master your mind, monetize your knowledge. realize effortless wellbeing and create scalable income without leaving your couch. 1 actionable insight every saturday morning (in 15 minutes or less).
how i made $100K on X
|
Click here to read the (prettier) web version In March 2023 I was a broke music teacher. But since then I’ve earned more money than I thought I ever would… while compromising less:
Actually, I do no unfulfilling work. (It’s 4:54am on a Saturday right now. I want to get up and get to my desk 7 days a week.) I’ve come to understand that this is possible for everyone—including you, whoever you are and whatever your background. In fact, I’ve taught over 1000 people how to do it already—and if you read this post in its entirety, you’re next. Actually, you can get started right away if you prefer: I just released a free course called Freetirement Foundations, which guides you through the beginning steps of earning your first $100K on X. Also, on the 22nd of September, I’ll take a limited number of students through a structured cohort course—in which you can get personal guidance from me as you go deeper into my fusion of spiritual practice, personal development and purpose-based business. (Scroll to the bottom of this post if you’re keen.) Now, the idea of earning $100K without leaving my house seemed too good to be true the first time I heard it. Which is why I’m giving you the full timeline of how I pulled it off in this post. But first, I need to tell you where it all started… The 4 Killer CompromisesRight before a new technology is released, everyone fantasizes about how much work it’ll save them:
But then immediately after that new machinery or software is integrated, the space it creates is filled with some other task. Our species is basically done with the burdens of survival, yet still we feel we must ruthlessly occupy ourselves with effortful activities—always in the pursuit of more. We’ve transcended our biological needs, but replaced them with imaginary needs. This creates a huge problem: Imaginary needs can never be satisfied, because they don’t really exist. Think about it: where’s the cut-off? How many people do you know who’ve said, “okay, I actually have enough money now”? These imaginary needs have been baked so hard into our collective consciousness that we don’t even question them. And so we make 4 great compromises to satisfy them… Compromise 1: RulesAs I’ve written before,rules are efficient at a societal level, but oppressive at an individual level. Many of my earliest memories are of wondering “why?” Mostly, why everyone was telling me to do things in certain ways but none of them could give me a good reason why. That’s rules at their worst: remember parents and teachers giving you the “because I said so” line? Or perhaps it was a religious authority who told you “because it’s in the holy book”. People who don’t back up their rules with arguments typically don’t have any arguments. And look, I get it: some people just like rules. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. The problem is that those who like rules tend to crave power over others, which means they tend to get it. And one of the most enduring inventions of those control freaks is… Compromise 2: Schools
Humans had achieved a lot before the industrial revolution. Aside from the fact that we all learned to walk and talk before anyone could teach us how, we also achieved:
Still, in the late 18th century the control freaks decided it would be better to make children line up, shut up, sit down and be told what to do rather than, you know, doing it. As a kid I found this deeply confusing. If you were lucky, you made it out of school with some degree of curiosity and creativity intact. But if you were like most, both those qualities were stifled in you. This left you at a great disadvantage in real life, where curiosity and creativity are greatly rewarded. Compromise 3: EmploymentSchool was never about teaching you to succeed. Your boss has entered the chat (and she’s spamming crying laughter emojis). If your school was progressive, you were told employment was the safe option. If your school was traditional, you weren’t told of any other option. But the truth is that employment is no safer than going into business yourself. As I discussed in my post on How to Win on Social Media, every private sector employer is an entrepreneur who can go bankrupt following one bad decision. They can also make you redundant whenever they please. Since 2000, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or ceased to exist.¹ Employment is the typical life path only because it doesn't demand creative thinking, which is much harder to teach than knowledge. But the difficulty of a task is not, by itself, a good reason to avoid it. The sad truth is that the vast majority of people don’t understand how the mind works. And compassion is appropriate here: most schoolteachers are doing the best they can. No-one taught them to think creatively either. But that doesn’t mean you have to lie down and surrender. Consider these ideas:
This trio of ideas is responsible for almost as many wasted lives as war. Compromise 4: DerivativesI thought I was a rebel when I decided to be a professional drummer. What I didn’t recognize was that I could only rebel as far as my environment would allow. Among the thousands of teenagers like myself, desperate to “make it” playing rock music, that privilege was given to precisely three from my southwest region of England. (They still perform—their band is called Muse). In other words, there wasn’t much of a scene. Almost every other musician I knew either quit or did what I did—taught lessons and played cover tunes in whatever genre would pay. This demonstrates what business author M.J. DeMarco calls derivatives. M.J. grew up loving cars and so ended up driving limousines for a living. But after 3 years of that he’d fallen out of love with cars entirely. I managed to keep my passion for music alive a good bit longer, but over those 25 years my drum kit gradually felt more and more like a tool than a medium of artistic expression. Music also became my only source of income—and on a “time for money” basis. The hours were long and unsociable, the travel was brutal, and the pay was stereotypically low. This was a very different set of associations with my craft than I’d had when I was a teenager.
I’d ended up in a shockingly similar position to the employed people I knew. The differences being:
The cure had become the disease. “Perhaps I would’ve been better off falling in line after all…” I contemplated. I Wish I’d Known This Before Wasting 25 Years In My Old CareerYou weren’t born wanting to compromise. You were born wanting to survive. And everyone else is the same—including your tens of thousands of ancestors. Those ancestors were, naturally, the survivors:
It’s their brain sitting in your skull, and it’s their psychology dominating the collective consciousness. That’s why everyone wants more than they need. That’s why you feel anxious about money sometimes, even though you have way more food, safety, comfort and entertainment than those ancestors of ours could’ve dreamed of. When our primitive ancestors felt “anxious” (they didn’t call it that) they grabbed a spear, ran a few miles, killed a beast and dragged it home. Zero anxiety left at the end of that adventure. When 21st century folks feel anxious they typically sit and stew in their hormonal cocktail or distract themselves (both of which lead to more anxiety). To summarize, the four compromises in the above section feel bad because they’re based on “shoulds”, “oughts” and “musts”. They’re abstract, imaginary, made-up.
99.9% of people are playing those games, and that’s why everyone tells you that you have to go to college, become employed or—at the very least—settle for a derivative of one of your interests. But they don’t know what I know. They don’t know how easy it is now to make a living making the change you want to see in the world. And hey, I don’t expect them to. I’m on the frontier out here. I saw the super-early adopters—the creators populating the creator economy long before it was called that. I thought it was too good to be true. But in 2022 I entered the game, and I was still early. And even if you’ve not started yet, you’re early too. How do I know that? Because most people I talk to still go cross-eyed when I try to explain to them how my business works. There’s never been a better time to start your purpose-based business. The creator economy has matured enough that people like me are out here to guide you, but it’s still young enough to give you an outsized return on investment. (You can get started on $0, by the way. The only investment you have to make is in time and energy.) I’m going to give you the full timeline of how I earned that first $100K on X. This is an example of what you can expect to happen for you if you follow the steps in Freetirement Foundations and continue learning the game afterward (more on that below). The 2 Ingredients to My SuccessObviously I had to learn how to start and run an online business. That’s ingredient number 2. You can skip to that if you like, but you’d be missing something critical… Ingredient 1: SpiritualityBefore I ever had the idea of starting my purpose-based business, I had to clean up the mess that was left from my trying to fit in with the 4 compromises. In 2014 I was living like the majority of people:
And also like that majority, I was just digging myself a deeper and deeper hole. That hole is called coping: that dynamic of feeling “emptied” by most of your daily activities (work), then trying to “fill yourself back up” with anything you can find. After 15 years of it not working, I finally decided to look for a solution… And boy did I find one. I’ve told this part of my story before, so I’ll skip the details here. The important parts are:
Jackpot! Ingredient 2: The Purpose-Based Business ModelWhen I finally showed up and started learning how to start a one-person business, I found I moved a lot faster than everyone else. They were all struggling with:
But I’d already dealt with those issues in my spiritual practice. Here’s how the timeline went for me:
If you’d told 2014 Dan that this was going to happen for him he’d have thought you were crazy. But it did happen, and I’m here to make it happen for you too. But I need your help. I need you, first, to acknowledge that this can happen for you. Note that I didn’t say “believe” this can happen for you. I didn’t say “trust” this can happen for you. You don’t need belief, you don’t need trust, you don’t need faith. All you need to do is engage with the free material in Freetirement Foundations with an open mind. Confidence comes after action, not before. Take a few steps down this road. See how it feels. Then, if you really don’t think it’s going to work for you, drop me a message in the Freetirement Friends networking group and tell me why. I’m here to help. With love from my desk, P.S. If you’re super keen, you can reserve your spot on the Freetirement Frameworks cohort right now. Spaces are limited.
SOURCES: https://www.capgemini.com/consulting/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2017/07/digital_disruption_1.pdf |
the freetirement files
master your mind, monetize your knowledge. realize effortless wellbeing and create scalable income without leaving your couch. 1 actionable insight every saturday morning (in 15 minutes or less).
Click here to read the (prettier) web version of this post. You already have $100,000 worth of knowledge in your head. You just need to learn how to transmit it to people. Then you can quit your unfulfilling “time-for-money” work and join me in the Freetirement gang: Where we get paid what we’re worth Where we only do things we care about Where we get results that change people’s lives And there’s never been a better time to make this transition: You can start a business **for $0 You can...
Read the (prettier) online version here. 2 out of 3 millennials have nothing saved for retirement.¹ Yet everyone feels they need $1.8 million to retire comfortably.² If your reaction to this data is to think you’d better stop buying lunch out, you’re still playing a rigged game: A game in which the rules change without notice A game in which your options are severely limited A game in which your winnings decrease in value over time In this post I’m going to show you how to play a better game:...
Click here to read the (prettier) online version. 4 weeks ago, my uncle started feeling unwell. 3 weeks ago, he saw the doctor, who diagnosed him with terminal liver cancer. 2 weeks ago, he had tests. 1 week ago, he was told chemotherapy might extend his life by weeks—if he was lucky. He opted out of treatment, preferring to spend his remaining time without the additional suffering caused by chemotherapy. So on Wednesday, I flew with my parents from Bristol to Edinburgh to see my uncle and...