Welcome to a new series on the blog, where I will chronicle my “experiences with experiments” (say that 5 times fast) on my slow FI journey! There will be success stories, and there will be not-so-successful stories. I’m refusing to call them failures, because I believe that there is no such thing as failure when it comes to experimentation: we try things, we learn things, there you have it!
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know I am a huge fan of experimentation on the journey to financial independence.
Many of us on the path to financial independence know that we don’t want to work for the rest of our lives (or even until traditional retirement age), but fewer of us know exactly how we would spend our time if we weren’t working for income all the time.
Although I have a pretty good idea of the basic structure I’d want my days to look like if I wasn’t working (which I figured out by experimenting, mind you), the actual things I want to do to fill up those days are less certain.
I keep a list of ideas for what I would consider doing, called my Financial Freedom List, but these are just that: ideas. Things I think I’ll want to do. Things that are calling to me, that I think I will like doing, but that I want to explore further.
For some of the things on this list, it’s difficult to experiment while still working a full-time job. But for other things, I can actually start doing some small experiments while I’m still working a 9-5.
And so, please allow me to report on my latest experiment: playing pickleball.
A little bit of history
Mr. Dink and I are big fans of both tennis and table tennis (aka ping pong). We both grew up playing tennis competitively in school and had ping pong tables in our homes as kids (thanks Mom and Dad!).
In fact, I actually inherited my childhood ping pong table, which now lives in our “bonus room” above the garage. It’s perfect for us because it’s nostalgic, we kept the table out of the landfill, and we did not have to pay a cent!
Although ping pong is incredibly fun and a good stress reliever, Mr. Dink and I both crave a bit more exercise than what ping pong can bring us. We have played tennis here and there throughout our relationship, but I have struggled with knee issues throughout my adult life, and it’s becoming more and more clear that playing tennis at a somewhat competitive level just isn’t in the cards for me. It’s not worth it to risk injury/further damage/lots of pain after play at this stage of my life.
Because of that, I have always wanted to start playing pickleball more regularly.
For those who may not be familiar, pickleball is a sport played with a wiffleball and a paddle a little bigger than a ping-pong paddle on a court slightly smaller than a tennis court.
I like to think of it as the sport that would result if tennis and ping pong had a child.
I first fell in love with pickleball in high school, when we learned how to play in gym class. I was incredulous that there was a sport that felt like tennis and ping pong had birthed a baby. And that baby was pickleball. It was incredibly fun and energizing, and you got so much more exercise than with ping pong; yet, it was no where near as physically demanding on the body as tennis.
But at that time, in the early 2000s, no one was talking about pickleball! No one even knew what it was when I would tell them about it. It hadn’t reached the level of insane popularity that it has today (mostly among those aged 65+, for the exact reason why I wanted to play it more: low impact).
Nowadays, pickleball is everywhere.
In fact, there has become quite the little following in our small Vermont town.
When I saw in the local paper last year that pickleball was played every morning from 7-10 am (outside in the summer and inside in the winter), I knew I wanted to make regular pickleball play a goal of mine.
And I had a hunch that Mr. Dink would love it too.
And so came the birth of this experiment.
The experiment
When I set my goals this year, giving pickleball a try was on the list.
Mr. Dink and I are not big on gifts, for Christmas or otherwise, but sometimes I like to use the opportunity to buy us something special that we wouldn’t normally buy on our own, as a sort of joint gift. This year, in addition to the board game Azul (which I highly recommend, by the way), I bought us a pair of pickleball rackets for Christmas. I told Mr. Dink about my goal, and that this was the first step. Now that we had paddles, we could go try it out when the mood struck.
The experiment had been initiated.
When we went to visit Mr. Dink’s mom is Florida a few months later, we learned that she in fact had started playing pickleball! Although we didn’t get a chance to play when we were down there, I kept this little nugget of information in the back of my mind.
When Mr. Dink’s mom the snowbird came back to Vermont this summer, she told me she also started playing in our little town! This was it. I knew I needed to initiate the next phase of this experiment.
I knew that Mr. Dink wouldn’t want to just show up to the open play, not knowing anything about the sport, and I too had gotten quite rusty with the rules over the years. So I asked Mr. Dink’s mom if she’d be willing to go to the courts with us some weekend day, teach us the rules, and give us some pointers. We would thank her by taking her out to lunch or brunch afterward (double bonus: family time and goal-realization time!).
This step of the experiment was a wonderful success. Mr. Dink had a blast, fell in love with pickleball instantly (just as I knew he would…phew!), we got to meet some new people (some folks from out of town were there, and one of them offered to play with us so we could have an even 4 and actually try playing a game), and we got to spend some quality time with Mr. Dink’s mom.
Now, we were on to the next phase of the experiment: getting into a regular routine of play.
The town sign-ups started at 7:00 am. Although this originally sounded great back when I had made the goal, as I wasn’t even logging on to my work computer until 9 am, I’ve been starting work at 8:30 am now with my new job thanks to the flex hours. I didn’t want to shake that up because I had been enjoying it. But 7:00 am felt tight to get enough play in, get showered, and get to work on time. What to do?
As if a delivery from the universe, I saw a post one morning on our small-town email listserv from a woman asking if there were anyone out there who would be interested in playing pickleball at 6 am on Fridays. I couldn’t believe it.
At first, I was a little skeptical. This could go any number of ways. It felt a lot less scary to show up for open play than to commit to playing with just 2 people at 6 am. I also didn’t know how Mr. Dink would feel about it. Our mornings are our sacred time. But we both really wanted this. It seemed worth the risk for the potential payout, and we could always say we didn’t want to play again if for some reason it didn’t go well. What did we have to lose?
We could take a chance.
We could do an experiment.
We could always change our minds.
You likely already know what happened given the title of this post. The experiment was incredibly successful! The two women we met on that first Friday at 6 am were the nicest, sweetest people. They are almost our exact same skill level, so we had a fantastic time with some really great, close games. I couldn’t be happier.
We even wanted to stop playing at the same time! I had been nervous that they would want to play for more than an hour, and we’d have to set a boundary, but they were actually the first to say let’s call it. Before we were through our first meeting, we were already making plans to play every Friday at 6 am, creating a little group text called Friday Pickleball. Experiment success.
I am absolutely thrilled by how this experiment went. For relatively little effort, and implementing the experiment on our schedule and our timeline, the payout was enormous.
Concluding thoughts
There you have it. My first experiment success story chronicled on the blog. I’m looking forward to many more, and to including some not-so-successful stories.
One of my favorite things about experimenting is that you are in full control. You can experiment on your own timeline. No one is putting the pressure on but you to get the experiment done. You can experiment as fast or slow as you want.
In case you haven’t noticed, we over here do things pretty slowly.
Hence our slow FI lifestyle 🙂
We choose to do things slowly because we’ve already gotten our lives to a pretty good spot for where we are, where we choose to be, still working full-time jobs on our journey to financial independence.
We adopted a slow FI lifestyle because we want to create lives we don’t feel the need to “retire” from. We want to start living our best lives now, not some day when we hit a magic number.
So we’re in no rush to make big changes, because we’re not miserable. We can take the time we need and go at the pace we want to design our ideal lives.
Next up in the series, I’ll talk about some experiments that may be considered failures in some eyes, but were actually great learnings and provided opportunities for growth. Stay tuned!
What experiments have you been up to lately? Or what experiments are on your to-do list? Let me know in the comments, or send me an email to [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you!