Dont allow work and mundanities of life, dull your edge. Nurture your creativity - full-on.
Creativity enables alternate ways of thinking. It unblocks old patterns or habits of thinking and nurtures non-linear thinking. Creativity enables empathy or habits of lateral thinking. It encourages non-linearity.
If that is not expected of an effective leadership, pray what is ???
Thus you need to self-invest atleast an hour each day of your life to find and nurture your creative expressions. This is needed of an effective leader or you will dull your edge and become boring unknowingly.
Knowledgeable you may be. But unless you are creative, you will tend to be repetitive. Remember, all Managers read the same books, creativity gives them a critical expressive edge as a supporting tool. This a leader needs badly.
Unleash your creativity ... sketch, paint, doodle, act, sing, dance, write poetry, blog, scuba-dive, swim, play Piano, Veena, jog, sprint, cycle, whatever.
So go back in time, now ... each time your interviewer asked you to tell him/her about your hobbies and what you do to develop the same, you gave a wrong answer. You thought those were time-feeler ice-breaking questions. Unknown to you, the smooth interviewer wanted to know about your art and your medium of creative expressions. But you .... well, you went clinically ballistic impressing the interviewer with the name of your Tennis hero and how your shots are just like him !!!
Good one