How Personal Hobbies Can Boost Your Professional Development

“Your hobbies are friends that you need.”

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People often assume that having only career-relevant hobbies will be useful in their career or professional life. Yes, career-relevant hobbies will be helpful but believing only those hobbies are useful is wrong.

There are a lot of advantages that other hobbies provide for your personal and professional development. Here are some of the reasons how your personal hobbies can boost your professional development:

• Personal hobbies help you tap into your creative side.

Let it be painting, sports, music, or any hobby, you need to be creative for you to truly create something. This is also what your professional career can demand of you at some point in the future.

Creativity also makes you think in different ways and during this process, you even come up with solutions to the problems that you are facing as a professional. Your personal hobbies help you unlock this particular aspect of your personality.

To stand out from a group of people you need to have something that the others don’t have and your hobby might be the one thing that separates you from the mainstream herd. No doubt personal hobbies help your personal development but also your professional development.

Organizations and companies search for an individual who can come up with solutions in difficult times. Hobbies help you think out-of-the-box which would be very useful in your career. When compared to a person who doesn’t have hobbies you will always be above them.

• Helps you handle failure in a better way.

History has been evident that no man has ever succeeded without failing. And that fact still is true to this day. While being focused in your career or working for an organization there will be hurdles.

There will be a few hurdles that you can easily jump over and then there might be a few that you just can’t. And that’s when you truly face and know what failure feels like in your career.

It is usual and common to fail in your hobbies too.

For example, Your favorite hobby is cricket and once in a while you and your cousins play against each other. You did make your strategies, plans, etc to win the match. You did everything you could and yet you lost the match. But even though you lose you will make better plans and tweak the strategies that will help you win.



Hobbies instill this mindset in you to never give up and you try, try and try until you accomplish what you aimed for.

This never giving up mindset helps you handle your failures better than the people who don’t have hobbies. This mindset also helps you in your personal development as it is common to have a failure in personal matters too.

• Turns you into a team player.

Anyone can work solo but a person’s true professionalism is tested when he/she is working with a team. When working for organizations, at some or the other point you need to work with a group of people.

Working in a team truly tests your communication skills. Physical hobbies like cricket, football, basketball, etc are really helpful when it comes to working as a team.

And if you have the above hobbies as one of your hobbies then it will be easier for you to work in a team. As those hobbies demand good communication between players for a successful match or a campaign.

Companies also search for this quality in people who apply for jobs.

• Teaches you patience.

Doesn’t matter if you are an engineer, a doctor, or an architect there will be frustrating times in your career when the most important thing you need is your patience. And it isn’t easy to have the patience for things to happen.

That’s where your hobby comes in. Irrespective of the hobby that you love or are into, you need patience. When it comes to painting you need to have outstanding patience from the painting to dry.



When it comes to music you need to have the patience to find the right music note or the lyric to make a new piece of music. Hobbies teach you how to be patient and the quality slowly gets injected into you as you grow.

And eventually, this quality of patience that you developed from your hobby will be very useful in your career. In tough and frustrating situations patience will be truly helpful to you.

• Gives you an edge over others during an interview.

When you go to an interview for an organization they will look for something in you that separates you from others. Having hobbies and stating your passion for those, increases the chances of you getting selected.

When you show your passion for your hobbies to the interviewer, he/she will know that whatever work you do, you do it with your everything. That’s how hobbies help you through your interviews.

For example, If person A and person B have the same qualifications but person B has hobbies and the interviewer can clearly see how much he/she loves those hobbies, the recruiter will select person B because there’s clearly a difference between the person who has hobbies and the person who doesn’t have hobbies.

• Could be an extra stream of income.

Your professional career is important and your main focus should be on it but it wouldn’t hurt to make your hobby into a source of extra income. It would be like a side job that wouldn’t affect your career in any way.

Every now and then when you find the free time or when you take a break for a few days you could set up your hobby as a side job. There are a lot of websites that offer you to present your skills and the customers can hire you to do a job.

Let it be painting, writing, music there are people who will hire you for the quality of the hobby that you decided to turn in a side job.

You could even do gigs for organizations according to your times and comfort. But keep in mind that you should never sideline your professional career to make space for your hobbies unless those hobbies have a strong foundation.

• Your hobby can be your backup.

Supposing your career doesn’t pan out as you planned it, your hobbies can work as a backup plan in such cases. Any organization will always search for individuals who have the skills that others don’t.

Even though you have worked for a company for almost 10 years, the company will lay you off if they find better and budget-friendly candidates. It is common for such things to happen especially in the corporate world.

So, it’s always a good thing to maintain a backup plan just in case things don’t go your way. And your hobby might be the backup plan that you’re searching for.

Hobbies can help in your personal development but you need to indulge your hobbies into your professional career too as things would get easy.

• Grow your connections.

Irrespective of the career you are in, at one point you need the help of your network/connections for things to move forward. You might be making career-related connections throughout your career but your hobbies will let you connect to people of different working areas.



At some point, these connections that you made through your hobbies will be useful and helpful to you.

For example, Nick is an entrepreneur by career but he loves painting and he regularly posts about his art in his social media apps. He made a few friends who love art and paint, design, photoshop for a living.

Now, at one point Nick needed a graphic designer for his company and where else to look but on the very social media that he was posting his art on and making connections.

That’s how your hobbies can help you not only with your personal development but also in your professional career.

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• They will help you break the ice.

When working for an organization you have to work with a group of people you don’t even know and it might be uncomfortable for you. And you need something to break the ice.

People really connect easily when you talk about personal stuff like hobbies because hobbies are the things that people are passionate about. Talking about hobbies with the group can make the discomfort you were facing disappear.

• Increases your capacity to imagine.

Any job requires you to have a brilliant imagination i.e you need to have a clear picture of what exactly you will be doing and how the whole thing should look when it’s done.

For example, You are a coder for a huge cybersecurity organization and you need to write a program that will counter attack any virus. You need to map out all the things that you need and you need to imagine how it will all work when it’s done.

Hobbies help you to imagine things in ways most people can’t and this very imagination will be a lot helpful in your professional career.




Written By :



Pottipalli Shreyas Raj


Career Expert at CV Owl

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