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.

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.

Let me explain what that means.

In your normal every day life, your body is usually relaxed, muscles are not intense, you aren’t preparing for an attack or anything. Your strength level (or energy level) is at 1. 1 out of 10.

When you are – for example – defending yourself  from someone, and you go for an attack, ideally you want to hit them with your full strength/energy. That would be a 10. 10 out of 10.

In martial arts sparring/fight, ideally you want your body to be at a state of 1. Relaxed and focused. Then when make the hit, you jump to 10, then go back to 1 after the hit. This will preserve energy and stamina, while ensuring you are hitting with the full mighty strength you have. 

Right as you are hitting, for a split second, your entire body is tightened. Every muscle is clutching. You are exerting tremendous pressure internally to every part of your body. So that it all comes out as concentrated energy in the punch or kick you are performing.  

Before that split second, when you start the movement, your stomach is already doing the same thing. We keep that pressure exertion in the stomach until the movement ends. 

Similarly, when you are defending against a punch or a kick, your stomach becomes like a rock for a second, and the body part you are using to defend.

Now imagine doing this in every move, in every practice and fight. Every time someone is punching a mat, this whole motion happens. Every time someone kicks a sandbag, this motion happens. The entire practice time is basically 1000s of these split second moments. 

Even when doing a Kata, this is true. Even though they look like static movements. They are meant to be practiced in that way. 

Where are we going with all of this? 
The other day, I suddenly got this epiphany in the gym, trying to apply Pavel's advice. It suddenly clicked. Why are martial arts practitioners so strong? Yes, it’s the punching and kicking and the push ups and the setups. But if we dig deeper, it’s the underlaying immense strength that these practitioners exert on their bodies, for 100s or 1000s of split seconds per session. Over time, it builds up incredible strength in the body. 

What if careers were the same? What if life was the same?

What if, the normal cycle is to get a job, spend a sizable amount of time (10-20 years) building hobbies and side hustles until you become good enough at them, that you are comfortable leaving your current job if you want to, and try out other things?

I am looking at this from my own lenses of course.

I haven't been "investing" in outside hobbies and side hustles that much. Hence, I feel that my career is dependent on whatever my current job is, or the expertise that I have. The risk is that my work portfolio is not "diversified" enough, or hasn't reached that threshold of comfort.

Personal finance teaches you to be disciplined and consistent in your investing. DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) and automation (“set it and forget it“) are major techniques/mindsets that will contribute to your wealth expanding over time.

Of course, life is much more complicated than investing a few dollars once a month automatically. But the discipline stays the same. If you decide the hobby you want to invest in (i.e the ETF), then one can decide the frequency and amount of time they want to invest in. Then decide how to make it as frictionless as possible to do this hobby with such frequency. Lastly, to do it.

Results will show themselves over time.

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. 

Have fun reading!

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.

I have read somewhere an encouragement to start automating small daily tasks. Just to get a feel for automation, and to free up that mind space. So in that spirit, I saved my self 5 minutes a day, and more minutes at the beginning of the week because I have to do weekend emails as well. (using Microsoft Power Automate)

But let me explain how really this made a difference.

The process used to be:

1. Open email.
2. Find the particular report email from 30 other similar ones. (I later has them filed automatically by the system into folders).
3. Download the file.
4. Rename the file and add yesterday's date.
5. Move it to the folder needed.
6. Make a copy to the team's folder.
7. Repeat for the 2 more that are already there.
8. Repeat for 1 more that comes in the afternoon. (So I have to be conscious of the time, as the team does not have access to that particular report, and having it in the team's folder is important)
   

Now, each process may take less than a minute. But that is already some precious processing power that I am wasting in the early morning just to do this. In addition to being conscious about the afternoon report. 

In addition to coming out of the weekends and downloading different dates, and making sure I am note missing up the dates when renaming the files.

In addition to coming back from long holidays where I have to be extra careful with the naming...etc.

All of that now costs me 0 minutes. 
In effect, I have saved up around 21 hours a year of just that simple daily work. 

More importantly, coming back from a weekend or a holiday, I don't have a mess to deal with. My team has access all the time to the latest up-to-date reports.

This has now opened new doors in my mind to explore ways to automate. I might post some other examples in the future.

How do you tackle such an issue?

After some consultation, it was determined that I should go spend a day in each showroom. Write some observations and notes. Evaluations, maybe. The person who gave the consultation probably had a more mature idea of having evaluation sheets be ready beforehand and looking at certain aspects. I did prepare a bit, but honestly went in blindly and decided to work things out once I am there.

Surprise, surprise, after visiting 10+ branches, I ended up with 50,000 words and 20GB of media data.

How the heck did that happen? The power of taking notes.

Back in my previous job in F&B, it was part of the job to go to different countries to determine suitability for franchising. Part of that visit is to eat out from different cuisines and different popular restaurants. It's called food tasting. Sounds fun, but it's tiring.

Every time we went into a restaurant, I had to take many many notes on the phone from start to finish. The person who was with me was 20 years in the business. So, all those notes I am logging, for him it is just a mental exercise. Counting the number of chairs, the number of customers, the customer segment, observing decor, menu price, menu content, food taste, salty or not, how good, how authentic, fitout quality, waiters attitude....etc. Even during eating I would just write.

As there was no luxury of writing things slowly, I had to write as we ate, and do that for every place we went. This is in addition to general notes about malls and other locations. This is all, of course, accompanied with pictures.

This developed the habit of writing every day's notes in one single note, and cleverly leaving timestamps and keywords that I can go back to.

This allowed the ability to go back to notes and refer to things. In my discussions, and reports, etc.

But that was it. This time, I scaled all of this. It was an intense 2-week exercise. Every showroom has one single note with thousands of words, and hundreds of images/videos.

Just like in F&B, I was standing all day, taking notes of anything and everything. Talking to staff? take notes. Customer walks in? take notes. Staff is doing a certain process? take notes.

As a result, my questions became deeper and deeper as the days passed. More direct and more touching of pain points. Accompanied with visuals of actual operations.

Furthermore, I started organizing all of this data. (took a few more weeks longer than expected). All these raw notes were moved into a more organized Excel file with many sheets and many columns of issues and descriptions. 200+ issues, 200+ ideas, 100+ notes from staff. All kinds of filtrations were applied. It was eventually distilled to 4 categories and 40+ projects. Which we are working on now.

What about the images and videos? Those were organized into showroom folders, each folder is semi-standardized. I can go to any folder at any moment and get a walk-through video of a location. There are folders for products, printables, fitout related issues. All kinds of things.

What did this do to me? Similar to what happened in F&B, my knowledge of the situation has skyrocketed. It put me in a better position to discuss, present ideas, and connect to the right person/place when needed. This time, the visual part was organized as well, so it made it easier to pull up examples of things.

To dig deeper, it was a defense mechanism, against the unknown. Literally, my thinking was “how can I clear as much of this unknown as possible within the shortest amount of time?”. Going into excruciating details is my current motto of doing things.

I think this was inspired by real-world examples of people who delve into extreme details, like Mr. Beast and how he and his friends dissected YouTube in very intricate details, or Elon Musk and how he can be extremely detail oriented about specific engineering problems.

Joe Rogan interview with Mr. Beast (go to 6:40)

Also, this was to build intensity into work. Going into a new role requires momentum. This was one way to start strong and have enough momentum to carry on over the first few months until we can get work rolling.

— Mutaz