Many wants to quit their jobs because they are boring and repetitive, or because they want more freedom. The problem with that is that it’s not easy to do. What would you actually do if you didn’t have that job? You need money to buy food, various services such as internet, cable, telephone, etc. So what do you do?
The first idea that comes in mind is to start your own business. But which business? Is there anything you like? Well, for me, programming and/or anything related to computer is great. Currently managing many websites is a really interesting job that keep me passionnated. If it’s not your kind of stuff, maybe you should think about what you actually want to do… Maybe you like to interact with people, help people, work on machines, buy stuff for people, sell stuff for people. You can make any profession your own. If you didn’t notice, most of the “geniuses” in our world don’t have diplomas. They started as self declared whatever they wanted to be. If they liked robotic, they just played with a lot of robot until they were recognized has an expert in the field.
Most of the time when you go to apply for a job, what employers are looking for is experience. Do you know how to deal with various stuff? If you do, then you’re most likely their best choice.
This small story of mine should help you understand how this idea works.
At age 18 and before, I had a huge interest in websites. I did my first website out of Geocities, at age 13. From that point forward, I learned a lot about computer and programming. I was so interested in the topic that I was often ahead of my peers in the domain. I had seen the potential computers had and I wanted to take part of it.
At age 18, I began to manage around 5 websites, mainly blogs which I would try to update regularly. At first it was fun, new. Then routine made the whole thing a chore. I was bored to do all the work alone. At that moment I had no idea what to do. I was making money out of the advertising on those website I owned and because I didn’t see a drop in how much I was making even though I wasn’t writing anymore, I though that if I’d stop, it wouldn’t make a huge difference. For a year I did nothing on those sites, but still, revenue was in. I was partially happy, partially because I did money, but not totally because I knew I could do much better. At the moment I though I could do better, which was around age 19, I said to myself I had to find a solution to my biggest problem: generate content without it being a chore.
So my first solution was to find people to write for me. I though about friends and family members, but most of them where not as passionate as me for the topics I was writing about. I waited for some months until I read the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris. In the book, I learned about elance and registered there. I decided I would try to get some people to help me write content, even though it would cost me up to 300$ of my personal money. I engaged 3 different writers to write about my main blogs topic and gave them specific instruction.
After a month, all the articles were ready and I began to put some of them on my blogs. Some articles were great, some sucked huge time, but I didn’t have the time to do it myself anyway. I began to see revenue increase, I was beginning to see some results. I told myself that it was actually time I tried again to write on those blogs.
Still, it’s a huge task. I believe the best solution is to find some friends which would agree to write for me for a small amount of money per article. With that idea, the business became.
I’d pay my friend over 5$ per article, which is similar to what I would pay over elance, but the results would be much better and since those people were my friend, they had a better understand of what I was looking for and they often had the same interest as me. From that moment forward, managing my blogs and website was a piece of cake.
What I want you to grasp about that story is the how I did it. Notice that I wasn’t able to do what I wanted at first, but after a while, I succeeded. It’s not because you fail once that you’re necessarily going to fail twice…
