EEDA Newsletter Vol 5, Iss 8: Transferable Skills Aren't Just for Work
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Hi friends! While I am not a huge fan of warm weather and I am allergic to anything and everything that blooms, I’m trying not to let Spring get the best of me. My tulips are huge and still intact, my pink lemon tree has blossoms all over it, and our bay laurel has multiple explosions of new growth. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’m better at outdoor gardening than indoor gardening. I have tried multiple times without success to keep a small herb garden indoors and so this weekend we decided to recognize my/our strength and we potted a bunch of herbs and made a little herb garden out of cement blocks and two-by-fours on our patio.
I haven’t fully given up on indoor plants, of course, and earlier this week I bought my first African violets. I’ve a loved one named Violet and my grandmother had a large collection of African violets so I’m going to try my hand at them.
I’m going to keep the theme going and talk about playing to our strengths. While I am constantly learning more about anti-capitalism and trying to walk more toward leisure and away from the constant need to be productive, I have noticed a trend both in myself and some of my friends. We have some amazing professional skills that we have learned and cultivated and use in our day jobs. We talk so much about transferable skills with regards to what can help us earn a paycheck. We sometimes give the best of ourselves to our jobs and if you’re into that and that works for you, then cool!
Personally, I’ve been thinking about how I try to use what I’m good at for work to make our lives easier at home or perhaps ways in which I can help my loved ones and community. I am absolutely not talking about working for free. I am thinking more about how, in my day job, I deal with information that includes dollar amounts and wealth and assets and how my comfort with that makes it easier for me to be the one in our household to manage our finances. I think about how my wife, Nicole, is a spreadsheet sorceress and she made a phenomenal tracking spreadsheet with various kinds of functions that I can use to track all the advanced reader copies I get from publicists. For my birthday, Nicole used her research skills honed in grad school to make me really fucking cool gift. For her birthday last year, I wrote a piece of short fiction just for her and had it printed professionally.
I remember a DuckTales episode when Scrooge McDuck said, “Work smarter, not harder” and that was the first time I had heard that phrase. It stuck with me and I try to apply it in all the life that happens outside of work. I fully understand if it gives you the ick to think about connecting anything you do in your day job to your life outside of work, but I’m hoping this reframe might help some of you in similar ways that it has helped me.
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