The most successful people know how important it is to have interests and hobbies outside of their work lives.
Some of these hobbies are useful and considered important networking tools, while others are more focused on personal development and pushing themselves. Some are purely thrill-seeking and allow people in high-stress jobs to forget about their day-to-day responsibilities.
George W. Bush, for example, is an avid painter. The adventurous Richard Branson's favorite sport is kite boarding, and investor Warren Buffett plays online bridge.
Here are the hobbies of 9 highly successful people.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is an aggressive golfer.
Since golf is such a popular sport in the business world, women can miss out on important networking opportunities if they don't play. Rice knows this and started playing golf when she was working as Secretary of State and even often played with former President George W. Bush.
Six years later, Rice is a member at the Augusta National Golf Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, and continues to play golf regularly. Rice and business executive Darla Moore were the first women granted memberships to Augusta.
"I'm very aggressive," Rice told John Barton at Golf Digest. "My inner Phil Mickelson comes out quite frequently."
Indian billionaire Anil Ambani is a serial marathon runner.
India's fourth-richest billionaire and chairman of Reliance ADA Group, Anil Ambani often runs the streets of Mumbai before dawn with his bodyguards. He first trained for the Boston Marathon in 2003 after someone questioned his weight at an investor's conference in New York. Since then, Ambani has pushed himself and is now a serial marathon runner.
"At a deeper level, running is about pushing the limits, of realizing one's possibilities," he told Businessweek.
Investor Warren Buffett regularly plays the ukulele and online bridge to keep his mind sharp.
The oracle of Omaha is a man of many talents. Buffett's been playing the ukulele for decades, but he also told CNN Money that he plays online bridge most Mondays with three other partners, sometimes including Bill Gates.
In a report titled "Why Warren Buffett Plays Bridge," economist John P. Hussman reasoned that Buffett's love of the game could be because it places emphasis on "playing a hand right rather than on playing it successfully":
"It seems to me (and it has certainly been my experience) that it takes an enormous amount of restraint to focus on playing every investment hand 'right,' according to an established discipline, allowing the law of averages to work in your favor, rather than trying to win every hand. I would guess that this is exactly what appeals to Warren Buffett's temperament. Over the long-term, good investing requires it."
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