Your skills are worth more than you think

A yoga instructor's story about walking away from accounting, and what it says about the skills we all overlook in ourselves.

The accountant who teaches yoga

My yoga instructor wrote a blog post last week. It was about how he became a yoga instructor, and it wasn't the story I expected.

He comes from a family of accountants. Chartered accountants, several generations of them. He did his undergrad in India, then came to Australia for his MBA. Met his wife on day four at UTS, which is its own story.

Somewhere in there, he realised he didn't want to be a chartered accountant. He'd always had dance, yoga, cricket. Not as hobbies exactly. More like the things that were true about him the whole time, sitting underneath the career he was supposed to want.

The part that stuck with me

A lot of us end up doing this. We pick a direction early, before we really know what we're good at, and then we spend years finding out whether it fits.

You don't have to blow it all up. Most of us can't, and honestly most of us don't want to. But it's worth asking whether there's something else in there. Something you're already doing, already good at, that never got treated like it counted.

I think passion is a better guide to skill than we give it credit for. We assume the two are separate: what we're good at is one thing, what we love is another. But the things we keep coming back to, the things we'd do even if no one paid us, usually turn out to be the things we're genuinely good at too. That's not a coincidence. Attention compounds. Ten years of doing something because you love it looks a lot like ten years of practice.

What that means practically

You probably already have one of these. The thing you're good at because you never stopped doing it. Baking for every birthday in the office. Fixing bikes for anyone who asks. Being the one who always has the right plant advice.

It doesn't have to become your whole career. My yoga instructor still does the accounting side of running a studio, he just does it for something he actually loves teaching. Somewhere between "hobby" and "quit your job" there's a version where you find out if the thing you're good at is worth something to other people too.

That's the bit Picklo is for. Not the leap, just the finding out.