Tag Archives: entrepeurship

Full-time work and why I’m trying to avoid it

Making money has been a goal of mine ever since I was about 12, when I made my own business cards on powerpoint for my new dog walking business. Then at 14, I began tie dying shirts, which was more successful and I made my first real amount of money.

I never wanted to work at McDonald’s or any other typical job a young teenager works because I heard my friends complaining about poor pay and long hours, and I think this sentiment has endured for me. To this day I still don’t want to have to go into work 5 days a week, I want to have flexibility. Moreover I want to be doing something I love and I don’t think you can love having to go into work every day.

So I don’t want to have to work full-time, great, but how do I achieve that? It’s not like I can say oh yeah I’ll just work part-time for the rest of my life, unless I happen to marry rich (fingers crossed!). I need a strategy to make up the lost income which comes from not working full-time.

I’m yet to figure out how I will make up that lost income, with many ideas but no action so far. I was listening to a podcast with Austin Kleon (the author of Show your work!) and he said “you may have several passions and by doing all of them you may not have a career, but you’ll have a good life.” This really resonated with me because I feel that if I went into a full-time job I would strive to progress in that, jumping on the hamster wheel like everyone else to continue to get pay rises and jostle for positions. I don’t want that. I want time to focus on what I really enjoy doing, writing, learning new things, having ideas, teaching people, having in depth discussions and exercising.

I’ve noticed since I’ve been at my placement 4 days a week and studying the rest that the time I spend doing these things has reduced significantly. So I don’t yet have a solution on how to recoup the income gap between part time work and a full-time career, maybe it is something I don’t even know exists yet. I trust that if I keep my options open, and continue to work hard, opportunities will present themselves to me. Maybe that belief is naive, maybe I do have to work full-time, but I don’t think it is.

This also raises a thought reminiscent of ‘The Four-Hour Work Week,‘ how much money do you really need to be happy and live the life you want, but that’s a conversation for another blog post.

I feel like this is something unique to me, this whole desire to not work full-time, but at the same time I feel it should be universal, so I’m interested to hear others thoughts on this and start a conversation about work and why we actually do it.

Aside: To challenge myself to continue writing and doing things I love I’ve set myself a challenge, 50 days, 50 blog posts. There are 50 days left in the year, and I want to write more, so I’m going to set aside some time every day to sit down and write, something, anything.

Starting Something New

Whenever we are considering starting something new, we get nervous. Whether it is a new job, a business or a something in the digital sphere; a blog or a youtube channel. With these nerves we start to put it off, especially if it’s something we don’t HAVE to do.

These nerves are something I’m experiencing now, you begin to doubt yourself. You do everything to convince yourself what you’re about to do is silly and worthless. You didnt have this idea for no reason, theres clearly an important reason you’ve started the process.

Gary Vaynerchuck has the idea that you shouldnt try to create perfection with your first go, and he believes it’s actually impossible. the salve for this problem is to just start creating and reacting to the success of each individual thing you create and follow the likes essentially. So dont try to create perfection with the first go, because its not possible. Just start, and change along the way and you’ll end up with perfection in the end.

This is a short reminder (as much for myself as others) that the downsides of whatever it is you want to start are likely less than benefits, and if you’ve having doubts at the last minute, you just have to make the plunge.

PS: I got a new lens (Fujinon 16-55mm f2.8) for my camera and am stoked on it, so excuse the photo of me on the header)

Committing to Passive Income

Just finished watching Ali Abdaal’s video on youtube about his salary as a doctor and youtuber and it has really triggered me off to really start committing some time to developing some sources of passive income. A pact I made to myself years ago as a teenager was that my ‘day job’ was never going to by my sole source of income, because as Ali mentioned, you are then choosing to be doing what you do and are never forced to do it, leading to you enjoying it a lot more.

I have delved into the world of content creation previously, I’ve created viral Tik Tok videos for March On, a charity focusing on spinal cord injuries (@march_on_aus). More recently I’ve also started a podcast by myself essentially for my other work, Running Science, a running store in Sydney (runningscience.com.au/podcast) . The goal of the podcast is to make running more accessible to the general public, as well as making it seem more inclusive than it does currently in Australia.

My biggest goal in life is to get people healthier, by exercising more. I want to do this through research but also health promotion. My dream ‘day job’ is to work with the UN or WHO to increase physical activity on a global scale. How I plan to achieve this is by doing a PhD and being an excellent researcher. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want this to be my primary source of income so what do I do? Currently I’m doing a lot of 1:1, Time:money work and I want to move away from that.

Below I’m going to list my ideas and how I can start actioning them:

  • EP Network – A friend from Uni and I saw a deficiency in how well known exercise physiologists are, so we decided to create a youtube channel to a) inform the world about what we do through educational videos, and b) help inform individuals about how easy exercise can be and how significant the benefits are.
    • ACTION: Currently we have been writing down scripts in Lockdown with evidence, as soon as we are out we have to start bulk filming these base video’s.
  • Instagram Page – I have previously been against using my personal instagram page for promotion, but I’m using it less for communicating with friends and more for just putting pretty pictures up currently. This is an opportunity to start growing and audience and building a personal brand which is incredibly important.
    • ACTION: slowly start sharing more and more of my own content on there, from the podcast, March On instagram and EP Network.
  • Writing – Writing is a passion of mine, I really enjoy it and love the idea of writing, I’m beginning to practise it more and more and hopefully get better and better. This could lead to me writing a book one day, continuing to write blog posts about my life and my work, and how that can provide value to people.
    • ACTION: Write consistent blog posts (1 per week), research how to spread blog posts and how this can grow.

This has been a good piece to write, I find by writing this in a public domain, I’m more likely to take these actions seriously and use them more going forward. I’m going to stick to these and see where it can take me.