about hobbies

Professionalising my free time is one of the best decisions I ever made. Let me explain.

Any Friday in 2019, 3pm, the call would always come in at 3pm. "Alex, what are you up to this weekend?", my cousin Alex on the other end of the phone, "The usual, no plans but let's do something". The call would then follow a 10 minute brainstorm session with all the plans we could do, ride bikes, sail, ski, go fishing, hike or anything in between; but there was always one key factor that never changed, all these plans had an objective, a goal.

The goal could be riding from point A to point B in X amount of time, crossing this mountain range on skis, fishing a specific type of fish, fixing a bike with enough time to ride to X place. Over the years we ended up creating almost a hundred mini goal-based adventures one could do in a single weekend. Then we wanted to get more friends involved, so we (sort-of) professionalised it.

Every year, about 20 of us or so get together in December and plan out the weekend adventures for the following year, we list them all in a shared Google calendar. Before the year starts, everyone knows when each adventure is happening and can plan ahead.

The result: we've managed to spend so many weekends together, enjoying our company through great mini-adventures, building great friendships, facing hardships, laughing our arses off and even taking those friendships into business plans.

We like to take life seriously, and by that I mean we take the art of living seriously.