Jean Galea

Here’s one of my favorite quotes, although I don’t know its origins.

Find three hobbies you love: One to make you money, one to keep you fit, and one to be creative.

These can change over time, but right now for me these three are:

• investing
• padel
• reading/writing

I really think it’s important to have these three, not only because they’re your best chance to live a healthy and fulfilling life, but also because they feed into each other.

For example, to improve in padel and investing I read and write about these topics, and I can apply what I learnt from investing into the sport of padel. On the other hand, padel training has given me a lot of discipline and methodologies that I can then apply to my writing and investing.

The concept of them being named as hobbies also aligns with my idea that ideally there shouldn’t be a hard line between work and play in life. In fact I always strive to build a life that I don’t need to take a holiday from.

I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living. – Richard Branson

Most people go on holidays to forget their daily life during the rest of the year, while the most fulfilled and high performing people I know don’t have this concept in their lives. They find joy and fulfillment in their daily routines and if they take a holiday they don’t really treat it in the way that most people treat it. For them, it’s most likely part of the yearly routine and has a specific purpose that fits an overall goal.

What are your three hobbies?

I’ve recently started investing in Italian property through property crowdfunding platforms, and the reasons are the following:

• 5.1% more residential properties sold than 2016 (5 years growth in a row).
• Transactions value reached 11.2B€, which is higher than pre-crisis results (10.8B€ in 2007).
• 15% more Italians say that they want to buy a residential property.
• The commercial market increased 4.2% in terms of value, compared to 2016.
• International investors have gathered over 5,8 billion euros in real-estate investment in the country; which is almost 60% more than the same period the previous year.

Clearly, Italy is past the economic crisis, at least in terms of the property market. As always happens in such recovery and initial growth periods, the main cities are the hottest ones. If it’s your first time investing in Italy, I would suggest sticking with Milan.

Milan has a strong demographic growth (hence the need for more housing), a strong employment rate compared to the rest of the country, and an average workforce salary of 34,000€ per year.

Perhaps, more importantly, is the interest generated from foreign buyers and investors. We all know that Chinese and Russians have high net worth buyers that are fast acquiring European properties, and they are looking for quality properties in prestigious cities. Milan certainly fits the bill since it’s the capital of Italian fashion and is also one of the five shopping capitals of the world.

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Here’s what I try to achieve week after week as I strive to become a level 5 padel player.

Technical Training

• 3x with a padel coach on court (I rotate between 3/4 coaches)
• 4 hours reading padel books or watching video tutorials
• 3 hours watching pro padel matches

Physical Training

• 3x strength training with PT (30 min per session, plus 30 min on my own after)
• 1x yoga (for flexibility and all around strength)
• 2x agility sessions (30 min each using skipping rope, cones and agility ladder)
• 4x stretching sessions at home

Mental Training

• 1x psychologist
• 4 hours of reading sports psychology books

Competition and Matches

• 2x friendly matches
• 1x competition (once or twice a month)

Recovery and Growth Aids

• 1x deep tissue massage
• 2x sauna sessions for 20 minutes each (here’s why)
• 4x EMS sessions

I’ll come back to this post to expand on some points, but for now I just want to put it out there for feedback and for its potential usefulness to other serious amateur padel players.