Has a hobby ever surprised you by making you better at your job?

So, one of my slightly mad hobbies is "Homelabbing," the bizarre practice of building a datacenter in your home for no good reason.

I’ve spent years marketing enterprise IT and data center concepts, and I thought I understood my audience. Then I started building and running the technology myself. 

Nothing teaches you about uptime quite like providing critical services to a family with less patience than any CEO. And you don’t fully appreciate the trauma of data loss until you’re performing disaster recovery on your family’s entire photo library.   😟💾

It’s taught me a huge amount technically, but the biggest change has been empathy. Concepts like resilience, simplicity, and recoverability feel very different when the people waiting for a fix live in your house.

What hobby has unexpectedly made you better at your day job?