If you have these 6 hobbies, your intelligence is likely above average

Some people chase IQ tests. I look at what they do when nobody’s grading them.

Hobbies are quiet signals. They reveal how you prefer to use attention, how you handle complexity, and whether you’re wired for growth.

If you’ve picked up a few of the six below, there’s a good chance you’re working with above-average cognitive horsepower—and using it well.

1. Reading widely

Not just business books. Not just whatever’s trending on your feed.

I mean novels that stretch empathy, science that humbles you, essays that sharpen your skepticism, and the odd rabbit hole on mushrooms, medieval trade, or the history of maps.

Readers collect mental models. You learn to compare sources, to see where an argument is strong and where it wobbles.

I keep a notes doc of “ideas that might contradict each other,” and it’s wild how often the friction turns into clarity a week later.

Reading also scales your attention span. Your phone trains you to snack; a book teaches you to cook. The smartest people I know protect a daily reading block like their mental gym.

If you’re already doing that, you’re signaling a high tolerance for complexity—and a brain that likes to be used.

2. Learning languages

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Bilingual and multilingual folks juggle grammar, context, and culture at once. That juggling builds executive function—the brain’s air-traffic control.

You practice task-switching when you move between tongues, and you practice pattern recognition every time you map a new verb form to a familiar idea.

I’m not militant about apps or courses. I’m pro-immersion. Order your coffee in the new language. Put sticky notes on your fridge. Watch a movie with subtitles and pause when a line hits your ear right.

Intelligence isn’t just in the knowing; it’s in the willingness to sit inside confusion until meaning emerges.

Language learning is confusion training—and that’s a feature.

3. Playing a musical instrument

Music is structured problem-solving with emotion baked in.

You’re decoding notation, predicting chord progressions, keeping time, listening to yourself, and adjusting—all in real time. That blend of analysis and feel is rare outside of performance and engineering.

When I was learning fingerstyle guitar, the first month felt like knitting with oven mitts. Then one afternoon the brain-hand link clicked.

That click—motor learning plus auditory feedback—turns out to be addictive. You start hearing mistakes before you make them. That anticipatory awareness bleeds into other work: code, copy, negotiations.

You plan two beats ahead.

Also, instruments teach deliberate practice. You don’t try to “play everything.” You slow the tricky bar to 60 BPM and loop it until the motion is automatic.

That’s intelligence in motion: diagnose the bottleneck, isolate it, and iterate.

4. Strategy games and puzzles

Chess, Go, bridge, even well-designed video games—these are compressed sandboxes for systems thinking.

You model your opponent, budget resources, and calculate tradeoffs between short-term gain and long-term position. Puzzles do something similar in a quieter way: they teach you to reframe.

When a Sudoku stalls, you don’t shove harder—you change the angle.

I grew up on SNES RPGs and later fell for Go. The first habit they installed wasn’t “win.” It was “review.”

After a game I’d replay the key turns and ask, “What assumption was I married to?” I’ve mentioned this before but reviewing your process, not just your outcomes, compounds faster than any “tips and tricks” thread.

Smart people keep score on decisions, not just results.

A bonus of good games: they punish impulsivity. You see how one greedy move poisons five later turns. Once you feel that pattern in your hands, you start noticing it in money, health, and time.

5. Making things with your hands (or code)

Woodworking, ceramics, sourdough, sewing, home audio, open-source contributions—making anything forces you to think in loops: design, build, test, debug, refine.

You start with a fuzzy idea and end with an object you can hand to someone else. That “externalization” is huge. It closes the gap between concept and reality.

As a former music blogger who now writes about psychology and life choices, I still carve out maker time. On weekends it’s usually photography—hiking with a lightweight mirrorless, then editing until the story of the light shows up.

On weekdays it might be a small Python script to clean a research dataset. The domain matters less than the posture: imagine, prototype, learn from the failure, iterate.

There’s a reason product thinkers and craftspeople talk the same way.

They live in constraints. Constraints force tradeoffs, and tradeoffs are where intelligence wakes up.

6. Journaling and long-form writing

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” — Joan Didion. Source

Writing is an MRI for your thinking. If you’ve ever tried to explain a messy decision on paper, you know the feeling: sentences expose fog.

You push through it by naming assumptions, defining terms, and choosing structure. That’s high-order cognition hiding behind a cheap notebook.

I keep two journals. One is practical: what I’m trying, what I’m measuring, what I’ll change tomorrow. The other is reflective: patterns I’m noticing in conversations, books, or on the road.

Over time you start seeing yourself like a scientist sees a dataset. And you start making cleaner calls because you’ve thought them through without the heat of the moment.

As Will Durant put it (summarizing Aristotle), “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Source Journaling is how you watch those habits form—and how you steer them before they ossify.

A quick reality check

This isn’t about gatekeeping. Lots of brilliant people don’t play the cello or speak three languages. And some folks collect hobbies like badges but never go deep.

The signal is not the label “I play”; it’s the way you practice.

If the pattern across your free time looks like this—seeking novelty, tolerating confusion, reviewing your process, and iterating with intention—you’re demonstrating core elements of intelligence: working memory, pattern recognition, cognitive flexibility, and metacognition.

How to lean into it (without making it a job)

• Rotate focus. Quarter by quarter, pick one hobby to go deep on and keep the others in maintenance mode. You’ll feel progress without burning out.

• Set tiny constraints. Learn 20 phrases in your new language for a single context (ordering at a café). Master one song in a new key. Solve endgames with only king and pawns. Constraints raise the signal-to-noise ratio in your practice.

• Review weekly. Two pages, 20 minutes. What did you try? What worked? What will you tweak? Progress loves a feedback loop.

• Keep it fun. Diane Ackerman said, “Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” Source Even intense practice can feel like play when you engineer clear challenges and quick wins.

Why these hobbies track with intelligence

They all recruit multiple systems at once. Reading blends symbolic decoding, empathy, and world-building.

Languages stretch auditory processing, memory, and inhibition control. Music ties motor learning to prediction. Strategy games formalize uncertainty and consequence. Making things turns abstraction into constraint management.

Writing welds logic to self-awareness.

In psychology terms, you’re training executive function and metacognition while building domain knowledge. In life terms, you’re becoming the kind of person who can absorb new complexity without panicking.

That tends to look a lot like intelligence from the outside because it is intelligence from the inside.

The bottom line

If these six hobbies live in your week, you’re not just “smart.”

You’re practicing the habits that keep intelligence active, useful, and kind. Keep going. Protect the time. Trade a little scroll for a little practice.

The future version of you will quietly thank you—with better decisions, richer conversations, and a brain that still loves to learn.