consume it, I ask myself why I like it. Not only does this help refine your taste, but it’ll also help you develop tactics you can use yourself.

3. One mindset shift that transformed your work? Comfort with uncertainty is a necessary precursor to creating original work. Nearly every scientific discovery, world-changing business, and mind-expanding piece of art began with someone’s willingness to engage with the unknown.

How to Not Know

🛠️ Brain Picks

• What if you could absorb the key insights from top nonfiction books in under an hour? Shortform breaks down complex ideas into structured, easy-to-follow guides – perfect for busy minds who still want to keep learning. Discover smarter reading. Ness Labs readers get 20% off.

• Free inspiring programme for founders running on empty. Founders Pit Stop offers reflective business support and hands-on creative practice, starting May 29th in Old Street. Apply here.

• Ready to break free from inbox overwhelm? Start using a newsletter aggregator built for reading and wake up to a personalized news briefing using smart filters to always surface the most relevant content at the right time. Try Meco.

Many thanks to our sponsors and cross-promo partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.

🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Designing a life you don’t need to escape from. In this ​guided exercise​, Gosia Fricze will help you reflect on the life you’re living, what feels misaligned, and how to intentionally create a life that feels more meaningful and more like your own.
​• NEW - Writing accountability sessions. Join Ethan Miller for regular cowriting sessions. These will be unguided and casual, although if you’d like some prompts, feel free to reach out to him beforehand.​
• Know your body. Join Kat Wong and Amy Thomson for a workshop to learn why knowing about your hormonal health is key to work-life balance while building a career vision.​
• Explore the future of learning. Join Jane Shore for an introduction to People-Based Learning, where she will walk you through the Connect Reflect Affect model and invite you into a few lightweight experiments to explore what changes when learning moves through people.​
• Rewrite your professional story. In this workshop, Rachel Ropeik will help you reimagine and reshape how you talk about your work based on what you want to amplify in the current moment, context, and next chapter of your adventure.​
• Design an AI-powered reflection practice. Join Zsombor Koman for this hands-on session to learn how to use AI not as a faster answer machine but as a thinking partner that slows you down in productive ways.
​• Make progress on your projects. Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Improve your knowledge management system. Join our next PKM meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.