If you want to be a CFI then do it. If not, don't... That simple.... But you truly don't know what you don't know until you try to teach it.... or better yet, teach something wrong and be corrected by a fellow CFI, Chief, or student.... Then you begin to realize that you don't know squat...... talk about humbling....
Training for and getting your CFI teaches alot to you. Even if you never use it, it is never money wasted. You will learn alot, more then you would think. And it will make you a better pilot, period. Is it the end all? Of course not. But you will learn.... it's finally putting everything together and then trying to teach people of all types and I mean all types, ages, etc. to fly.....
Aerobatics is great, and I am a huge proponent of pilots getting trained in aerobatics for the experience and knowledge gained. Plus it is a blast.
However, overall mastery of a skill comes afte many hours and studying many disciplines. CFI, aerobatics, instrument flying are many skills and it will take a long time to master anyone of them..., let alone combining those skills to create a good professional pilot. I call it tools in the tool box. The more tools you have, the better you are to handle a given situation.....
I think of where I was three years ago, to where I am now in skill, knowledge and mastery. It was the CFI (at first), then the 2000 plus hours of instructing that taught me the most (at all levels). The ability to teach people of all walks of life to fly and to interact with them and see things going bad, long before they do, is something that takes time and experience. And there is no short cuts to aquiring these skill sets. Is it always fun? No. But it is always a learning experience. Even when you think that there is nothing more to learn (for yourself), there is. You may not even realize it. The learning by you is incidental to the teaching by you, but learning is still occuring.
And you will learn more in your first two weeks of teaching, then anything you have done before in your flying. Then as your skills and certs increase (as does you hours), so does your knowledge. Usually your best learning experiences come from mistakes that you made with your students. At my flight school, believe me when I say that we are called out on our mistakes. This is done for many reasons, but first and foremost, it is because our bosses want us to be the best we can be. And they want students trained by our school to have quality instruction. Long story short, we care. And we want to do it right.
I consider myself a good CFI with a descent amount of experience. I am a CFI/CFII whom also teaches tailwheel and aerobatics. And I love doing it. But it wasn't until I had been teaching at one level for a while that I was able to move up to the next. I got good at one thing, and then went to the next level and the next.
Are there better out there? Without a doubt. I just try to do the best I can and learn more and more all the time to be even better. And there is sooooo much more to learn. Nice thing about aviation, is that you will never truly know everything. We can only hope to know more then we did the day before.....
The moral of my ramblings is this. All training is good training and all experience is good (whether or not we think so at the time). CFI is not the only way. I just don't know another way to begin to master a skill, as when one teaches the skill.
The original poster is young and has admitted as much. Alot of us here are a bit older with a little or a lot of gray in the hair (if we still have it). They will learn what we have. All we can do is give advice and hope they will take some of it as being good. From there it is up to them. As far as being humble, well, time takes care of that as well.... One way or another.
opcorn: anyone want some soda?
