First of all, welcome, dear reader, and thanks for being here! This is the first post in a blog that will focus strongly on learning, living well, and maximizing value and happiness in your life by challenging conventional methods.

A little background on myself first. I am the kind of person that loves learning to the extent that I am not comfortable doing the same thing for much longer than the point of proficiency. This can be a strength or weakness depending on the environment in which I’m working. Either way, throughout my life I have bounced around between a rather large variety of different hobbies and professions, just about all of them self-taught from scratch. I’ve worked as a professional DJ, went to school on a music scholarship, founded a prolific charity organization, majored in neuroscience, applied to jobs as a graphic designer, worked for 4 years as a programmer, and am now spending a year traveling internationally with my lovely girlfriend, among a large number of other crazy things that might be discussed later.

I strongly believe that the internet can empower you to learn and become quite good at anything you want. The availability and wealth of free information is staggering, and through determination, research skills, and trial & error, I have been able to self-teach everything from hobbies to a well paid full-time job, as have many other crafty individuals in this generation.

I frequently brew up crazy plans of things I want to do and/or learn, and use any amount of research, apprenticeship, and trial and error to figure them out. In this blog, I’ll be writing about the process of coming up with these things, the process of researching and learning them, and the things I learn as I practice and improve. At no point will any of the information on this blog ever be sponsored or influenced from the outside in any way at all. All of it will be 100% genuine, results of my own hours of research and practice. I have zero business goals with this, the value I hope to gain is becoming a better writer and perhaps meeting some interesting new people who embrace the DIY spirit as I do. As a quick sampling of the topics I’m currently interested in and will be writing about shortly, I present to you this list:

• Travel: finding real experiences and living well, inexpensively
• Working Out: simple and effective lifts and eating
• Cooking & Eating: gaining/losing weight, eating well for cheap
• General health: sleeping, moving, habits, making good decisions
• Electronics: building and repairing electronics
• Websites: building and running a solid website
• Construction: building and repairing things from metal & wood
• Investment: maximizing returns, minimizing effort
• Gardening: flowers, plants, growing good things to eat
• Education: learning and teaching things effectively
• Photography: equipment, shooting, editing

Of course many more topics will be covered as they come up. On top of that, for any discipline covered, I will be personally diving in head first with at least one real-world project, and covering my planning, process, and results, and posting all of this in detail right here so you can learn from my process and inevitable mistakes.

Cheers, and hope to see you back here soon! To stay up to date, make sure to subscribe to Pragmatic Life. If you don’t end up liking it, you can just unsubscribe, but I’m sure you will : )