Is Your Hobby an Indicator of Your Next Role in Mid-Career?

You'll never work a day in your life....and all that jazz

Mark Twain teased us by famously saying. “Find something you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”  

I recall a dinner conversation with my cousin years ago in New York. She had navigated the city while I worked more than a full day downtown in meetings on creating a better client experience.  My hobby was not project management, my interests in investments were selfishly tied to my own 401K balance. My hobbies were reading, yoga, running, training my then puppy and finding out food trends in NYC. With 12 years under my belt, she was pummeling me with questions on navigating doing more of what you love while getting paid.

Over a rare homemade meal from my miniature apartment stove she mulled over attending law school, finding a role in Nashville’s music scene or finding graduate school to bridge the unknowns in her life.

I recall saying fiercely, “'It’s very difficult to make a hobby a career.”

The reality of meshing a hobby with work and financial security is incredibly difficult to come by. In the stick adult world of bills and inflation, cash is king.

There are two paths on the road to your next career junction.

Your strengths and interests, not your hobbies, will give you the right professional track in mid-career.

Relying on hobbies can lead you down a track of no return. Activities you enjoy for leisure are often entirely different from the strengths we excel at professionally. 

Roles in mid-career, after many years in the working world,  can provide extra space for anxiety reducing hobbies. Switching your profession based on recreational interests can land you in a spot that doesn’t translate to marketable skills or future career success.

Careers require business acumen and persistence that might differ from your valuable and relevant skillset that you’ve gained over the last decade or more. 

Keep your hobbies as a space to find personal fulfillment, connect with friends, but when it comes to career transition decisions, it's your strengths that can truly guide you to the right next steps.

Leveraging Your Hobbies for the Right Professional Track in Mid-Career

Reading, sewing, wine tasting, pickleball, tennis, skiing, golf, hiking, wellness, writing, teaching can shift our work lives when we want to make a major edit in our professional lives. The Artist’s Way reminds us to write daily, create weekly based on explorations of our inner desires. Creative endeavors are at our fingertips if we persist in our creative inner knowing.

In a soul searching career pivot, hobbies provide breadcrumbs to passions and skills you want to enhance. Time well spent on interest you love align to the intern’s mind written about in  “Designing your Life’ by David Evans and Bill Burrett. Starting a career search with a beginner’s mind releases the pressure and often resets your career as if you mark an X on a venn diagram of your life.

Every Career is like a Fingerprint

I used my love of charts, graphs and organizing to create a role in financial services project management. My ability to take big ideas and swap them for detailed plans and make them personable to people created a career tract I loved for a very long time. My career shift from Wall Street to Career Coaching and Facilitating is adjacent to my former roles. My yoga hobbies and love of Reiki makes me knowledgeable but it does not lend itself to a full time role. I weave all of my stress reducing data into my career sessions, workshops on wellness in the workplace and even prioritization.

For others, interests and weekend hobbies define careers. My cousin has gone on to work in college athletics with a law degree in athlete contracts.  In her case she took a bread crumb and followed into a lucrative financial career. This isn’t the same for everyone.