Learn Things You Are Not Good At
I have a working definition of what a hobby is. It’s something you work on that you don’t get paid for. As a consequence, it must be something you enjoy. But enjoyment is not what makes it a hobby. It’s the work part. Sex isn’t a hobby.
There are two reasons something is a hobby and not a job:
The financial returns to the work would not be enough to support the lifestyle you desire.
You are not good enough at it to generate financial returns from it.
Hobbies that fall in the first category are things like documenting the history of a small town. Even if you are a very skilled historian, not enough people will be interested to make it worth your while. You do it anyway, of course, because the town’s history matters. Most hobbies are like this. I like to read. No one gets paid to read, and I don’t think the reason I don’t is because of my lack of talent at it.
But the hobbies we spend the most time doing are in the second category. There are certainly people who earn enormous amounts of money from playing chess or writing fiction, but they are not me. Because I am not good at either of those.
The fun of the second kind of hobby is that you can always improve at what you are doing because there are professionals out there that you will not really match, but can approach. Chasing the dragon.
I’ll admit to doing these hobbies not just because I enjoy them. I think trying to do what doesn’t come naturally to me humbles me and humility is good. I am naturally good at math. I didn’t have to work all that hard to be good at it. By contrast, this year my chess rating is almost exactly the same as it was last year - no improvement from a year of constant, consistent work. Chess is hard for me. Doing the hard thing builds humility and, maybe, a better work ethic for the things I am good at.
Learning to do something even when you are bad at it really does “build character”, in my (and I’m sure many other people’s) dad’s words. He told me this when I played Little League baseball. I was terrible at it. I love baseball so it wasn’t for lack of a desire to be good. I was bad because, well, I didn’t get the hand-eye coordination draw from the gene pool.
I wouldn’t have learned how to work hard if I had just done my schoolwork. I was good at school. I learned about hard work from failing to get a single hit all season. And then, in the last game, after a season of failing, hitting a single.