The Harmonium That Rarely Came Up

My piece for Founding Fuel this week made a case for keeping something in your life you have no professional use for. Drucker studying medieval history. An HR head soldering decoders into model locomotives. The claim was that width gives you more frames, and more frames give you more readings of the same situation.

The Case for Knowing Things You Don’t Need to Know, Founding Fuel, 30 August 2026

Then the notes started arriving.

A harmonium, restored over four years. A serious gardener. Someone who cooks at a level that would embarrass most restaurants. A man who collects paraphernalia from hotels around the world and has done so for two decades. Several people who read outside their field with a discipline I do not have.

None of it was secret. Colleagues knew, in the way colleagues know things. What struck me was the gap between the depth of the thing and the space it occupied in twenty or thirty years of working conversation. Two decades of collecting, reduced to a line at a dinner. A four-year restoration that came up once.

I should say who these people are. All of them ran companies or sat in the C-suite. All of them have retired, or are close to it. One generation, one rung, one part of a working life. Whether the people coming up behind them are any different, I do not know for sure. It may be that they have not been asked yet either.

Why pursuits outside work stay off the record

I called some of them. These are not my theories. They are what people said, arranged afterwards by me.

It looks like distraction. This is the one about other people. A boss cannot see how committed you are. So attention gets used as the measure. If you have an interest, some of your attention went there. That is enough to raise a question. Whether the work suffered is a separate matter, and it does not get asked.

Busy people are not supposed to have room. This one is about the story we tell ourselves. If I am as stretched as I claim to be, then I cannot have time for anything else. So I cannot have a pursuit. Saying I have one would mean admitting I had room.

One chief executive, now retired, was blunt about it. He had used the time argument for twenty years, and he had the hobby the whole time. He kept it going through the worst years. He never said so. He put it close to a moral thing. Having an interest felt like taking something that belonged to the job.

I do not want to be seen through it. The gardener said this. Once work knows, the garden becomes a talking point. Then it becomes part of how people describe her. She has watched that happen to others and did not want it. There is a version of this where the pursuit turns into a way of showing you are interesting, and she wanted no part of that either.

I am not good enough at it to be seen doing it. This was the one I did not expect, and it came up more than once. A man who has played for years said there were almost certainly people in his own organisation who played better than he did. He did not want to be the senior person who is a beginner. He is used to being the one who knows. In his own field he is at the top. In this one he is somewhere in the middle, and he preferred that not be visible.

So the quiet is not one thing. One reason is about the organisation. One is about the story we tell ourselves. And two are about how we would rather be seen, pulling against each other. Do not look at me through my hobby. And do not catch me being ordinary at it.

So the quiet is not one thing. One reason is about the organisation. One is about the story we tell ourselves. And two are about how we would rather be seen, pulling against each other. Do not look at me through my hobby. And do not catch me being ordinary at it.

The part where I catch myself

A few days after all this I read an old essay by Randy Borum in Infinity Journal, on fox and hedgehog thinking in strategy. It rests on a very old line.

The fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one big trick.

Archilochus, quoted by Randy Borum

Jim Collins built a chapter of Good to Great around the hedgehog. His version goes like this. The fox tries every trick to catch the hedgehog. The hedgehog curls into a spiny ball. The fox gives up and walks away. The hedgehog always wins, because it does one thing supremely well.

Borum says the foxes have worked it out.

The fox jumps at the hedgehog. The hedgehog rolls into its ball. Then the fox walks a few feet away and sits down. Nothing happens for a while. The hedgehog decides the danger has passed and starts to open up. Its back legs come out first. The fox is waiting behind it, and takes the legs before they can go back in.

The defence was very good. It was also the same every time. Something with more moves watched it, learned it, and went round the side.

I loved that story more than I should have.

Look at where it comes from. A hedgehog rescue website, quoted in a strategy journal. That is not much to stand on.

And it is an animal story being used to win an argument about people. The fox is not choosing to be curious. The hedgehog is not choosing to specialise. They are doing what their bodies do. A fox in a field tells us nothing about whether a finance director should learn the harmonium.

I reached for nature because it sounded like proof. Nature was not offering any.

Six days earlier I had written that width probably stops working the moment you pursue it for the return. Then I went looking for a fox to prove that width pays.

The point my mind is restive with is smaller than the fox. A handful of people who spent decades running organisations, and who each arrived at the same working assumption. Something they had done for twenty years or more. Something that shaped how they think. And there was little room at work for a conversation about it.

That instruction was never issued.

Where did they learn it?