The Hobby Hole
I want to use this as a case study for buying anything new, especially when getting into a new hobby. Let’s say you go on a bike ride with friends and someone spots you a bike for a 15 mile ride around the city you love. By the time you get back home to reflect, you tell yourself this is your new life. You want a bike, and want to ride until the days end. We have all been in this situation and have started the research phase. WE NEED A BIKE NOW, for our awesome new life we are starting, as soon as the bike arrives. When that bike comes, everything will be different!
As we know, there are many flavors of bicycles and it is a gigantic industry. Pretty soon, every ad you encounter will be about bikes, and every person you talk to will have a different opinion. If you are anything like me, you will have been in this situation many times before. This is the honeymoon phase of picking up a new hobby, or finding something new and interesting.
We focus so much on the bike itself, but really it isn’t the bike we necessarily want, it is the hobby. Which is going out for bike rides on a regular basis, whether your doing that on a hand me down $15 craigslist find or a $1500 speedster, you are engaging in the hobby of bike riding for leisure. We have to be very honest with ourselves and IF YOU KNOW YOU CONSTANTLY PICK UP HOBBIES AND DROP THEM, do not get an expensive bicycle. Prove to yourself you deserve it first. For every 3 bike rides you go on, you can deposit $100 in a ‘New Bike Fund’. Build the habit, the love for the rides, the network of folks of the same mindset, a working map of places to ride close to you. So by the time you shell out for that expensive bike, you will have everything in place to get the most out of the money you spent.