The Hobbyist #18: An Interview with minor genius Founder Elliot Aronow

The spiritual creative director talks about jiu-jitsu, skateboarding, and Ralph Lauren

Graphic design by Thomas Euyang

Everyone needs a homie they just vibe with, as the kids say. We all need people with similar-ish interests, that we can catch up with over text or over the course of many hours at a coffee shop (or Cafe Mogador, of course). Someone who’s smart the way you are, that is equally obsessed with a random hobby just like you.

I first “met” Elliot Aronow when he was putting together a magazine on behalf of a music industry entity. He asked me about writing an essay on slowthai (remember him?), which I happily agreed to because a) I liked slowthai and b) I needed money. He was a very good editor and a very nice person which is all you can really ask for. We didn’t really stay in touch but reconnected when I moved back to New York. I forgot why or how but it might have involved the Knicks or it might have involved Elz’s business, minor genius.

A minor genius is, in Elz’s words, “someone who gets paid to be themselves.” As lead minor genius he helps people get paid to be themselves. As someone who gets paid to be myself, I was very intrigued by his work. While we’ve never officially collaborated on a project between minor genius x The Hobbyist, his career as a spiritual creative director is one I find very much aligned with the mission of The Hobbyist. i.e. How do people get paid to do what they love doing?

When I needed an extra bump to finally get The Hobbyist off the ground, it was at one of Elz’s awesome minor genius breakfasts that I finally got the advice I needed. Something useful for everyone: If you wait for it to be perfect, it will never get done. Words to live by. Many more words to live by (and lots of talk about jiu-jitsu) in the conversation below.

Talk to me about the zine you put out back in February.

Elliot Aronow: The the zine is is a real big deal for me. It just feels really good to walk it like I talk it. As the ‘own your IP, put out a project’ guy, it just felt rad to be like, ‘Hey, I made this thing.’ And I actually promoted the party as if I wanted people to come. I didn’t treat it like sending out an email and hoping people would show up.

I feel like you’re doing a lot of work around things you’re passionate about. You’re helping people turn their hobbies into their life work.

EA: I’m sort of less concerned with people turning their hobbies into businesses, although I do help facilitate that. What’s more compelling to me is getting people out of hiding, avoiding, and resentment, and into creating. Like you, I’m a soldier of this business. I know where all the bodies are buried in media, fashion, and entertainment. I don’t have any illusions about what the landscape is.

But as I see it, when you’re someone like us, who for better or worse, have an unnatural desire to create things, we’re just not wired to go to a job, come home, and watch TV. The root cause of a lot of our suffering is creative constipation, where you have this idea for something and you can’t get it out of you.

It just stays there.

EA: Well, it would be great if it just stayed there. If it just stayed there it would be a benign inconvenience. In my experience, it doesn’t just stay there. It becomes cold and calcified and mean. You become an asshole to yourself and the people around you. It has this negative cloud effect on everything else. Part of my mission here is to give people permission to get that stuff out of them.

Yeah. The thing about some of my hobbies is that while you’re doing them, it feels anywhere from the worst thing you’ve ever done to at best you’re ambivalent about it. As soon as you’re finished, though, it’s the best feeling in the world. I’m sure you get a lot of that from jiu-jitsu.

EA: I get a lot of it from jiu-jitsu because everything that I’ve used to defend myself and create my armor over the years is not available there. With my friends, I wasn’t Mr. Football. As a small guy, the way I found safety and acceptance was by being the cool guy, you know? I was styling my friends when I was 14. Having cultivated that identity for a lot of my life, jiu-jitsu cares about none of it. You just look at someone with blank eyes that wants to choke you. There’s no sense of humor, no fashion style. You’re not wearing the Polo gi. It’s just a sweaty, terrible thing. That process of having no personality has been really amazing for me because it’s given me a chance to not have anything to hide behind. And then, of course, you have to face the primordial fear of being hurt, being dominated, and being embarrassed. And yet, I love it.

When you get to my age and you get to become somewhat of a professional in one field, you really have to throw yourself into being a complete amateur at something else. With jiu-jitsu, I get such gratification out of being a part of the community and showing up. It reminds me of going to hardcore shows. It’s really cool to see the same bunch of people that have self-identified as being weirdos.

When did you first do it?

EA: August of 2021, I think.

What was the impetus?

EA: I was working with a coach and he told me that I had a lot of emotional intelligence and I was in touch with my feminine side, but I needed to do something against my nature; something aggressive, gnarly, and really physical. When I moved back to New York in the Summer of 2023, I got right back into it and it has sort of become my thing.

You’re doing something that’s pure instinct and also technical. What’s that balance like?

EA: Being a youngster in search of subculture, my first foray even before music was skating. Because I wasn’t really good at skating, punk was really rad because I could connect myself to something and be part of the scene without being an athlete. Training jiu-jitsu reminds me exactly of trying to learn to skate. Even for the most basic moves, there are probably seven very subtle technical details you need to master all at once in order to do it. There’s a 90% failure rate, but after doing it over and over and over again for 18 months, you start at the very minimum to recognize your bad habits. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m by no means slick, but I can see when I’m getting into a bad situation a lot earlier.

What’s your post workout routine?

EA: Clockwork, where I work out at, has such a great culture that most people hang out for 20 minutes after a class and bullshit. The instructors there are very, very cool. If I go to someone with a detail that I’d love to get help with, they’ll help you drill. There’s a cliché in jiu-jitsu, “Come for the chokes, stay for the folks,” and I think it’s really true, especially now in the world we’re living it. We’re being groomed to be agoraphobic. There’s no ambiguity when you walk into a jiu-jitsu studio. You’re gonna fight and you’re gonna hug each other. That sacred leaving of the everyday has been what I’ve been after my entire life. I love that transition from ordinary to alternate, to extraordinary.

Personality drives both of our careers. Talk to me about a hobby in which personality doesn’t matter and might even be detrimental to the activity.

EA: I dig that there’s a real bifurcation between your social life with people in the dojo and your combat life. It’s like in basketball, where on the court players go at each other, but when the game is over, they hug and embrace each other. I do exercise my social skills. I’ve met a lot of friends through jiu-jitsu, but in the specific combat situation, it’s a little bit different. For anyone that may be interested in it, I don’t want to overstate that it’s brutal. People are very respectful when you’re a lower belt or a more diminutive figure. People are super cool at meeting you at your ability. It’s just that in the grand scheme of things, jiu-jitsu is incredibly hard.

You mentioned that you started doing jiu-jitsu because of a coach. Did that more aggressive energy make its way into the rest of your life, too?

EA: Definitely. Parallel to any spiritual quests, jiu-jitsu has changed me at a core level. We have a false sense of accomplishment posting things on the internet. It ticks the box of having done something, but I look at Ralph Lauren and George Lucas. That guy made Star Wars. That’s hard! In my own life, jiu-jitsu has prepared me for being an entrepreneur, writing a lot, and having people either ignore or enjoy my work. It’s a weird mix of attention and kind of being ignored.

Jiu-jitsu has helped all of the vicissitudes of being an entrepreneur — the highs and the failures alike. In jiu-jitsu, I mostly fail. In life, I kind of win, because I’m prepared to do something really hard. When you work in the culture industry, there’s zero room to ever do that. Even if you have cool bosses, you don’t have room to fail for a year, trying anything regardless of how many wins you get. Where else can you show up and just try? It’s a real gift.

Do you advocate for your clients to do their passions on the side before it becomes the main gig? Or do you want them to go all in?

EA: It depends. Everyone is different. All of us have a certain internal bar. Until that bar becomes suffocating and stifling, you’re gonna mostly go at that level. What I really enjoy about my work is that there’s no convincing. You’re either ready for this and all-in, or you’re not. I don’t really believe in forcing people to professionalize their hobbies. What I’m more interested in is the transition from passive worker to alive creator.

For a lot of folks that I’ve worked with, they haven’t left their fancy-pants jobs, but they started making something and they believe in themselves. They see that they have abilities. As you know, the grand irony of making a life in the creative industries is that the further you climb up the ladder, the less creative your work is. If you have that insatiable desire to make something, you need a space where you can be raw and reckless. You need to make the rawest thing you can or else it’s just algorithm chum. Unless you have money or endless resources, you’re just wasting your time.

That’s the magic of this work. You have to make your own weird thing. Otherwise, it’s just gonna be a warm Pepsi. No company actually wants to do anything cool. They just want the illusion of being edgy and progressive. Auteur style projects are what people are gonna gravitate towards. People on the internet don’t gravitate towards companies. They gravitate towards people. The next Polo isn’t gonna be Polo. It’s gonna be a person. Hopefully me. You can print that [laughs].

What is a minor genius?

EA: A minor genius is someone who gets paid to be themselves. All my life, all I wanted to figure out was how to become a successful weirdo. [Hobbyist alumni] Sam Valenti and I talk about this a lot. There hasn’t been a time where more strange things are commercially viable. If you’re a teenager and Primus is a thing, there’s no ceiling on how weird you can be and be successful.

We’re living in a time now where it’s very obvious that everything you were taught as a kid isn’t true. This idea of, ‘Get a good job and a company will take care of you.’ Now there’s an opportunity to tune into your own authority and play the game the way you want to play it. As guys that have had relationships with legacy media, that’s never happening again. I was lucky to catch a couple of bylines because it gives me credibility, but that’s done. That door is closed. It’s an amazing time — if you’re not completely freaked out — to reinvent yourself and play your own game. Since there’s no more security, the only other option is freedom. That’s been the Faustian bargain that we’ve been given. In exchange for freedom and authenticity —

We’ll give you healthcare and a 401K.

EA: Exactly. Now that this doesn’t exist as much anymore, all that’s left is freedom and jiu-jitsu. And menswear [laughs].