Because you only live once…
Hailey Rene
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Posts by Hailey Rene
Fear of Being Normal
May 10th
Throughout my whole life, I’ve struggled with fear. Growing up, I was afraid of fire and thunder and stuffed bears. As I’ve aged, some of the fears have lessened and changed, but I’m no way over my fear. I’ve replaced my fear of bears with the roar of the airplane that is about to take off under my feet.
I still fight my fears. I still go on trips and light candles. But there is one fear that I’ve had for my whole life that I will never hate and will never try to get over. It is the fear that, until college, ruled my life.
It’s the fear of being normal.
I fear conformity. I fear the crowd. I fear that people will look at me and claim that I’m just another one of the sheeple. I fear waking up when I’m 40 and realizing I never did anything with my life. That I’m am ordinary.
Because I want to be extraordinary.
In college, I got beaten down a bit (not literally) and burnt out. By the end of college, I just wanted to veg out and do my job. I had turned into one of those dreaded sheeple. After graduation, I got a job as a web developer. As jobs go, it’s pretty nice. I make a decent living working 4 days a week.
But as the burn out from college began to subside, my old fear began to come back. I felt normal. Well, I was normal. And that needed to change. I began searching for myself. I wanted to prove that no, I wasn’t just an ordinary girl. I could be extraordinary.
That’s what got me to where I am now. I started this blog and am working on some super awesome projects.
And never again am I going to be normal.
Want to join me?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet / CC by 2.0
Is this all a Pipe Dream?
May 9th
So I know that many people reading this may not grasp how all this can be done. How can you make a living without working for someone? How can you make a living working for yourself, out of your own home?
First let’s define “Making a Living”. You make a living by earning enough money so that you can live comfortably while doing the things you want to do on your off time.
Most people accomplish this by getting a traditional job and working 40 hours a week in order to earn the money they need so that they can enjoy what little free time they have. The problem with this is that you are stuck. You make a set amount of money and that is it (in most cases).
The alternative way is to work for yourself. You are still working and producing value (although it may not take nearly as long to do so when you remove the clutter that comes from an office environment), but you have freedom and are not stuck with that fixed income.
Imagine this. You work hard for a couple of months producing something super awesome. Then you launch it. You make your year’s income in a few weeks. Take some time to enjoy it. Maybe you can travel some. Then you go back producing your next awesome thing. You set the schedule and enjoy the freedom.
Don’t think it can happen? Let’s look at some numbers. I’ll use myself as an example.
I currently make $40,000 a year as a computer programmer working 4 days a week. I will use that as my base salary in doing these calculations. Feel free to redo them with your base salary (also, you will need to take into account the fact that you may have higher personal expenses when you work for yourself).
- If I have a $1000 product, I would need to sell 40 of them.
- If I have a $500 product, I would need to sell 80 of them.
- If I have a $250 product, I would need to sell 160 of them.
- If I have a $100 product, I would need to sell 400 of them.
Do you think those numbers are unreasonable? For a year? If you have a really good product, selling 400 of them for $100 each would not be that hard. The key is that you need a really good product.
Now take a different approach. Sell a monthly subscription service. Maybe that is a membership site where you provide weekly teaching on a topic that you are knowledgeable in. It could be a subscription to a product that you sell (think ‘Wine of the Month Club’ style). It might be a website that is a really good tool that people really find useful.
Okay, now say that you charge $20 a month for it. That is $240 a year. Can you get 167 people to buy this product or service? Plus, if it is a super good product people will keep using it. You won’t have to worry about making $40,000 in new sales the next year because some will follow over from the previous year. Your income can grow.
I pay for a NetFlix membership, a World of Warcraft subscription, an email newsletter service, an announce-my-blog-post service, a membership forum, and probably some other things that I am not thinking about right now. People do actually buy that type of thing.
Your products have to be good, and you probably have a lot to learn to make it happen. But no, it’s not a pipe dream.
Lifestyle Design is Here to Stay.
May 7th
Is lifestyle design a fad? Will this go away in a few years when people start forgetting about Tim Ferris and his 4 Hour Work Week?
I don’t think to will. Lifestyle Design captured the heart of so many people because it truly mends some deep-seated cultural desires. Lifestyle design is here to stay.
- People hate jobs. Log onto Facebook on Sunday night or Monday morning and you will probably see people complaining about the start of the work week. The hate of work is so wide spread that no matter how good a place is to work, you can find people who don’t want to work there. UnWork is the alternative. You can still add value to this world and care for your family without a job.
- People want freedom. As a web developer, I can take 21 days off a year. And that is a pretty generous program. That equates to an entire month away from my job. But if I were to take a month off at one time, I would get looked down upon from the higher ups. With a job, you can’t just go traveling the world for 6 months at a time. You are stuck. You also don’t have the freedom to move to a new city whenever you would like. You are stuck. UnWork give you freedom.
- Potential for Wealth. People chase money. The evidence of this can be found in the large number of people who fall for scams. Just look online. Some of the best selling products teach people how to make money. In a job, you have a salary or an hourly wage. Even if you max out your hours, there is still a cap to how much you can make. With Lifestyle Businesses, there is no cap. Awesome products make awesome profit. Where there are profits, people will follow.
What reasons do you have for wanting the UnWork lifestyle?
Make a Million Dollars in a Day
Apr 17th
I make a million dollars a day and I can show you how to do it. Buy my product and it will walk you through my process step by step!!
Just give me $10,000 and I’ll show you how to control the world!!!
Just click here!
Let me guess… You don’t believe me. Good. Because if you hear something that good it’s probably a scam. They are probably just out to steal your money.
One of the awesome things about the internet is that anyone can publish anything. This allows writers who never had a chance to get published before to be found and sell their work online. This allows people to have blog, write ebooks, and sell stuff online. This also allows people to scam you.
Scammers are not always from Nigeria
Internet scams come in all sorts. Some try to trick you into buying a false product. Some try to steal your email address so they can sell it to spammers. Others try to trick you into clicking on false ads so they can get paid by an ad network. Some of them are less offensive then others.
As a patron of the Internet, you must learn to recognize scams for what they are. Here are a few tips I use when trying to separate the scams from the authentic products:
- Don’t fall for unreasonable claims – if they offer you a million dollars but only want you to pay $10, it’s probably a scam. The reasonable offers and products won’t make such grandiose claims.
- Flashy sales pages – The flashier the sales page is, the more suspicious I get. Most of the honest offers that I have seen have thorough, down to earth sales pages.
- Money for nothing – I hate to break it to you, but to make money you are going to have to do some work. People that promise no work systems are probably scams.
- Read reviews – The awesome thing about the ease of posting something online, is that if it exists, it is probably discussed somewhere online. If something is a scam, there will be people telling about their experience being scammed by it. I will google “(product name here) scam” before every online purchase that is not from a known seller. This can really save you a lot of grief.
In short, just really do your homework and trust your instincts when buying things online.
And yes, I know that there are actually people out there who may make a million dollars in a day, but they are rare and if they do offer training, it’s going to cost a lot and will come well recommended by current students. Just be careful.
What other things do you do or use to spot scams online?
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/ / CC BY 2.0
Gamers Guide to Getting Rich pt. 2
Apr 14th
Simple games like We Rule can teach you basic information about money management and give you some ideas, but in order to get a fuller picture of economics, look at a game with it’s own economy: World of Warcraft.
Full economy?
WoW has it’s own full economy, with items with various degrees of supply and demand. Each item has a value that it can be sold to a vender, but most higher value items are sold to other players in the auction house.
Blizzard, the makers of WoW, has control over the supply and demand by controlling the game play and use of the various items. This is a bit different from real life, where the governments can control the money supply, not the supply and demand, but it actually brings the effect of these two things to light.
Things that have more uses are in greater demand.
Things that are limited in availability have greater value.
To maximize your auction house profit in WoW, you must have something of limited availability (such as a high level mineral) then try to sell it at a price that is the highest someone would pay for it. Each time you put an item in the auction house, you lose a small portion of that item’s listed price. So if you continually list an item at a high price, at some point it will no longer be profitable. There are add ons and software that helps you figure out the price sweet spot.
So how does all this apply to real life?
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/ / CC BY 2.0
iPad Only
Apr 12th
I got my iPad a little over a week ago. I’ve been using it so much that it feels like longer. I have been watching a few people on the Internet try to use only the iPad for a month, specifically Ed Dale and Paul Colligan. I haven’t vowed to go iPad only, but on my personal work (aka anytime that i’m not being paid to code), I have been pretty much iPad only.
The two main exceptions to this have been when I was testing some code that I got back from a contractor and watching some videos on Vimeo. The code was in python and needed to be run locally, so couldn’t do that on my iPad (although I do have an FTP and SVN client running on my iPad for non-local stuff). The videos were a webcast that was going to be taken down that I really wanted to see.
The only other thing that I haven’t been able to do well is post to my blog. I had to work out a system where I write out my blog entries in Pages and then get my VA to post them for me. Still working on this one, but I think it will be doable. I really wish the iPad WordPress app worked better than it does, but without copy and paste and rich text display, it’s just not real usable right now. I also didn’t have much luck editing via the web interface. For some reason, my rich text fields are not working correctly.
But some of the things that I have been able to do on my iPad make the limitations well worth it. I love writing on the iPad. Typing is really easy in the landscape mode and since the keys and the text are right next to each other it’s really easy. And pages is super pretty.
Yesterday I finished my business plan using one of the Pages templates, and brainstormed on my new web app using a combination of MindNode and iWireframe. Both of these tools work great in their infancy and I expect them to get even better. Once I finish my diagram and wireframes, I just need to email them to my designer and programmer and that will get the project started. All from my iPad.
For notes, I have ended up using an app called CourseNotes. It is made for students, but does a great job at collecting and organizing notes on various topics. My only wish is that I could name a session of notes, but that feature is probably coming.
I have even gone iPad only during play time too. My relaxing time has been spent playing iPad games and watching Doctor Who on Netflix. At some point, I’ll go back to reading actual books, but for now, it’s all iPad. I have yet to try reading a book in iBooks, but I have my doubts about the backlit screen hurting my eyes. But i’d really love it if iBooks would store PDF files as well as epub. A lot of the books I read are PDF ebooks that I get online. It would be nice not needing a separate PDF reader.
Well there are some of my initial thoughts about the iPad. I am really looking forward to coming up with even greater tasks to try to do on my iPad. This device is truly awesome!!
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivyfield/ / CC BY 2.0
Dragon Diction Fun
Apr 9th
It’s almost as fun as playing with babel fish translator. In short it doesn’t really work that well. I just told it a simple story about the things sitting on my bed around me. The result? See for yourself:
Okay I want to see what crazy things I do think you are consenting but you didn’t say I am on the phone like that you come up and I am going to get away from you soon I had to work out system is intended to Adam breakfast
I’m planning on playing with it some more, but right now it’s not really usable for any actually work.
Gamers Guide to Getting Rich
Apr 8th
Yesterday I was totally absorbed into my new iPad. I watched some tv shows on netflix, played a bunch of games, and in general, did very little work. One of the games that really grabbed me was We Rule, a kingdom building game where you grow crops and charge taxes. It’s surprisingly addictive.
But as I was playing, it occurred to me that this game teaches the basics of money. Here are the steps to getting rich in We Rule:
- You start with enough money to buy a farm. And you can plant corn for free. You grow corn until you save up enough and gain enough experience to plant a larger crop.
- While you are in playing the game, plant as many rounds of corn as you can. These have the best payoff, but are the most time consuming.
- When you are about to leave the game, decide when you will be able to come back and plant to crop that takes that long to grow. Set a calendar alarm so that you don’t forget to come back.
- As you save up more money, you can expand your kingdom but always be sure you have enough saved up to plant your crop for while you are away.
Now let’s translate that into real life.
- You need to start with a little bit of money saved up or be at a job that provides you with money until you can get residual income. Start your business by doing small but possible time consuming things that can begin to grow the value of your business. These may be setting up a blog, designing a project, or writing a free ebook so you can start an email newsletter.
- When you have the time, work on these time consuming things as much as you can, as they will lead the way for you to offer sell things that don’t require as much effort on your part. These may be things like consulting or larger ebooks.
- Over time you will begin to get income coming in from the less time consuming sources enough that you can spend much less time on your business and much more time on living your life.
- But as you live, always make sure you have a bit of savings that you can live on if you need to, and some extra cash to invest into your business.
What other business principles have you been able to learn from a game like We Rule?
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/ / CC BY 2.0
The Changes We Love
Apr 7th
Have you ever experienced a change that caused your productivity to increase a great deal, but only for a limited time?
Maybe you got a new device or office supply that you really loved using. Maybe youstarted working in a new location. Maybe you started working with someone else on aproject. Your productivity soars, but as soon as you got used to the new toy, space, or person you went right back into old habits.
This is currently happening to me with my new iPad. I just love working on it, so I’m being really productive with tasks that I can do on my iPad. But I know that without lots of discipline, the productivity will not last. I’ll start not checking my iPad task lists. I’ll put off that same tasks that I have always put off. I’m going to try to avoid it, but it will probably happen.
What’s to be done?
But how can we use this to our advantage? Can we use regular systematic changes to keep a high level of productivity? Here is a system that I try to use to regularly give my self a productivity boost through changes:
- Once a month, I treat myself to a new toy. This doesn’t have to be an expensive electronic device. It can be as simple as a new pen that I enjoy writing with or a new journal to write in. Or a new piece of productivity software that looks promising. Something that makes me want to work with it.
- At least once a week, I work in an alternate location. I will either go to a library, a coffee shop or a public space that is conducive to work. Of course the work that I need to do helps choose a location. I can write in the park, but I can’t work on the web. I have found that this helps even on the other days when I’m in the office.
- Once every week or two, I have a work party with a friend. This habit was formed in college when I would go to study groups to do homework. Even if you don’t have anyone to meet up with to work, maybe larger cities has co-working groups that you could join that do just this thing. Some may not work as well in groups like this,but I have found that when I’m surrounded by a bunch of people being productive, I’m more productive. And it never hurts to give it a try.
These are 3 ways that I use regular changes in my life to help myself be more productive.
Do you have a change that you use to help yourself be more productive? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kthread/ / CC BY 2.0
