How I Spent My Time After Hours Is Why I'm Now Successful Online
Steal my blueprint to get there yourself.
Where it starts
Sitting in meetings all day and thinking about a different life is where it started for me.
I knew I could do and be more.
I just didn’t know how.
Curiosity, though, is a superpower. It opens up your line of sight.
Similar to how if you buy a red Toyota, all of a sudden you see lots of other red Toyotas you've never seen before.
They were always there, but you hadn’t programmed your mind to see them.
That’s how I felt about building something online.
Eventually, I just started having conversations. One chat led to a lead, that led to a blogger, that led to a $0 writing opportunity.
Online success often starts out unpaid, and that’s where most people drop off.
Not me. Before and after work every day I wrote on this guy’s site for free.
Screw goals. Make a system.
If I had tried to write online after hours when I felt like it, nothing would have happened.
I never felt like it. I still don’t feel like it most days.
The goal of quitting my job to be successful online at something got me nowhere. Plenty of friends had similar goals. They’d usually start a social media account, post every day for three months, then quit.
Once you see the cycle of failure, you can’t unsee it.
I made my after hours writing fun a system. To get accountability, I agreed with the editor of the Wordpress site I wrote on what days I’d publish.
Breaking my system meant upsetting the editor.
I couldn’t do it. I’m a people pleaser.
The next level happened when I scheduled everything in my calendar. I then overlaid my 9-5 job calendar to see how it all fit together.
It wasn’t perfect, however, it was systematized early on. If not, I may not be here writing these words to you.
Audit your online friends list
Many of my online friends at the time were toxic.
They spent most of their time posting sarcastic comments, taking others down, and publishing memes a 5th grader would find funny.
The biggest difference was this…
They were consumers, not creators.
You want to be around creators to be more successful online.
Figure out passive income (faster)
I can’t talk about online success without talking about money.
Making money online is how you buy your time back from a job that fills up your calendar with (mostly) tasks you don’t want to do, and meetings you’d rather not attend.
I had no idea at the start.
In fact after 8 years, it’s only become a lot clearer in the last 12 months.
At the start of my journey, the main income sources were Adsense revenue for placing ads on a blog you own, affiliate links to Amazon books, and paid coaching.
Now there are so many more options.
Don’t be dumb like me. Figure out passive income after hours.
If you search “income reveals” or “how much money I made in 202-” you’ll see what’s possible.
Once you know what’s possible you have a back-of-the-envelope path to follow.
Conduct mini-experiments
Doing the same thing over and over online and expecting different results will lead you to give up and become a troll.
Don’t do it.
What I did from day one was conduct experiments. I tried publishing my work in lots of places. One of those places was Medium dot com.
The site ended up defining a lot of my online success. But if I never tested it out, I wouldn’t have found out.
One-day tests aren’t enough either.
I reposted my articles on Medium for about a year (5 minutes a day) before I went all in and published exclusively there.
Make data-backed decisions. That’s what the internet was designed for.
Get a financial education
There’s no point making money online if you’re going to piss it up against the wall.
At the start I had no idea about finance. I remember asking a mentor what derivatives were. He explained it three times and I didn’t get it.
The reason is I hadn’t bought financial assets before.
As part of my education I set up a trading account. I did a short course on how to read financial charts with all those cool red and green candlesticks.
It took a long time.
But after many years I’ve learned a lot about finance. I can now talk Wall Street shop with strangers on finance twitter and keep up.
Read books on finance. Learn where to invest money, so you can spend less time doing work you hate, and more time doing work you love.
Re-invest in yourself
The bulk of money I’ve earned is re-invested in:
Health
Books
Online courses
Live/virtual events
Productivity tools
I spend the most on upgrading my psychology.
Because if my mind can’t see the opportunity, the rest of me certainly can’t.
Dreaming big is why I am here today. On day one my mission statement was “to inspire the world with personal development and entrepreneurship.”
Nothing has changed, except it’s no longer an aspiration.
You can invest in yourself too.
Takeaway
How you spend your time after hours shapes your future.
You can numb the pain of your workday after 5pm with Netflix and alcohol, or you can build the life you want. It’s amazing what one year of working after hours can do.
You become unrecognizable.
Experiment with an online side hustle. Change your future.
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Thanks for all the great information, feel like being in class when am reading.
On Quora,where I first saw you.there was a Question Asked "Who in your life ever told you the most important thing ",after following your information I have to say No One,not even my Parents had that kind of Positive Knowledge about Life that you have,Where have you been the last 50 years.I always look forward to see what you have to say next.Stay Safe MGM