Honesty is the best policy. Not because it is the most profitable, but because it is the most honest. Recursive argument, but a true one.
This blog was called LifeETC by Momekh, and now is called JustAddVenture by Momekh.
The blog is about being creatively self employed to live a life of adventure.
Defining a Life of Adventure
What is a life of adventure? I say it to mean having the time and money to pursue your hobbies.
This is the simplest definition I can come up with although I’ve been guilty of successfully producing more complex (hence useless) definitions.
Location independence and Financial Freedom is the perfect mix to live a happier life. Your work becomes your leisure and your leisure becomes your work. This is not some Utopian concept; I live it. By God’s Grace.
Goes without saying (although I am going to say it), if I can do it, surely anyone can do it. I’ve never held a job in my life (except maybe two 6-month stints while at college), I am what you call extremely unemployable. I have a B.Sc. in Computer Science (a topic I love) but have a 7+ years experience in running a farming operation (and 15+ other small, hardly-profitable enterprises). All in all, by God’s Grace, I would not choose to live any other life, although I’ve considered giving up at times. So yeah, if I can do it, so can you. You can probably do it much better. As so many others do.
Hobbies are what turn into professions. People who pursued their interests and did it with professionalism. It is my contention that our professions should grow from our hobbies. I plan to write more about hobbies turning into profession, and how one can make money from their hobbies.
We take hobbies very lightly unfortunately, and pay no importance to treating them like professions. In fact, many of us do not know the difference between a profession and a business!
My main agenda with this blog
My main agenda with this blog is to get people on my email list. Why? So I can get help in spreading my idea of living a life of adventure. The idea of “living a life of adventure” is not mine in the sense that it originated in my head; it’s mine because I have chosen to promote it.
Why am I promoting this idea? Because I am living it. By God’s Grace. And so far (10+ years into it), it is going great. I want to share this, tell it to the world, perhaps contribute. Standing on soap boxes and singing on rooftops is old fashioned; writing is the weapon of choice. Hence the blog.
Two primary reasons for writing and maintaining this blog, in order of priority:
- Because I truly believe that one can benefit from even a half-hearted attempt at living a life of adventure. One can pick up concepts that can, in reality, change their lives for the better. I have seen it work, and hence makes sense for me to write and talk about it (see Rules on Giving Advice below)
- I believe that I can make some money by either recommending products to the people who are on the email list, or selling them my own products that I believe can help them live that life of adventure.
Most of the content on the blog (like 99% or something) is free, and sometimes I charge for a more detailed solution (or product — see the store).
On Money
Sometimes when I recommend products, I get an affiliate commission from them when someone buys.
Sometimes when I recommend products, they are my own products!
And many times, I get no money for my recommendations. And that is because I was unable to work out a deal, or working out an affiliate deal was not that high a priority for me.
But the point is: I recommend a product not because I get paid to recommend it. I recommend it because I feel it is the best product or service for the given scenario. For example:
- You ask for a hosting company, I recommend Hostgator (I get a commission AND you get a discount too!!). But if you are an independent publisher and have a very specific set of needs for your hosting and online infrastructure, I recommend Blogstarta (a publishing company I own for years).
- You ask for advice on starting a dairy farm, I recommend the free resources page at https://momekh.com/dairy-farming-pakistan/. But if you are serious about starting a dairy farm and are not just “browsing about”, then I recommend my own guide on starting a dairy farm, the DFG.
- You want to start earning money from affiliate marketing, I have a free resource at http://thefirst1000.net/ … a 70+ page ebook that is still working for people all around the world by God’s Grace. But if you are serious about converting your hobby into an online, lifestyle business, then I recommend to you ProHobbyist.
So on and so forth… point being, I want to let you know that in many cases, money will be involved. Of course you can ask me, and I never shy from telling you.
Some Thoughts (and one Rule) on Giving Advice
This blog has a lot of advice, how-to’s and what-not’s.
I believe the following rule of dishing out advice is a solid one (stolen verbatim from Nasim Taleb’s page #):
Golden rule: one is not ethically allowed to tells others what to do unless he is doing it himself, and can suffer harm in case it turns out to be a bad advice.
I suffer harm in the form of (1) a bad reputation (I consider that a somewhat-temporary if not a superficial harm though) and (2) a lost subscriber to the blog (a not-so-superficial harm).
This means that I try to do things before I write about them. And second, I write about things that I do.
I take the risk of giving bad advice, but – and this is important – I am giving that bad advice believing it to be absolutely the right advice.
Just like I will admonish my child if she does something bad and I ask her why and she says, “because Saba (her friend) told me to,” I expect the reader of this blog to accept the same sort of responsibility.
If you take my advice, you take it at your own risk. This is not just legal talk, this is straight-up ethics: I can’t blame others for giving me bad advice, I can only blame/admonish myself of taking and following that bad advice.
My advice for what its worth (not much) comes – like everything else in life – with no guarantees whatsoever.
These are, and will remain, dangerous grounds; I tread on them softly but tread on them I do.
And may God in His Grace, Guide us all.