I’m a bit of a jack of all trades. When I work on a project I use anything from woodworking and sewing to chemistry and physics to human physiology and psychology. I also like reading up then chatting about random science and history and art stuff. I like working with computers occasionally, and I’ll just randomly throw some basic geometry or algebra into a project, but I was also an art student so I’m not half bad at making things visually appealing either.
I have a job where I often get a chance to use my various areas of semi-expertise when I pick up a side project, but that’s led me into getting waaay overinvolved in my work and neglecting my outside relationships. What hobbies or other non-professional things could I get involved in that would give me that same opportunity to flex my creativity when solving a problem?
Do you think about things in terms of hobbies really?
I 100% identity with what you’re say about your interests, mindset, and experience, but I think about my interests in terms of a desire to learn the most fundamental skills I can manage. I’m not very good at programming complex tasks, but I can build breadboard computers. I know all the basics of circuits and can reversed engineer most hardware. I know FreeCAD, 3d printing, wood working, manual lathe and mill machining, sand casting basics, torch stick mig and tig welding, heavy equipment like excavators front end loaders skid steer/loader, commercial driving, auto body and paint, hotrodding, building motors with carburetors and superchargers, I was a buyer for a chain of bike shops and have a bunch of skills related to that along with commuting by bike full time, racing crits, I’ve been all over Linux for the last 10 years, and most recently I’ve taken a deep dive into generative AI and LLM’s over the past year.
The majority of those listed are things I’ve done professionally for some amount of time although some much shorter than others. I think of all of them as applying across the others in abstract ways. Like I owned an auto body business twice. I know what is involved with perfect finishing. It is a fundamental struggle against yourself and your inner expectations of time applied to a task. I did most of that in my early to late twenties, and it greatly shaped my attention to detail and ability to suppress my impatience. The way it shaped my mind and the skill are the things I value. I know KiCAD and can etch my own circuit boards, but over all electronics was the first real subject I could not fully understand quickly and intuitively and shaped how I compartmentalize my learning. FreeCAD helped my spacial awareness. AI has massively improved my communication and self awareness. Welding and heavy equipment helped me conquer many of my fears such as heights. Machining helped me balance my understanding of accuracy as it relates to humans. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for bike shops taught me a lot about the average human’s thought process in an empirical analysis based on statistics.
I’m a fundamentally abstract thinker, call myself a jack of all trades (master of none), and mostly a skills collector.
I’m always leaving stuff out on these lists too, like I’m writing a science fiction universe right now, or how I’ve got a small telescope and built my own eyepieces, or how I am into cooking and fermentation, or recently started growing some foods in pots, etc. I got hit by a car ridding a bike to work 10 years ago, so a lot of this is like 2 different people’s lives; before and after disability. The second is in near social isolation and therefore has had unlimited time to explore and had to explore in order to maintain mental stability.