Purpose of this blog

As it is explained in my Life Goals Framework - success vs happiness and life goals, I believe the formula to happiness lies in spending my time in the activities I find make me happy. 

The most inspirational motivational writer and writer on broader topics about life is - Dale Carnigie (1888-1955). To me he had such a unique way of writing in books like "How to make friends and influence people" and "How to stop worrying and start living". Since then, I have never seen an author use his style of pragmatic, engaging and fun writing based on personal life experiences and the life experiences of others. Therefore, I'd like to use his name as my personal inspiration to write this piece in such an eloquent manner.

Unique contributions to the field of research on happiness and success

My first unique contribution to the field of science on happiness is the term I coined -"time allocation", which refers simply to the process of how we choose to allocate our limited time on this Earth (over our life, and much shorter periods such as each day or minute). Many people don't realize it, but by choosing an activity to perform each day (consciously or subconsciously) we actually allocate time to things which do not make us happy, or in the most extreme cases make us feel outright unhappy. Therefore, if we spend more of 12 of the 24 hours in a day in things which do not bring us happiness, the math suggests we will be unhappy. An example would be a miserable employee who works at a Fortune 500 company, gets paid for 8 hours, works 10-12 hours and travels another 1-2 hours to work and back. In this case, this employee may feel somewhat successful due to his/her ability to solve problems, but are those the problems they really ought to solve?

In simple words, if I have 24 hours each day, minus about 10 for sleep and other human-being related activities (you know what I mean, the basic needs), I have about 14 hours of my day to allocate to different activities. 

Therefore, if I allocate all my 14 hours into say 7 activities of 2 hours or 2 activities of 7  hours, then I would have spend as much as it is actually possible, being happy. The idea here is to illustrate that if we spend our time on things that make us happy, we will feel happiness more often than not. If I were to go even further, I would state that "how we spend our time" is the key variable that determines "how happy we are in life". So the more time we spend on things that make us smile and happy, the more happy we will actually be (it's so common sense, but I have never ever seen any one person on this planet other than me to think about happiness and time allocation in this way, please correct me if I am wrong and I will give credit to someone else, as for now, this is my own unique idea about how I live happily by spending my time on things which make me happy).

Spending 2 hours a day coming up with ideas and 2 hours a day, writing them in this blog is my way to utilize 4 hours of my time daily on a thing that makes me happy - expressing my strong opinions, doing research, formulating hypotheses and testing them.

Multiple activities at the same time

Doing two (or more) things at the same time that bring you happiness is also not mutually exclusive. For instance, as I am enjoying the process of writing this piece with a smile, what makes me smile even more is my favourite person next to me, giving me a kiss at the same time. I am also drinking coffee, which if you know me, bring me a lot of happiness too. So what I am trying to illustrate is that we can do multiple things in the same minute and even further magnify the impact of positive feelings we get by doing multiple things (which are compatible of course).

Therefore, this blog and its content is a way to test this bigger hypothesis: 

Hypothesis 1: If I spend all my time on activities which make me happy, I will smile and experience happiness on a daily basis

Hypothesis 2: If I spend more than 12 hours a day on things that make me happy, the only thing that can make me unhappy is something devastating like the loss of a parent or loved one

Hypothesis 2: If I spend all my time at a job I hate, I will experience 8-12 hours of unhappiness on a daily basis

Hypothesis 3: If I spend my time on multiple things which are compatible and make me happy, I will magnify the happiness in my life

As you can see, even this model of happiness already has a major flaw. This is the disadvantage that one external event can cause us shock and unhappiness - be it a financial crises that puts us in a position where we fall behind on our bills (from being well-off), be it the death of someone we love even a pet. If you have noticed this flaw kudos. 

However, can we and should we actually worry about those and dismiss this framework because in 1-2 extreme cases it will not work. I think not. Because we have only 2 parents, the times we can suffer this loss is basically only 2 days of our entire lives. The grieving progress might be much longer, but the point is to say, on an average day, when none of our parents die, we would be much better off spending our time on things which are our passion and make us smile.

Basis of idea

This is a unique idea I derived from other theory, namely the theories of business strategy and finance. In the context of business, to achieve a strategic goal, a company has to make a choice and allocate its resources strategically to achieve this company objective (resources in this context are machines, money, people's time and others). So if companies think about people's time as a resource, why shouldn't we think of it like this? After all, Buffet said time is the most valuable commodity because we can never get it back.

In investment management, this idea is also applied as allocating capital in different instruments to achieve different investment goals. Capital in the context of investing is a word for money. However, as a person with an academic background, I cannot stress how important it may be, to actually extend this idea of "allocating capital" is the way to achieve goals. The extension would be that capital is not necessarily money and the most important resource we have is not capital but time. Therefore, how we spend our time is a key determinant of what goals we will achieve. Some goals may require only time - such as this one, writing a blog on a free platform (courtesy of Google). Others such as starting a business require a combination of the time and money resources. Buying a house can be a combination of time + mortgage +/- investments. The point is any goal, requires first of all time and then it may require other resources. 

Reflections of time management in business vs personal life

The key observation I have is good managers are good at allocating their time in the firm in performing tasks effectively for the firms they work. However, when it comes to their personal lives, they struggle both with planning their financial situations and their time management (as a resource) to accomplish their life goals.

In other words, it seems people have a skill in time management at work, but not in their personal life. Maybe employers, due to their own strategic goals and better management are stronger in managing managers to they become responsible with their time. When it comes to our personal life, no one actually tracks how we spend our time (like it is not a habit for people to generally consider how they have spent their time allocation on the previous day). This is somehow weird, because keeping a journal or a form of agenda that allows us to track how we spend our time can contain the most important pieces about our happiness and unhappiness.

However, what if we were accountable of our own time?

Tangible benefits arise from thinking in this way - we cannot change our current past, but we can change our current life and our future past and our future. Wait what? Bear with me for a few more moments. I will explain what I mean in simple words.

By changing how we allocate our time today, this has an immediate impact on our day.

After today passes, tomorrow our past becomes the day before, so if we changed how we live today, we start changing our past. In other words, if today I wrote about this blog and this made me smile for two hours today, tomorrow I will have a memory of today as my past to remember fondly.

Now imagine if we live doing things we love on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis? What about decades? 

Well, actually the same idea would apply, the more time we spend on the things we love, the more likely we are to be happy for as long as possible (changing our past, present and future in the process).

So what does this blog include?

Series 1 - TheInvestmentAddict - research questions and hypotheses about individual companies and/or their stocks. Click here for the first article of this series. You can also search the "search button" if you are curious to find more posts of these series.

Series 2 - TheIndustryInsider - research questions regarding industries, sub-industries, innovative sectors and hypotheses about multiple companies and their stocks. Click here for the first article of this series. You can also search the "search button" if you are curious to find more posts of these series.

Series 3 - TheIntelligentMacroAnalyst - a follow-up on my 200 pages book from April 2020, into small bits as it contains hypotheses from 2020 to 2100. This is a series where I will also explore research questions that are about the PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal and environment macro variables) which affect every industry and companies which participate in it. Some external macro variables like COVID-19 affected and changed the entire PESTLE landscape. Others, such as the emergence of Bitcoin and blockchain technology represent a specific change in one of the PESTLE factors, in this case, the T - technological landscape. In this series, I will discuss things related to PESTLE factors and broader variables that might change the current PESTLE environment. Click here for the first article of this series. You can also search the "search button" if you are curious to find more posts of these series.

Series 1-2-3 together

The IntelligentMacroAnalyst explores research questions and formulates hypotheses about the broadest (macro) factors which affect every industry (for instance, COVID-19 was a type of macro factor which affected all industries and companies all over the world). The idea here is that every industry and individual company are influenced by macro factors. Whatever the macro landscape is, an external variable like COVID-19 can change the entire PESTLE landscape.

TheIndustry Insider is explores research questions and formulates hypotheses about specific industries and discusses multiple companies, often competitors. 

TheInvestmentAddict is the only series that focuses on one company or compares one company to others.

Macro factors (PESTLE) define the world's business environment and influences all the global industries. PESTLE changes could affect a specific industry or the entire world. A world economic crisis would be an example of an economic variable change. An emergence of new technology such as blockchain is a technological change. Changes in the rules and laws in blockchain technology would be an example of a pestle factor leading to a change in another pestle factor (technology emergence leads to the need of regulatory clarity, which changes the global environment). 

I hope this shows the importance and the comprehensiveness of thinking about the macro world, as it is the set of variables that determine our own quality of life (when COVID-19, a financial crisis come, all our lives change, mostly in a negative way, on the other hand, the emergence of technologies like cryptocurrencies have allowed transactions between people, businesses and governments to become much faster, more efficient and at a lower cost (for instance Ripple's cryptocurrency - XRP is such a technology).

On the biggest scale, we have factors like COVID-19, meteors and other unpredictable factors which could radically affect the PESTLE landscape without being a PESTLE factor (I could be wrong here, but I'd say that COVID-19 is neither of the PESTLE factors). Rather, this represents a factor which itself changes the PESTLE landscape.

"The macro world is the set of EXTERNAL variables that determine our quality of life"

Series 4 - TheCryptoverseGuide - research questions and hypotheses about individual blockchain projects and/or their tokens. The first publication is a review of Bitcoin models predictions' about the future price of Bitcoin. You can read it by clicking here. 

Series 5 - TheIntelligentWealthManager - an overview of the most important theories of investing, and proposed updates to theories. For instance, the 60/40 (stocks/bonds) investment strategy has been around for over 100 years (as it has 120 years of performance data). Some would argue that it is fine as it is. I would argue that I use a different approach I call - the Asymmetric Alpha Framework (it is my own work framework based on PhD/MD Bernstein's efficient portfolios theory). 

Series 6 - TheInvestmentProfessor - materials about psychology, history and other pieces of content.

Series 7 - TheSocionomicsProdigy - materials linking specific points of euphoria, as shown by the general mood of people (society) via a simple thing such as a YouTube video which coincide with the exact top of a specific market. This series has limited, but very practical as it shows us events in the world - grand news about a new tallest building, new songs about crypto market millionaires, that can be extremely useful in suggesting a market top. So in this series, I will give some examples of the past and one day put an example, once I see one about the future. You can read my first piece which is about the "2020-2021" Dog money (Dogecoin hype and Elon musk tweets) here.

Writing on all these series is my way to allocate my time to something which makes me happy - writing research with a different perspective, gathering data, analysing data and presenting conclusions. I also enjoy making testable predictions in hypotheses and test whether they are accepted or rejected. Lastly, I have a passion and enthusiasm about markets which is why I choose to write about them, but not exclusively. For instance, most of this piece and my other 2 pages of the blog are about my frameworks to live a happier life as well as how I define my life goals and achieve them. The home page which contains the publications of my series is meant to inspire people thinking about a different perspective via my research-based opinions. This is not to motivate them to take action on my ideas. Rather, it aims to motivate people to 1) allocate time on things that make them happy, 2) figure out what their life goals are and plan for them, 3) making difficult decisions regard life or business to achieve those life goals and 4) to inspire people to be able to formulate their opinions, beliefs or predictions in a clear and presentable way. Lastly, 5) it is meant to inspire my children about the true importance of the research process and why learning it is important (as its many uses apply to answering any question in life).

There is a saying that I heard in one of my management consulting classes which goes something like this "The quality of any answer on any question in life is determined by the question". In other words, the answers we find to problems in business management or life management will always depend on asking "the right questions". And to do so, I think it's important for each person to learn how to ask questions, learn how to turn them into testable predictions, and collect evidence and data to answer them. So this blog is also meant to inspire people who cannot afford going to a top50 or top10 university in the world, to learn the basis of the research process as taught by the top universities I attended.

Problem-solving the current 2.0 Internet and "the subscriptions ERA"

This also tries to solve one problem that bugs me - the problem that every piece of content is oriented to sell us a subscription, newsletter and or any other number of things. The problem I am trying to solve therefore is the lack of any content on the Internet that does not try to sell you anything. You can pay nothing or if there is such a demand for it, I might put some digital wallets where potentially you can send me donations. For now, I don't have any.

I have a "pay what you want, when you want, if you want at all" policy. In other words, everything here is available for free, I am not selling you anything. I just want to be the first person in the world to start a Blog with the actual purpose of motivating people and inspiring people, for free. I have 0 skills about making money from this via Adsense and other nonsense because I do not care to make money by spamming you with ads you don't care about, you can always go on YouTube and experience this yourself. This is the #Bitcoin of blogs, because it has a limited supply of publications (new supply only available while I am alive, when I die I hope AI has fun with it) and worth following (in case it catches on).

A final note (putting "time allocation + EXTERNAL PESTLE") in 1 FRAMEWORK, and a lesson on academic models formulation

The framework of "time allocation" suggests that the more time we spend on activities we love, the happier we are going to be. The external set of variables - PESTLE such as economic crisis, war, inflation, famine, disease, or personal external variables such as death of family member/pet, getting fired, breaking up, or something which we find personally devastating. 

In academia, if I drew a model of "happiness", time allocation would be the independent variable because that is the variable we can control. By controlling our time, we change the dependant variable - our happiness, or the amount of times we smile.

Both PESLTE and other external factors would be called "Moderators", i.e. these are variables in a model which are neither independent nor dependant variables. Moderators are variables which change (strengthen or worsen) the effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. That sounds super complicated but it's pretty easy to understand with this example:

Independent variable - sugar, dependant variable - coffee sweetness, moderator - stirring with a spoon. 

So when we add sugar to coffee it changes sweetness. However, if we don't stir it, the sugar sits on the bottom and it's more sweet at the bottom and less sweet at the top. Stirring, would be the moderator which will strengthen the effect of sugar taste being equal across the beverage.

Now with the same logic in mind, my framework suggests we should spend as much of our time (the sugar) in things that bring us happiness (the sweetness level of the coffee). I did not choose this example randomly but I want to illustrate that just like adding more sugar or less sugar changes the sweetness of our coffee, in the same way, spending our time (or not) on things we enjoy can sweeten or worsen the taste of our lives. What about the spoon?

The spoon was a nice example but about life it represents all the factors which may potentially sweeten or worsen our lives that are beyond our control. Due to the technology provided by Google I can write a blog without having a website. That is a positive development that sweetens my life, and an example of external Technological change that becomes the spoon I can control.

In many other cases, the spoon is a hammer and hits us via the worst - economic meltdowns, inflation, death, disease and so on. 

In this latter case, the spoon is not in our hands to control. However, we can keep adding sugar (more time on the things we love) to overcome any negative external event which temporary disrupts our ability to be happy.

Ah just fyi, the academic model with all variables would look something like this:

Isn't it funny that academia researches the big questions of life and this is not one of them? Well, at least you got me to get a free academic model.

Practical contributions

The practical contribution of this theory, which is one of the main reasons I started this blog, is that it can help us to think how to be in control of our happiness every minute, hour, day, week, year and so on. Its core principle is that to be happy we must spend our time on things we love (for me this is writing unique perspectives, writing research, testing hypothesis and answering life and business questions others cannot as well as summarizing their findings and testing my predictions about topics (via experiments).

Even when life hits us with a hammer and something goes terribly wrong and we are forced in unhappiness, stopping to allocate time on this and starting to re-allocate time on things which make us happy may be an actual solution to us not losing our minds (due to this negative event).

So this framework is by no definition perfect, but it includes what we can control - the time allocation and what we cannot control - the external events. However, it also shows that if events are positive we can be even happier (i.e. moderator like this blog tool for me). In the worst of cases, it can be a reminder that spending 12 hours a day, crying about how the crisis f-ed us or other unchangeable situations such as losing a job, a lover is useless. So ideally this can be a guide to the "formula" of what to do to overcome any problem.

The answer is simple - allocate the time to it!

How could Garry V say that University education is worthless? Look at how much fun I am having - making academic models about life and happiness and discussing moderators. This helps me a more comprehensive framework of happiness than his "just go do it". I hope this is much more informative. and it defines things even he doesn't know about happiness (which is funny because it also shows he is wrong about Universities, for such cases as the guy writing this blog).