Tools for Life
In this article, we’ll talk about:
- Life as a Choose Your Own Adventure
- Active vs. Passive Hobbies
- Thinking of yourself in more holistic terms
- Where Hobbies Fit In Terms Of Your Professional Career
- Additive Hobbies
- Lifestyle Design
We’re doing this because at this point in the New Reality, there are more options than ever. You have access to a world of entertainment, and that can mean sitting in front of your computer or TV screen for hours, or it can mean you’re effectively superhuman with a range of skills, experiences and a lifestyle that people up until very recently, historically speaking, couldn’t even have dreamed of.
As always, there are pitfalls and opportunities.
And also as always, small simple things can add up to huge results for you moving forward.
Active vs. Passive Hobbies
I remember a few years ago, I was talking to a friend who told me I was the most interesting person he’d ever met. Replying that I was just a nerd, he qualified the statement by listing all the various hobbies I’d talked about recently.
The key to this is what I’ve previously written about as active versus passive hobbies.
Ever since childhood, I’ve hated not being able to do things. I also have a general curiosity about figuring out how things work. As such, when I’m exposed to something new, I’ll try and work out how to do it myself.
Discover a new type of music? I’d rather recreate it than listen to it for hours.
Hear someone talking in a language I don’t understand? It’s about time I did understand.
See some guy making a ton of money by running various internet businesses? Look how that turned out.
As such, most of my hobbies are active as opposed to passive, and generally speaking, if you want to appear interesting, or better yet, actually be interesting that’s the road you want to take.
For what it’s worth, I don’t consider myself particularly interesting, because I’m interested in all the things I don’t know. But I do a ton of things that other people find interesting, and that’s not the major benefit.
The major benefit is that, should you make the choice to actually do something with your free time instead of wasting away on largely passive activities like watching television, playing computer games or scrolling other people’s social media profiles, then your life gets better.
Additive Hobbies
If you choose well, your interests will have a cumulative effect over time. For all the talk of lifestyle design, there’s very rarely any discussion beyond various excuses for outsourcing the boring parts of life and mindlessly consuming various money-draining things and picking up random hobbies along the way. These conspicuously seem to most often be the trends of the day.
Lifestyle design is a bit harder to come by because you have to think in advance. But, like with our reality hacking guides, if you do put a little thought into stacking and planning out hobbies slightly in advance, (don’t go writing a five-year plan, it’s useless,) and with some thought as to stacking them, you can get big results from small habits.
Some easy victories you might want to think about, (and this is for example rather than prescriptive):
- Growing your own food
- General physical fitness
- Photography (We live in an Instagram-World, for better or worse,)
- Programming
Now, like I said above, those examples aren’t prescriptive; if you hate computers, you won’t learn to code very well. If you have little space, your food-growing options aren’t tremendous. And don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we become tech entrepreneur warrior-mindset dolts.
But all of the above stack well with whatever else you might be interested in. A basic programming education and some available and inexpensive technology allows you to automate little things in your life. Having a general physical fitness level means if you want to take up snowboarding or surfing or mountain climbing, you’re able to. Growing your own food gives you more control over your diet and saves you money, as well as being a good base if you want to get into cooking your own meals at a deeper level than, “reheat this pre-packaged stuff.”
Other than that, hobbies can be hugely additive depending on your own life scenario. Learning Spanish or other world languages is a great investment if you plan on travelling and it can open doors in markets and to networks and people in general unavailable to people who don’t speak that language.
Learning how to scuba-dive might seem like a hobby without particular crossover skills, and I don’t know, I can’t scuba-dive; but even then, you might use that as a basis for going on semi-paid holidays to nice place.
Speaking of which, let’s address money and hobbies.
On Profitable Side Hustles
There’s a lot of talk in the online business world about making your side hustles profitable. This is normally followed by a pitch for learning ecommerce or picking up a course or whatever.
This section is not about that, although obviously you can take any of the business skills talked about on this site and apply them to any type of business.
However, it’s important to note that not all that glitters is gold and not all that’s profit is monetary. It’s absolutely best to have hobbies that fall outside of your business interests and it’s important also to note that you can get things out of hobbies that give you immense profit in ways other than adding to your bank account.
For example, gardening. It’s an immensely useful skill and profitable in the sense that you can control your diet and grow food that suits your needs and you know its provenance entirely. It’s profitable in that wider sense. In a narrower sense, you can argue that monetarily, gardening is a valuable skill because it decreases your food bill dramatically. A packet of a hundred seeds might give you years’ worth of food for a couple of pounds.
But that’s not the point.
Decreasing costs, increased productivity; they are all a part of the old reality that we talked about elsewhere on the site. An old reality where you’re effectively reduced to a worker bee measured in terms of your productivity to the industrial system.
That reality is gone and so is that idea of you as relentless profit producing machine.
Instead, think of yourself and your life as a holistic system.
You As Holistic System
All of the above sections serve to prime you for the idea that you can consciously choose your own adventure and that you are not a passive participant in life as opposed to an active one.
You, as a human being, are designed to adapt better than any other species on the planet. In terms of the activities you choose to do and the ways you can decide to fill your time, there are an infinite amount of possible adaptations you can make in order to live a life closer to what you want.
That’s not to say that there’s some secret Law of Attraction thing going on – though there might be, I suppose – simply that, regardless of your situation, you can take actions today that will change your life in whatever direction you plan.
And if you add those actions on top of other actions, then before you know it, you’re a different person in a different place. Further to that, the more you do, the more data you have to draw from when creating your own personal narrative.
So in this section of the site, we’ll discuss different things you can try that’ll have a disproportionate additive effect for doing that.