I learned to cut my own hair out of necessity. I didn’t have money to get my hair cut, I no longer liked how my dad would cut my hair, and I didn’t want to take the time to get it cut else where. So I learned to cut it myself. This isn’t my profession, and people make a career out of cutting hair for a reason, so learning to do this myself meant messing up—a lot. Over time I figured out how to do it better and better, faster and faster.
Now when people ask where I get my hair cut, they’re surprised to hear that I do it myself. A typical response from a friend is, “can you cut my hair?” The answer is always no. Telling people that I cut my own hair and then promptly denying their request for me to cut theirs even if they offer me money usually comes off as rude. But this links back to the beginning, I learned to cut my own hair out of necessity not because I was seeking to pursue this as a career.
In high school I started to learn more about code and web development because I was curious about it and I also couldn’t afford to pay someone to build websites for me. Even with my current site, at the time of building it, it made more sense to build it myself than to hire someone. Much with cutting my hair, I’ve built lots of terrible web stuff over the years. Even now that I’m slightly more comfortable with it, I don’t offer web development as a service to clients.
All of this is to say, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should offer it as a service. Hire a professional when you can, and learn to do it yourself when you can’t. Never be afraid to learn new things, but at the end of the day, know what it is that you’re both good at and passionate about, and learn to say no to the things that take you away from that.