Follow your curiosity

Kajanan Nithiyananthan -

One of the things that brings me the greatest joy in life is feeling excited.

Excitement for me can be brought about by many different things.

Some days that means sitting at my desk and journalling my reflections on life. Some days that means going for a long walk and trying to snap some aesthetic photos on my Ricoh GR III. And some days that means playing Catan with friends and chatting absolute shit.

Do you ever feel so excited by what you're doing that you're genuinely disappointed when it's time to go to bed?

On the flip side, do you ever wake up dreading having to get out of bed because it means another day working at a job that you don't enjoy?

If these are things that you, like I, feel, then perhaps it's a sign that we're not following our excitement and curiosity as much as we should be.

So what's the antidote?

Freedom.

Freedom of time.

Freedom to be able to do whatever we want to whenever we want to.

How does one achieve freedom of time?

Here's a useful exercise that I recently completed.

Let's think about how we spend our time.

There are around 24 hours in the day.

In my life, the average day has:

  • Getting to sleep = 0.5 hours
  • Cleaning and self-care (including meditation, showering, brushing teeth, journalling etc.) = 1 hour
  • Exercise = 1 hour
  • Eating = 1 hour
  • Transport = 1 hour
  • Chores (including meal prep, laundry, cleaning the house etc.) = 1 hour
  • Leisure (including time with family and friends, pursuing curiosity, side projects like YouTube etc.) = 1 hour
  • Work (placement/work at the hospital) = 8 hours
  • Sleep = 8 hours

Of course, there's a lot of wasted time in between, because rarely do I move from one task straight into the next. But generally speaking, these are the major categories of how I spend my time.

Of these, what are the things I am happy to do?

Cleaning & self-care + exercise +eating + preparing for sleep + leisure + sleep = 14 hours.

(However, I'd love to increase my leisure time).

What things do I accept as inevitable or do I feel ambivalent about?

Transport + 1/2 chores = 1.5 hours.

What things do I wish I didn't have to do?

Work + 1/2 chores = 8.5 hours.

With regards to work, it's not even that I hate it. It's just that:

  1. I get more excitement from doing other things,
  2. I'm locked into working the hours that I am rostered by the hospital without any freedom, and
  3. I feel stagnant in what I do at the hospital.

So the obvious answer to spending more time on the things I want would be to either quit my job or at least drop my hours at work, and pay for someone to do my chores, right?

But the issue is I can't afford to do any of these things because I have no other source of income.

And this is the crux of the issue. Money.

If I had enough money, it would allow me to live life on my own terms and spend more time pursuing things that bring me excitement.

Naturally, the next question is:

what's my number?

I've done some calculations and if, at the time I had a family, I had AU$600K in net income, that would allow me to live a life of absolute freedom.

Yes that's an exorbitant amount and realistically I wouldn't need that much to be free. But as I've previously talked about, I don't just want freedom of time, I also want freedom of lifestyle i.e. to be able to spend money on things I want without having to even think about the cost (I'm specifically referring to travelling [in relative luxury] because that's the major expense I foresee as limiting the lifestyle I want to live).

So how do I get there?

There's 3 main avenues:

  1. High-paying job that fills me with excitement (extremely unlikely)
  2. AU$40M in principal thereby allowing me to live off the dividends (extremely unlikely squared)
  3. Starting a business, or multiple with over $600K in net profit (possible)

Therefore, to become wealthy, the best pathway is to start a business.

But I've never really done anything entrepreneurial beyond content creation.

And that's where this newsletter comes into play.

For the past two years I've been on and off with making YouTube videos. I've grown my channel to 250 subscribers, but I've realised I hate playing the game of maximising CTR and audience retention. So I've delegated YouTube to be a creative outlet for me (at this point in time).

Instead, I'm going to focus on building an audience on Twitter and through my email newsletter by learning in public.

Through actively trying to learn more about entrepreneurship, I hope to identify a problem that I feel uniquely skilled to tackle.

And even if I don't, I hope the content I create is valuable enough that I'm able to create an income stream from it.

Because for me, the goal isn't FIRE. It's just FI. At this stage of my life, I don't want to retire early.

I just want to be paid for pursuing my ongoing curiosity and excitement.

And content creation is a great way to do this.