Skills give you options, not obligations
Use them at your own peril
I was in Nashville this past week and caught up with a lot of people.
I heard these work stories from my friends:
One told me how a business contact had recently quit his finance job because his side hustle selling forklifts(!) had taken off
Another is a skilled programmer but is working only 20 hours a week right now, because he doesn’t want to manage anyone for a while
Someone else feels like their core abilities are slipping as they project manage more and get further from the “real” work
Someone else is trying to find their way in real estate after bouncing around account management jobs
Another is working on an animated kid’s project after a career spent in marketing
And another may decelerate into a small marketing agency after working for big corps
I haven’t even mentioned my wife who transitioned 6 or 7 years ago from speech therapy into Christian ministry
I forgot where I saw this, but I keep running this phrase through my head: skills give you options, not obligations.
Just because you have a skill doesn’t mean you have to use it.
But it may be foolish not to?
It’s nice to have options…
It’s nice to have a fallback.
It’s nice to build up something either intentionally or alongside your main project and then you can jump over while abandoning what you’ve become known for.
Everyone I mentioned above is in their late 30s or 40s, and already have “made” it if you will—they got a job in their chosen industry and then have pivoted or changed.
It could be a mid-life crisis, sure, but maybe it’s only a crisis because the skills have been overvalued in their own minds.
You can’t quite get rid of the questions—
Are my skills being wasted?
What am I really good at?
What about the handcuffs of a good job and health insurance?
None of those things should be dismissed.
In fact, a lot of people spend their whole (American) lives chasing any sense of stability and skill development.
I can’t help but think of certain members of my family who never “got it together” in the traditional sense, and have committed minor crimes, or have created very unstable home situations for themselves, despite having the ability to do otherwise.
Skills give you a choice, an opportunity to do something, but how beholden do you need to be to them? There may come a time when you give up those skills to do something else.
We’re all a little nervous…
What I hear in a lot of my friends is that they’re a little nervous about going all in with their new skills. Their identities were built on hard skills like art, programming, marketing, or data analysis, and now they’ve developed new skills they’re less certain about— like management or teaching or strategy.
That could be part of growing up or being in a certain income bracket, where we saw our parents use their core skills for years upon years, and maybe never quite cracking the C-Suite.
I keep coming back to Venn diagrams…
But what I’m realizing and what my friends are realizing is that we’ve been developing new skills along the way.
And those new skills overlap with our new skills.
We now actually have more options than we did before.
My friend can work 20 hours per week and not manage anyone. What a great option!
My creative friend who is a great teacher could one day potentially teach part-time or full-time or freelance. What a great option!
My real estate friend is now a realtor but he could go back to account management if he wanted to. What a great option!
I haven’t mentioned myself, but I also feel this tension. I’ve had opportunities to go freelance or to start my own agency or even to amp up a side hustle.
But this stuff takes work…
And less work is also an option.
For all the people I mentioned above, let me be clear on this — they all have pretty good lifestyles (from what I can tell) and it may be a cut to decelerate.
And I’m not even sure they need to do that.
But it’s just a reality and part of the tension. It’s scary to use new skills. Especially when it generates less income then you are accustomed to.
Upskill on the side
You can develop new skills alongside your old skills without giving up either.
Your skills may rust, but it doesn’t mean we can’t stop learning something new. In fact, that may energize our old abilities.
Okay, maybe this is…
A mid-life crisis.
No one (including me!) has bought a convertible or motorcycle yet (AFAIK)
Overall, I think these questions are healthy—to re-evaluate life and to try on another perspective.
Any new perspective is initially scary and weird and hard. It feels perilous. To make a change. To do something new. To upend all the things.
But it’s always an option.
Keep going-
Josh Spilker
PS: See you for the links this weekend