The Value of Doing ‘Unnecessary’ Things

It’s 11 pm on Thursday night. I just wrapped up the 9th meeting of the day. I was about to crash when a friend messaged. Too tired to talk, I ignored, but he called anyway — he needed advice.

He’s been job hunting for months and finally got an offer for a customer support role. His dream, though? Product Management. His question: “Will this job actually bring me closer to my goal?”

That got me thinking — does everything you do really need to make sense right now?

ChatGPT generated image. Aesthetics and Alt texts are important, anon

I was rewatching one of Steve Jobs’ speeches recently. He once took a random calligraphy class in college. Years later, when building the Macintosh, he introduced fonts to personal computing (which Windows copied later). If he’d done a SWOT analysis before taking that class, maybe we wouldn’t have fonts in Google Docs today.

And then I started reflecting on my own life. All those so-called “unnecessary” skills I picked up that I never thought I’d use — turns out, I use them every single day.

Photoshop → Tool Proficiency

Back in school, I missed sports day. My friends took hundreds of pictures, and I had major FOMO. So I taught myself Photoshop just to add myself into those group shots. What started as a silly hack got me onto college design teams. And once you learn Photoshop, every other design tool feels like a cakewalk. Now I can pick up any design tool in hours, not weeks.

Architecture → Tech Career

I majored in Architecture. The course drilled design principles into my bones. Louis Sullivan taught me “Form follows function” long before I heard “Usability over aesthetics.” That foundation helped me slip into UI/UX and product design — and eventually into tech. If I’d studied Marine Engineering or Biotech instead? Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be right now.

Architecture Deadlines → Startup Grind

In architecture school, going 2–3 days without proper sleep before jury submissions was normal. Two all-nighters running purely on caffeine was just Tuesday. So when I joined a startup and had to ship features under insane deadlines, it felt like home. Where others burned out, I thrived. (Unhealthy? Absolutely. But that rigor wired me to survive chaos.)

College Sponsorships → Partnerships & Strategy

In college, I used to go from shop to shop collecting sponsorships for events. Awkward pitches to skeptical shop owners taught me to sell, negotiate, and keep relationships alive even after rejection. Fast forward to today — guess who is leading partnerships and strategy at my workplace, using those exact same skills.

Looking back, none of it was unnecessary. Every random thing I picked up eventually stitched itself into who I am today. We only call them “unnecessary things” until they become the most useful things we’ve ever learned.

So maybe that customer support role isn’t a detour. Maybe it’s just another thread in a tapestry you can’t see yet.