A realization hit me one day, very recently, about hobbies. See, I am in my mid-thirties, haven't really built a hobby portfolio, and is focusing on my career. Personal finance has been an important part of my life the past few years.
One of the simple core ideas of personal finance is investing in assets that will yield you passive income overtime, until this passive income reaches a breaking point of surpassing your salary income. This is what people generally call financial freedom.
Due to the laws of compound interest and how it works, the earlier you start investing, the easier it is to reach this goal. Like-wise, the more you invest in the beginning, the faster you will get to your goal.
This got me thinking, what if hobbies and day jobs have a similar relationship. Maybe more of with retirement. A lot of people around me reach the age of retirement without having built any lasting hobbies on the side. It leads to this sudden hollowness. It's hard to suddenly loose 10 hours of your day that you have spent 35-40 years filling with work.
In the original idea sparking thought, I was thinking that hobbies could replace a day job over time. Not always. But say you like some sort of art. If you spent 10-15 years cultivating that hobby, there is a chance it could be monetized. Maybe it could be monetized to the level that it replaces parts of the salary income. Together with proper investment practices, these two could work together wonderfully.
Long time ago, I heard this bit in Tim Ferriss’s interview with Pavel Tsatsouline, who was a physical-training instructor for Spetnaz back in the 1980, about strength training.
Everything but your neck and face. Everything below your neck, you’re going to contract. It’s not for folks with high blood pressure, heart condition, and that’s true for pretty much any type of training. But for everybody else, it’s an extremely powerful tool.
So you get down in a plank. You make fists, okay? You contract your abs. You contract your gluts. You contract your entire body. You pretend that somebody’s gonna walk by and kick you in the ribs, which again, somebody might, at least in my course.
And Andy Bolton and other top power lifters [inaudible] this technique. They swear by this. Because this is the abdominal training for strength. This is not just some nonsense that you do cranking out the reps.
So to sum up your abdominal training, find whatever abdominal exercises that you like. It can be the plank, it can be some kind of a sit-up. It can be something from your book, The Four Hour Body. It can be from my book, The Hard Style Abs. It can be something else. That’s not important, as long as it’s a good exercise that’s been recognized that it does work.
And three times a week, do three to five sets of three to five reps. Okay, folks? Just remember this. Three to five sets of three to five reps. Focus on contraction. Don’t focus on fatigue. Don’t focus on the reps. And I promise, if you do these two things for several months – you work your grip in this manner. You work your abs in this manner. Everything that you do today is gonna be stronger. I don’t care what it is. It’s a bigger deadlift. It’s a tennis serve. It makes no difference. You’re gonna be stronger.
I understood it inherently, but never thought deeply about it, until I made a connection today. See, back in college days, I used to practice Kyokushin Karate. One very critical element in practicing martial arts is the ability to go from 1 to 10.
An interesting thought went through my mind the other day. In personal finance, the goal is to grow your passive income, by means of investing, until it can support your lifestyle, and give yourself the freedom of choosing not to take a salary, and live off that passive income.
What if careers were the same? What if life was the same?
I am committing to writing 50 blog posts until the end of this year, 2025.
That is basically one post every 3 days-ish.
It's July already. Or the beginning of a new Hijri year. Whatever half of the cup you want to look at is fine. The point is, we are here.
This is the 4th time I try blogging. Every time I start, I want to write long form posts. Every time it does not work out. Topics are carefully chosen, so stamina didn't last that long. I never committed to any number, either. This time, I am. Announcing in a public forum, like the internet, is one of those great accountability techniques I heard about. Happy to try them out.
The goal is 50 blog posts. It's the quantity this time, not the quality (as much). That is the critical mass I would use to judge whether I should continue with blogging or not.
I can happily announce that downloading report files, that are sent from the system daily, are now being automatically downloaded to the folder of my choice.
What possible benefit would that have?
Well, that is my first baby step toward the world of automation. Long time ago, the team and I tried using Zapier to automate some things, but our work didn't really have that much of repetitiveness, and wasn't structured within a locked system. So it was oly the knowledge that something as beautiful as that existed. Fast forward to present day, we have daily system reports delivered to our inbox. Most are useless, but 3-4 of those are important. Some of which we need as is, some of which we need as a source for our dashboard.
Recently, I worked on an observation/research project. I just moved from the project I was heading to another one in retail. We had several showrooms and I needed to understand what was going on in these showrooms in the fastest and deepest way possible.
This will be my 4th? 5th (maybe) attempt at blogging. This will be a place to gather my thoughts regarding random topics and experiences. Enjoy the journey.