#personalskilldevelopment

How many hobbies do you have? And how many of those hobbies are built around certain skills that you have acquired over time or you are trying to improve over time?

By definition a hobby is “an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation”. We don’t necessarily choose our hobbies. Rather they come naturally to us. They are an extension and pursuit of our interests and passions.

If you look around online (try googling “turning hobbies into skills” to start), you’ll find a number of stories about how people have turned their hobby - passion - into a skill that was relevant to their ambitions in life. For example, you could have a keen interest in technology and you have a dream of building an app that could help improve people’s lives. You may have a couple of hobbies that revolve around this passion. Maybe you read tech magazines and engage in forums every week, as well as dabble in the odd bit of coding. For now it’s just a hobby, but you’ve decided you want to focus on improving your coding skills (ideally with the aim of being able to get to a level where you can build something or at least understand what needs to be done to build the thing you want) over the next 365 days, you could significantly enhance the choices you could make in your life a year later. All the time improving your skill set and overall enjoyment of a wider range of activities.

There is a great concept that I first came across when reading a Jim Collins book. It’s the idea of proactively pursuing ‘Creative Hours’ during a 365 day period. The idea is that you aim to have completed a specified total number of Creative Hours over any given 365 day cycle. Say you want to build in 1000 Creative Hours into your life over the next 365 days. That’s 2.7 hours a day of creative ‘stuff’ - could be anything that ignites your passions (e.g. painting, writing, learning a new language, golf, endurance training etc.), but it’s also something that you want to ‘get better at’. The goal is to log these hours every day, write down what you did in the day and how much time you spent on each hobby / skill in that day and then - very importantly - rate your day on a scale of +2 (Very Happy 😀) to -2 (Not Very Happy 😔) based on how you felt about your day. By logging all of these things you can look back on your previous 365 days and determine:

Am I keeping to the 1000 hours / 365 day pace, and if not how many hours do I need to make up to get back on track by tomorrow / next week / next month?

Which days did I feel best about and what was I doing on those days so that I can plan to have more days like those in the future?

What was my ‘happiness score’ for the past year and how can I make sure I improve that this year?

Am I able to afford more time to improve new skills and/or do I want to develop the already improved skill to an even higher level? Should I / Can I increase my 1000 hour target?

I’m very excited about this feature of Balance app. It can be used to keep you on track with your personal skill development and provide prompts to tell you if you are behind on your daily target in order to keep pace with your 365 day target.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being able to build in creative time proactively into a life that may be taken up by work, caring for others or any number of other obligations. But there is science to back up the claims that having creative hobbies is good for you, whether it results in improving performance at work, improving physical health or reducing stress.