Two questions sort any skill. Will people pay for it? Will it still matter in ten years? The answers tell you whether to go deep, keep it as a hobby, or drop it.

The four outcomes

Pays and lasts. Go deep. This is where career capital accumulates, and depth compounds — each year of it makes the next year's learning faster and the work more valuable.

Pays now, will not last. Use it and do not build an identity on it. Specific platforms, specific tools, specific regulatory quirks. Earn from it while the window is open and be honest that it is a window.

Lasts but does not pay. Keep it as a hobby and stop calling it career development. There is nothing wrong with it; the error is expecting it to produce income because it required effort.

Neither. Drop it. The only reason it is still on the list is that you already started.

Answering the questions

Will people pay? Someone already does — find them. If nobody pays for it today, the market you are imagining requires evidence before it requires investment.

Will it last? The reliable test is whether the skill sits close to a durable human problem. Persuading people, understanding money, diagnosing what is actually wrong, writing clearly — these have been valuable for a very long time and the trend is stable. Skills attached to a specific tool inherit that tool's lifespan.

The pairing rule

The largest returns come from combining a durable skill with a current one. Deep understanding of how businesses make money, plus fluency in whatever tools are current, is worth more than either alone — the durable skill decides what to do and the current one executes it.

Choose the durable one as your base, and refresh the current layer without mistaking it for the foundation. See deliberate practice.