The hidden benefits of projects that don’t look relevant

Opportunities to learn and improve tend to come in a few different forms.

Some things are exactly relevant to the job you hold. Attending a marketing conference to help your job in marketing. Meeting a veteran designer to talk about your new job in design. Launching a podcast on the side just for fun to learn skills relevant to your day job as a podcast producer.

These tend to be the things we seek, though perhaps more accurately said, they tend to be the things that find us. Organizations and thinkers have a way of focusing narrowly. Because of course the marketing conference wants to attract marketers. Of course a designer knows other designers. Of course a podcast producer likes podcasts enough to try making one.

Unfortunately, if we only learn from things that are so perfectly related to our jobs, we become rigid thinkers and doers. Like overly muscle-bound athletes, if something breaks and we need to try new ways of moving, or we’re asked to change the way we operate entirely, it’s hard to do.

Along with our core exercises, then, we need to work on our flexibility. Our agility. Our vision.

Ask yourself: what are you doing to round out that kind of learning?

The marketer could attend a sales conference or a photography event or take a cooking class.

The designer could meet with a veteran copywriter or musician or CFO.

The podcaster can launch a blog about podcasting or travel tips or relationship advice.

In school, we learn that learning means memorization of the exact topic we aim to learn.

As adults, we learn that this makes us rigid, likely to struggle in the face of change.

It’s wonderful that we can follow and learn from leaders in our exact space. But being a well-rounded person is what makes us the kind of thinker and creator that the work requires: flexible, agile, confident.