The hyphenated life, How to live from many incomes

When I meet new people at a party or a networking event, they always ask me: 1. “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?”

I have no problem answering the first question, but the second one is a bit tricky.

Throughout the years I have picked up a few skills here and there and I learned to offer many products and services, and thus I created a hyphenated life for myself.

In my infant years, everything was possible

When I was a little kid, I used to go to school, like everybody else. But then, after school, I had many activities. I used to play soccer, I used to climb trees, I used to swim in the ocean.

Never did it occur to me, that my life as a kid was to go to school. My life started after coming back from school.

When we grow older, the school gets replaced by work. But as adults, our lives start and finish at work. We work and rest so that we can go to work the next day. We don’t do much else. Maybe, on the weekends we go to visit other family members.

What happens between being a kid and becoming an adult?

Why do we lose interest in all the other activities available to us?

How come our work becomes our identity?

My years as a workaholic

It happened to me too. I became an adult and work became my biggest focus. I started working as a dance teacher, and I worked and I worked until I didn’t have any more hours during the day to work some more. I worked for 6 consecutive years until I burned out. I didn’t have anything else in me to continue giving to my work.

So I quit!

I took a sabbatical year to search for answers, to find myself.

I became the guy who is always reading at the park, the guy drinking coffee from one coffee shop to the other, the guy who joins many clubs to look for a different perspective.

I never found the correct answer, but I knew which one was the wrong answer.

Reinventing myself

After a year of roaming the neighborhood, I decided to get back into the workforce.

This time, I wanted to be more like the little kid, the one with many activities going on at the same time. I decided to work on different projects at the same time.

I became a real estate investor
I became a blogger
I became a podcaster
I became a photographer

Not all those activities are money makers but the ensemble of all of them makes a living. Not a living in the monetary sense, but all of those activities replenish my life.