How to Turn your Hobby Skills into Business Success

There’s no doubt that most of us wish that we could make a living with our hobby. Spending your day surrounded by friends enjoying something you are passionate about seems like the ideal workday but, while most of us won’t end up being the Scrabble World Champion, there’s no reason that the skills we learn through our hobbies can’t be translated into the business sphere.

Like any skill building exercise, a hobby requires patience, dedication and focus, which are admirable skills in themselves, but depending on what you choose to do in your spare time, you could reap the benefits of better communication skills, a careful eye for detail, excellent organisational skills, and even a greater understanding of probability.

Social Contracts and Communication

Communication is the foundation of all good business and a social contract, a set of social rules that we can all agree upon, provides the bedrock for good communication.

At a basic level, all hobbies tend to start with group communication. Sports teams agree on the rules, as do friends playing a board game, and rules infractions are negotiated around. This kind of communication and negotiation is as important in the board room as it is on games day and is the perfect example of transferable skill.

Blue Sky Thinking

Inventive thinking is both a skill that is very much prized in the business world and one that can be taught through games. Using a specific toolset inventively to solve a problem is a common theme amongst many games, from solitaire to monopoly, with those best able to think and adapt quickly usually doing the best.

Role-playing games, or RPGs, have also garnered some attention in the business world, with many companies recognising the benefits of organising games for their employees, because of their ability to encourage better organisation and teamwork, good communication, and the finding of adaptive approaches to difficult situations.

Strategy

Any business person will tell you that having a strategy is hugely important if you want to thrive in any business endeavour and, in the cutthroat world of commerce, being able to think several steps ahead of the competition is vital to coming out on top.

Those skills are almost exactly the same kinds of skills found in championship winning players of games like chess and Go. So, the next time you’re are plotting that checkmate three turns in advance, think about how you could apply that same level of planning, risk assessment and foresight to your professional life.

Tactics and Probability

If the strategy taught by games like chess is a high-level business goal, then the tactics and mastery of probability that comes from many cards and dice games represents the adaptability to get the job done on the cutting floor.

Most card games are about assessing a changing situation and making decisions on the fly. Deploying your resources to shore up your position and deprive you opposition of certain benefits. It’s not hard to see the parallels to business.

Many poker champions are famous for taking an entrepreneurial approach to the game, weighing up the risk, the investment and the potential reward of any hand before processing, just like any successful businessperson would.

Pretty much every dice game is a risk-reward calculation, in dice as in business, nothing is certain, you just have to make a decision in the moment based on the information you have to hand. Most traders will recognise this as part of their daily lives and the same skills set needed to become family Perudo champion can be used to killing on the trading floor.

Transferable Skills

Most hobbies require you to be passionate about something and develop a new skill set, and skills and passion are key parts of any successful business. By leveraging those transferable skills you can enjoy your leisure time with the satisfaction of knowing that the skills you train at the gaming table, will be just as useful in the office the next day.

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