Men need to build things to be happy. Our hands are meant to create things.
If us guys go for too long without building something then happiness decreases.
This becomes an issue when you have a newborn baby at home as you need to start being very mindful of your spare time. When you have a newborn to take care of, spare time becomes a valuable resource as much of your time gets absorbed by diaper changing, baby bottle cleaning, calming, and caring for the wife as she recovers from childbirth.
Time with family is the most important and should be a priority; however, if you have optimized systems to deal with baby care and household chores, and you budget your time very well, you will find that you have lots of time to pursue your own interests.
Paradoxically, after I my Victoria was born I had more spare time on my hands. Just giving up TV was a huge time gain. I optimized my life in dozens of ways, but I kind of overshot and ended up with an overage of spare time. I am glad for this because I ended up doing a lot of building.
There are lots of things that you can build.
The best things to make with your hands are things that can benefit you, your family, your friends, and the world. Building something that does some good is always better than building something and then shoving it in your basement.
Here’s some ideas on what to build:
1. Build something around the house
Wherever you live, there is shit that needs to get built, fixed, or installed.
During the first two weeks of Victoria’s life, I took time off work to be with my new family. During that time I built all this stuff:
- A shelf in the bathroom because there was originally nowhere to put towels, toilet paper reserve, and toothpaste.
- Built and deployed the stroller.
- Installed some drapes in our sun room.
- Installed outdoor lighting.
- Repaired some chipped grout in the kitchen tiles.
Make a list of all the stuff you can do to make your home awesome. It feels great when you build something to make your home 1% better. A lot of 1% improvements add up over time to make a great home.
With a baby in the mix, you will likely have lots of baby things to build or install. Look at these as opportunities to work your man brain and make it happy.
2. Build food
You and your wife need to eat, so build some food. And not just any food, but food that is cool and Instagram-able.
One of the random hobbies I took up was making kimbap. Kimbap is the Korean version of Japanese maki sushi rolls. Instead of raw fish, we put a variety of ingredients in the roll such as egg, carrot, radish pickle, tuna salad, beef, and pork. The ingredients are placed in a seaweed sheet with a thin layer of rice. The whole thing is rolled up and chopped into bite-sized rolls.
One day my wife brought home ingredients to make kimbap and she suggested that I try making it. I never really made kimbap before so I expected the first time to be a bit of a disaster but to my surprise it came out looking really great. It turns out that I have some latent kimbap-making skills!
So I started to practice making kimbap. Standard-size rolls were not good enough for me because bigger is ALWAYS better. So I got to making MEGA KIMBAP.
Instead of putting down just a single sheet of seaweed, I stitched together 3 sheets using rice as glue. Then I put down a monster amount of ingredients at the starting edge of the roll so that it looks something like this:
Rolling this up you get this:
And after slicing into rolls you get this:
For perspective, the small rolls on the outside are normal-sized rolls. So the mega kimbap is a satisfyingly huge mouthful.
There is actually a non-zero risk of choking on one of my mega kimbaps.
My wife posted my mega kimbap pictures on a Korean version of Instagram and got hundreds of likes!
3. Build a blog
There are lots of reasons to build your own blog.
It’s fun: Building your own blog is fun. You get to say what you want to the world and perhaps make a positive dent in the universe.
It’s yours: Creating your own blog gives you your own platform to express yourself on the Internet. When you post a thought, photo, or video to another website, you grant that site the ability to use your content any way they see fit, i.e. you relinquish control of your ownership of content posted on Facebook, Instagram, etc. On your own platform, you are Lord Commander of all of your material.
It’s a way to meet new people: Find people who think the same way that you do.
It’s a way to make money: Since it is your platform, you can sell anything from an eBook to your old hockey skates by posting on your own website.
It’s a way to make the world a better place: That’s what I’m going for. I built this blog to write to other men about useful life hacks on how to have a baby. I also wanted to present a positive perspective on new fatherhood.
4. Build a book
Writing is one of the most important life skills for anyone to have in the new digital economy.
Writing is how you express yourself, sell your ideas, and persuade others.
One long term project that you can do is to write a book.
Many Kindle books on Amazon are only 20,000 words long. This is a very doable book length for most people if they set a consistent effort to writing every day for a period of 2-3 months. Write the book, self-publish it on Amazon, and promote it.
Maybe you won’t sell many copies and earn just a few bucks for pizza and beer. Maybe you will sell a million copies and earn many bucks for a Porsche SUV and a home reno. Who knows. You had something to say and you said it. I think that is more important.
In the first four months of my Victoria’s life I wrote a book for men on how to thrive as a new father. I will release this very soon. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, please sign up for my newsletter in the form on the sidebar. I will make the first 200 copies completely free.
Start building something today. You will be happier for it. Happy men make for great fathers!