I finally quit my job to focus on my side-projects. (Warning: verbose and cathartic)

eliquid said:
Good post.

I am sure you already know this, but get off Adsense as soon as you can unless you have a big brand website, in which case you need to get off adsense as well.

Good luck to you. I am no longer "employed" myself, but have clients. I am making that step to get away from clients hopefully by first of the new year
Click to expand...

This. Adsense is really only good as a filler, for a project you're letting mature in the background while you're working on something bigger.
 


As others have said, you are going from being accountable for your actions to not being accountable for your actions.

Some people can easily make sure they are always motivated and never distracted, but most cannot.

Something I've been doing for a long time is I track every second I'm working with Toggl. That way at the end of the day I can see whether I spent all day working or all day watching Youtube videos. Then set rewards for yourself if you can hit X hours/week of logged work.
 
37431850.jpg
 
Good job. You're certainly on the right path. My only advice would be to diversify. You can't depend on Google for everything. The day may come where you get that dreaded email that says your Adsense account has been suspended. Even if you're 100% whitehat and everything is legit.. shit happens. Don't let that shit fuck you.
 
cardine said:
Something I've been doing for a long time is I track every second I'm working with Toggl. That way at the end of the day I can see whether I spent all day working or all day watching Youtube videos. Then set rewards for yourself if you can hit X hours/week of logged work.
Click to expand...

Can it do this automatically? i.e. it detects if you're watching youtube.
</hijack>
 
So, 4 years in corporate America, 4 years in the Marine Corps, and 8 months into self employment, I've come to a few conclusions:

  1. If you can't kiss ass and brown nose, you won't make it in corporate America.
  2. Most bosses in corporate America are peacekeepers, not leaders.
  3. If you're genuinely a hard worker but constantly face consequences in corporate America, chances are you're a free thinker and you should be self-employed.
  4. If you've seen good leadership in the military, you know it's a tough find. If you've seen good leadership in the civilian sector, you know it's a damn unicorn. If you think good leadership is a buzzword, you've never seen good leadership.
  5. If you make money with your own hands, you're going to look like an outsider to your friends and family members who work traditional jobs.
  6. Just because you think you're entrepreneurial doesn't mean you're going to be any good at it. But if you're ever going to be good at it, you probably won't know right away.
  7. Tim Ferris' 4-Hour Work Week is bullshit. If you want something, be prepared to work your ass off.
  8. Hard work isn't enough. If it was, this country would be ran by construction workers and film crews.
  9. The definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. If you follow the patterns of your friends and family but expect a different outcome, you are insane.
Go get it, OP.
 
Good for you, and good luck. This industry is both a beautiful opportunity and a son-of-a-bitch at the same time. I find my ups are equally balanced out with downs, which probably is why I have always been so excited by it.
 
Mahzkrieg said:
I'm 24 and just quit my first post-uni Real Job after a year of employment. I have a meager Adsense income that will keep me afloat until something else takes off.

It wasn't until I was halfway through university (~2010) that I decided to seriously jump into programming. My goal was to be able to code any website that I could imagine -- a goal surely provoked by the helplessness of managing vBulletin forums and having to shop for "add-ons" to extend them with trivial features. (Everyone using Wordpress knows that feel)

Yet, despite three years of obsessively teaching myself how to code and despite reaching my goal of achieving this proficiency, programming has always been some side-show relegated to the glimpse of time I could scavenge from weekends or during amphetamine procrastination binges.

And when I graduated from university and thought I was finally free, I entered the workforce and found myself in an even darker dungeon: I was programming at my job and had to somehow scrape together the intellectual energy to work on side-projects when I got home.

I ended up languishing.

How can you possibly perpetuate that magical obsessive up-all-night ambition for a side-project idea that strikes you Saturday when you have to commute to work on Monday?

And then you have to sit at a dual-screen workstation and hammer out code that's not yours, the whole time your mind keeps dwelling on Saturday's ambition? How do you balance that?

I couldn't.

So, for the past year, I efficiently trained myself to ignore all of my ambitions and motivations. "Sideproject Saturday" became nothing more than a day to hammer out a small project with prudent demands since I knew if it was incomplete by Monday, I'd probably never finish it.

I couldn't live like that, where my own ambitions were toxic to my job performance, where stomping them out was the only way I could focus on work.

So I quit a few weeks ago.

And here I am. Living off some meager Adsense income that pays rent, food, and gas. It's not much.

But it buys me more than that: it buys me back the full 24 hours of the day, and it buys me the freedom to fail spectacularly.

I finally have the freedom to work fulltime on my own ideas. Between university and work, I've never had the opportunity.

Thanks for listening. It's on, bros.
Click to expand...

freedom to fail is worth its weight in gold
 
That's a great post op and I suppose you can keep it as a momento to look back on in the future weather things work out or not but either way internet marketing is here to stay so you will always be able to generate some form from income from the internet, but not getting that regular paycheck is hard to get to grips with in the beginning.

I've been a programmer for a number of years, but don't get too hung up on trying to be able to program everything on a site, there's no need to waste valuable time trying to build a custom site with functionality when a Wordpress or Joomla site can be installed in minutes and then start to program your bespoke stuff from there. I work freelance now and then the Internet Marketing in my free time but I count it as my work time, over the years I've gained skills were I know it will make my internet income a reality for a steady income.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom