Cultivating Yourself

On curiosity, culture, and the art of becoming.

There is something undeniably elegant about a woman who is interested in the world. A woman who reads beyond what is required of her, asks questions because she wants to understand, and can hold a conversation about something she discovered only yesterday. She doesn't need to know everything. She simply has a genuine desire to know more. True cultivation is not about how much you can prove you know, it is about remaining curious enough to keep learning.

She notices things. She has opinions, but is curious enough to change them. She knows a little about art, history, fashion, architecture, literature, politics, business - not because she needs to, but because she wants to.

She is interested. And perhaps that is one of the most attractive qualities a person can possess.

We tend to think of education as something with an expiry date. We go to school, attend university, collect our qualifications and eventually enter the world with the expectation that we are now sufficiently educated. But education was never meant to be a finish line. It can be a lifelong practice of cultivating yourself.

But it isn't simply about acquiring knowledge, it's about developing your taste, refining your opinions, discovering what fascinates you and deciding what kind of person you want to become, especially during a time where social media stands at the forefront of everything. Hobbies become a trend, health becomes an aesthetic, politics and worldly news becomes too controversial to engage in.

Personal identity is not something we stumble upon, it's something that's built. By ourselves, by our environment, by the people around us. Piece by piece, book by book, converstation by conversation, experience by experience. You might spend an evening learning about Renaissance art simply because you find it beautiful. Read a novel from a writer you've never encountered. Learn the history behind a fashion house you've admired for years. Take yourself down a rabbit hole about philosophy or psychology. There doesn't need to be an exam at the end. There doesn't even need to be a practical reason. Not everything needs to become a career, a side hustle or something to put onto your CV. Some knowledge can simply belong to you.

In a world increasingly designed to tell us what to watch, what to buy, what to like and even what to think, cultivating yourself becomes an act of authorship. You are choosing what enters your mind. You are deciding what deserves your attention. You are developing a point of view that is distinctly your own.

Cultivating yourself extends beyond the mind, it's also about how you inhabit your body, how you spend your time, what you find interesting and what you choose to fill your life with.

Cultivating the Body

There is another, equally important, part of cultivating yourself: learning to take care of the body that carries you through your life.

Not in the exhausting pursuit of perfection, and certainly not because your body needs to look a certain way to deserve your care, but because there is something deeply valuable about feeling well in your own body.

Take movement, for example. Going to the gym, taking a long walk because the weather is beautiful, learning to play tennis, or any sport for that matter, running, lifting weights... finding forms of movement that make you feel capable, energised and strong.

There's a particular confidence that comes from knowing what your body can do. Being able to walk for hours through a city without feeling exhausted. Having the strength to carry your own suitcase. Feeling comfortable climbing a mountain, swimming in the sea, dancing until late, simply keeping up with the life you want to live.

Health, at its best, isn't an aesthetic project. It's an investment into your future self. Caring for your body extends far beyond exercise, it's eating food that nourishes you, getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, spending time outside and away from screens, being able to rest when you need to, making appointments that you've been putting off, and ultimately paying attention to what your body is asking of you.

None of this is particularly glamorous, there's no aesthetic payoff to going to bed early, or remembering to drink enough water. No one sees the quiet choices you make to look after yourself. But that's the point. Self-care isn't always candles, a sheet mask and slow mornings. Mostly, it's discipline. Cultivating yourself should never mean cultivating only the parts of you that other people can see. Your body is not something to be looked at, it's where you experience your entire life.

Take care of it accordingly.

Hobbymaxxing

Perhaps we should bring back the hobby, and not the kind designed to make you more employable, or something you can turn into a side hustle within six months or so, but another activity that quietly becomes a productivity exercise.

Enter: hobbymaxxing.

I'll be the first to say, the internet has given us a ridiculous name for something that is actually rather lovely: filling your life with things you enjoy.

Learn to paint (and if you're anything like me, then badly), take up padel, go horse riding, learn a new language, make ceramics, read novels, spend hours at galleries and exhibitions, cook something unnecessarily complicated, learn to play an instrument, pick up photography, learn to crochet, go antiquing, becoming inexplicably knowledgeable about fragrances.

The fun part is, you don't have to be good at any of them. That is actually quite literally the point. We as a group of young individuals have become so accustomed to optimising ourselves that even our leisure time is expected to produce something. Every interest has to become a skill; every skill has to become a career; every career has to become a personal brand.

Hobbies offer an escape from that logic. They also give you 'permission' to become a beginner. There is something so captivating about a person with a life that extends far past their job. Someone who can tell you about a book they're reading, or stories from their running group, a pottery class they've just started, an obscure historical period they've become obsessed with, to a restaurant they've been wanting to try.

These little interests become the texture of a life. They give you stories, conversation, they build personality, encourage individualism, and give you somewhere to put your attention to when the rest of the world becomes too loud.

More importantly, they help you discover yourself. To not be another doom scrolling monster, or a copy and paste outfit girly, or a person with limited vocabulary and a mundane outlook on life.

You might begin learning Italian and realise you love languages. You might join a tennis club and discover you are surprisingly competitive (like me!). You might start painting and find that you notice colours and tones differently afterwards. You don't always know what will become part of you until you try it out.

So, hobbymaxx.

Collect interests, follow your curiosity, be a beginner, try things simply because they sound fun. You do not need to monestise every passion. Some things are allowed to exist simply because they make your life more interesting.

Cultivating a Life

Perhaps this is ultimately what it means to cultivate yourself: not to construct a life that looks impressive from the outside, but to create one that feels rich from within.

Having interests beyond your career. Literature you love, places you want to see, things you want to learn, hobbies you are terrible at, subjects you could talk about for hours. To take a class or a course simply because you're interested, wander aimlessly through a gallery alone, perfect a recipie, or learn something completely useless but amazingly fascinating.

In a culture and society that encourages us to optimise everything, there's something radical about doing things because they make life feel larger. Some choices may feel or seem insignificant individually, but together they create something bigger:

A life with texture.

A life with character.

A life that feels like yours. Exclusively yours.

Our identities are built quietly, through the things we repeatedly choose to care about. You are allowed to change your mind, outgrow an interest, reinvent your taste, become fascinated by something unexpected and start again. Cultivating yourself isn't about arriving at the final version of yourself, it's about remaining curious about who you might become.

And that may be the real art of it, not becoming the most impressive person in the room, but becoming someone whose life is unmistakably their own.

You don't have to know exactly who you're becoming.

You just have to keep cultivating.