When you’re looking for a career, it might feel weird to focus on something so simple as ensuring you’re working with your hands. However, small desires like this can help you to find a job that would be well suited to you. After all, if you want to work with your hands, then there is doubtless a reason why. This article aims to investigate your options when it comes to working with your hands as well as a few benefits of hands-on working.
Think About Your Options
There are quite a range of options when it comes to working with your hands, and you would be surprised at how much good it can do you. When it comes right down to it, however, there are three main paths that you can take to get more hands-on work in your life.
Change Your Career. First and foremost, you can look into your options to change into a career with more hands-on work. This is an extreme path to take, but if you are absolutely certain that hands-on work is the right thing for you, then there are plenty of options available to you. Plus, it can often do you a lot of good to make sure that you don’t commit yourself entirely to a single career. Change often helps us grow in more ways than we would expect.
Pursue a Hobby. Alternatively, if you’re looking for something a little less intensive, you might want to engage in a hands-on hobby instead. This is a quick and easy way to make sure that you are getting more hands-on work in your life. Plus, there is no inherent danger to taking up a new and interesting hobby. The only income you are likely to lose is what you spend on your hobby, which is far easier to predict and control.
Build a Side Hustle. Last but certainly not least, if you are looking for a happy middle ground between these two options, then you might want to think about building your own side hustle. This would allow you to engage with plenty of hands-on work and make a little bit of cash while you’re at it. The best of both worlds. What’s more, you can add the income of your side hustle to your existing income from your job, which is a nice little bonus.
The Benefits of Working with Your Hands
You might not think it, but there are actually plenty of benefits that you can reap from simply working with your hands. It’s more than likely that you’ve experienced some of these benefits after engaging with physical work, but you might not understand exactly what or why. A few of the most impactful benefits you can expect from working with your hands are outlined below, but it is far from a comprehensive list.
Boosts Your Productivity. First things first, the act of working with your hands can actually do a lot to make you feel more productive as an individual. The feeling of being productive and the boost in mood that comes with it can actually help to improve your productivity even more. This means that by engaging with hands-on work where you can see the progress you are making, you can help to boost how effective you are in almost every other aspect of your life.
Makes You Happier. On top of that, the rush of serotonin that you experience from completing these tasks can help to boost your mood, making you feel happier. Plus, the boost to your productivity and the opportunity to engage with tasks you enjoy can also help to further improve your mood and help you to lead the happiest life you can. After all, what is life without passion?
Keeps You Creative. An underappreciated benefit of working with your hands in this way is that it can help to keep you more creative. A vivid and creative mind is an incredibly important asset and can help you to achieve far more than you possibly could without that creativity. After all, when you are able to tackle a problem in a new and interesting way, you can often find new and interesting solutions.
Considering Potential Careers
There are plenty of potential careers that you could engage with in order to be more hands-on. These are widely varied and incredibly interesting ways to work. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this article to examine every potential hands-on career you could pursue, so a handful of interesting options are outlined here. Just be sure to keep in mind that this is far from an exhaustive list.
Becoming an Engineer. A fantastic career for those looking to work with their hands is engineering. The art of designing, developing, and building machines and structures, this industry is easily among the best possible ways to get into hands-on work.
Of course, if you are looking to become an engineer, then you are going to want to consider your education as well. There are plenty of online degrees that you could engage with in order to start yourself on the path toward engineering. For example, an online masters degree in lean manufacturing could be a great start to your engineering career.
After all, the best way to break into a new career and do well is to ensure that you know what you’re doing and that you can prove it to the people who matter.
Becoming a Mechanic. Alternatively, if you’re looking for a more relaxing, less full-on hands-on career, then you might want to consider the possibility of becoming a mechanic. Well, this is by no means an easy job to do. It is far less involved than something like engineering.
Often the best way to break into this career is by finding an apprenticeship and learning on the job. After all, mechanics are always going to be in high demand, and by finding one that is willing to teach you, you can learn the most important aspects of the job firsthand. Which is often the best way to learn something so hands-on.
Becoming a Handyperson. On the other hand, if you are looking for a career that is a little bit more flexible, then you might want to consider becoming a freelance handyperson. Everyone will need at least a little bit of handiwork done around their house now and then, which means there is almost always going to work for a handyperson.
Of course, you would first need to ensure that you have the necessary skill for the handiwork you are looking to do. Learning to work with electronics and with plumbing and be an incredibly effective way to prepare you for this kind of career. Plus, these are the jobs that people are most likely to call in an external contractor to complete.
One of the most important things that you need to keep in mind is that your reputation is your livelihood as a freelance handyperson. You are most likely to find work through word of mouth, and that means that you need to leave satisfied customers at every job that you go to. After all, nobody wants to recommend a handy person who didn’t complete their work to a high standard.
Getting Involved with Hobbies
Alternatively, if a good hobby is what you would rather start doing, then there are plenty of hands-on and creative hobbies. Not only can these be a lot of fun to engage with, but they can also be a brilliant way to kick back and cut out some of the stress in your life.
Pottery. If you like to work with your hands and you want to create something interesting, then pottery can be a truly engaging and fascinating hobby to take up. There is a lot of skill involved in creating pottery from clay, which means that you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the results you want.
However, it is said that adversity is the mother of invention, and the difficulty that you experience with pottery at first is sure to make your achievements all the sweeter later on. It is common for people to lose momentum or interest in a hobby if they aren’t good at it quickly. But if you stick with pottery, you will learn a skill that many will never manage.
Woodworking. Alternatively, if you prefer wood to clay, then you might want to get involved in the hobby of woodworking. This can be an incredibly engaging, hands-on hobby and a brilliant way to start building far more practical crafts. After all, there isn’t a lot that you can’t do with woodworking. You can even build your own furniture.
Sport. Last but not least, if you want a more social element to the hobby that you engage in, then the sport can be a brilliant option for you. Not only is it a great way to start working with your hands, but it is also a fantastic option to hang out with your friends more often. Social engagement and regular exercise are both incredibly important to your health, and a good sport takes care of both at once.
Creating Your Side Hustle
Finally, with the right dedication, you could even begin to build your own side hustle way. You work with your hands. In fact, almost any hobby that you can do with your hands could be turned into a career if you were interested, but there are certain side hustles that are better suited to the physically adept. A handful of these hands-on side hustles are detailed below.
Selling Sculptures. If you have a passion for art and are able to create good-looking sculptures, then one of the best things that you could do while working with your hands is to start selling those sculptures. Not only can this be a brilliant way to start making money from your passions, but it can also be a fantastic way to start working with your hands in a more effective way.
There are plenty of groups online that would be happy to pay a fair amount for a good sculpture of particular items. For example, those who are interested in tabletop RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons could be a brilliant source of income, as they generally like a good number of props for their games.
Websites like Etsy can help to enable you to sell your products online, but you will need to be sure that you can produce your sculptures to a high quality in order to engage with this kind of industry. Fortunately, practice makes perfect, and if you want to engage with this as a hobby before you make it into a side hustle, that can be a brilliant way to boost your skill.
Personal Training. If you are in good shape and you know how to help other people get in good shape, too, then a brilliant side hustle career that you might want to consider is to go into personal training.
Of course, you would likely have to become qualified properly in order to start charging for these services, but that would likely be well worth the cost, particularly if exercise is something you enjoy anyway.
Plus, by getting yourself fully qualified and ready to start personal training, you would likely learn plenty of new and improved health tips yourself. These can be a brilliant resource to help yourself get into even better shape while also allowing you to begin building plans to help others get into the best shape possible.
Gardening. Last but not least, if you love to see things grow, then one of the best sides hustles that you could get involved with is the art of gardening. People love to have extravagant and verdant gardens but often detest the work that goes into them. After all, people are very busy, and gardening takes quite a while if you want it to look spectacular.
All of this means that you could offer your services as an experienced gardener and make quite a bit of money if you have the skill to back it up. After all, the only thing more rewarding than seeing a plant grow after hard work is seeing both plants and your account balance grow.
