I was listening to Shoemoney’s podcast last night (I don’t have a tv at the moment where I am staying) and he mentioned how there are two kinds of people – people who seek freedom and people who want security.
He wrote a new post on his blog today about it. I have never heard it put so succinctly by anyone. Lately I have been reading a great deal of debates on blogs and forums over which one is the “right” way to live your life. I think some of it has to do with the small controversy created by the Four Hour Work Week. People who want freedom totally get it, while the people who want security think society will crumble.
A few years ago, before I started this blog I worked for a small startup company in Tokyo. The company was having troubles and stopped paying my salary, so I decided to leave and spend the time looking for a new job. Money was very tight, it was just before Christmas so companies weren’t looking to hire until the new year.
After that experience all I wanted to do was get a nice job in a big company with a decent salary. I eventually found a new job and was pretty happy for a while as it was settling to know that I wouldn’t have any problems getting paid or losing my job. One good thing that came out of that job was that I started working on company’s intranet site and later the internet site.
Just before that I got into ebay in a big way, buying and selling Japanese antiques. I made some great sales and for a while was pretty addicted to checking my auctions every five minutes. My apartment started looking more like a second-hand store and I was running back and forth to the post office every night.
Even though I was enjoying making money, I got tired of photographing, packing and shipping the stuff. I saw the potential in finding a single product which I could keep reselling. A couple of years later, armed with my limited web development skills I started my first website.
Not long after, I found a job that looked like fun and paid better money. That job turned out to be a total nightmare, but I finally realized that working for a company is not how I wanted to live my life. I worked madly on my websites in the evenings and on weekends and saved money to cover for any emergencies.
I think I have always been entrepreneurial, but that one bad experience working for a startup made me want to seek security. In some ways now I think you could say I have more security because I am earning money from lots of mini-businesses and have multiple streams of income, with the freedom to travel and live where I want.
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Great article. I never looked at it from this security / freedom point of view but it does make lot of sense to me.
Oh yes I also went through that ebay stage and have exactly the same experiences as you describe (although with a different product of course). Imho ebay is a great starting point but anyone who wants to make a living from it must do it full time. Same as any other business idea i guess. There hardly are any shortcuts on the way to success
Definitely no shortcuts, but what I like about adsense/affiliate stuff is that you don’t have to be actively working to make money like you do with ebay. I try to get my family into ebay to no avail. I guess they are all security people.
With that adsense/affiliate stuff: sure you don’t need to work on it directly yet in most cases you need to spend the time and effort to built a site into stage when it can actually produce some income from ppc/sales.
You know perhaps better than me that getting a web into such stage can be a lot of hard work without guaranteed result. But sure, once it clicks in, it is more or less a smooth sailing from there.
With regard to the input required to build up a site, yes that is the biggest part, but the secret is to do it in a subject you really enjoy. That way you can spend hours and hours working on it, but not feel like you are doing hard work.
You’ll also not be inclined to give up before it starts paying off. If you are building up something you love to do, you won’t lose your momentum and you will continue far enough for it to take on a life of it’s own, so you can then apply your efforts to another site. It does work, it’s like planting a seed and watering it everyday until it starts to grow.
I am always aware that not diversifying income can mean tears in the end. I am interested in the ebay thing myself as another income stream but as you said you have to find something that can be sold over again. Any ideas?