As you may have guessed if you've . . . well read most anything I've written or published in the last few years . . . is that I'm big on how people's hobbies can lead to and enhance careers. I'm always exploring the power of hobbies and how we can leverage them as part of the big picture of our life – and our careers.
Usually I focus on things like skills or networking, or occasionally the psychology of things like confidence-building. But there's something I've noticed recently as I've talked to fans and profans, as I've explored people using their hobbies in their careers.
Our hobbies teach us about repercussions and connections, of cause and effect.
Think about a child playing with blocks or toys, molding clay, or just messing around with a box. They're learning about how things go together, why things happen, and how they can make things work. In many cases they at least learn about gravity and how one small toy is very painful for a parent to step on.
I wonder how much of my sense of how-things-work was due to Legos.
Then think of the hobbies of our later years, of role-playing games and 'zines, of sports teams and school plays, of cosplay and crafting. We're working, making, shaping, meeting.
We learn how to manage a group – and how it goes wrong. We learn just how hard it is to get certain types of cloth – and why we need them. Think about the failures we had and what they taught us, and how we brought things together to succeed.
I learned long-term planning from my fandom activity.
Our hobbies teach us how things WORK. Our hobbies teach us how things get DONE. Our hobbies remind us of cause and effect (which people forget a lot). They give us failures and successes. They give us a sense of how things come together.
That is incredibly valuable. Our hobbies really are friendly ways to get a very good sense of the big picture.
Kind of amazing if you think about it.
So think about it.