Hi All, So I've been devouring knowledge non-stop for the past few weeks by using many great resources including this forum and I've decided to share my journey. I am going to do this slightly differently than other posts and share with you my views and the need to stop working a 9-5 job and take you along on a journey of knowledge, implementation, frustration, success and hopefully freedom. The below is copy pasted directly from my blog, Eternal Gambler: Work, Happiness and The way of life For many, including myself the job they have is not much more than a means to an end – that is to say survival; material, physical as well as societal which brings no pleasure, meagre amounts of intermittent satisfaction and copious amounts of boredom. Some may feel that it is a luxury, but never before in history have so many been plagued by the question of how to achieve and sustain happiness and satisfaction. There have been studies that postulate that each human being is born with a static level of happiness, which may spike or dip depending upon the circumstances of ones life, but the individual quickly reaches equilibrium again – personally this is a disturbing thought. As far as I can tell, happiness seems to be deeply co-related with two things, work and family; for what else gives our life meaning other than the people whom we surround ourselves with for every waking moment of our life; but as a consultant you live a nomadic life surrounding yourself with new colleagues constantly, some of whom are resentful of your very presence since you are the living embodiment of their inadequate skill set for the task at hand. This makes for a frustrating, inhospitable and sometimes hostile work environment. Finally I decided that life is too short to be in a job that I have no passion for and which gives me no pleasure, I seriously feel like I have regressed as a person in this job after being used to being surrounded by young, smart and driven individuals at university and so, motivated by a similar leap taken by a close friend and his success thus begins my foray into Entrepreneurship. . Re-Discovering my Roots I have have had a busy week, I have been devouring information non-stop and I have decided the direction I’m going to go in. When I was young, in the “wild wild west” days of the Internet I accidentally stumbled across to make money online selling digital my products on my website using Google ad-words to dive traffic to my site. It was quite successful, for an 18 year old I was making a ridiculous amount of money, many multiples of what a minimum wage job would have made me, coupled with very little competition and organically ranking number one for my keyword on Google, I thought I had it made. I remember excitedly telling everyone who would listen how much money I was making and how resourceful I was by having automated payment and delivery for my digital system wherein all I had to do was check my Paypal balance every few days. That was my first taste of passive income. My joy was shortlived however, as within months multiple copycats selling the same digital product cropped up and the market was saturated. I did not check my paypal balance for a week and suddenly realised barely any money had come in while my Google ad-words account was still churning away using up it’s £100 a day allowance. I was outraged, incensed that people were copying me, the fact that my product was a direct copy of someone else’s is besides the point. I wouldn’t understand it then but the barrier for entry to my “Business” was way too low and it soon stopped being profitable. A decade has gone by and I’m back to my old haunting grounds, web development and digital products and boy, have things changed. Terms like backlinking, blackhat and whitehat SEO and Google sandbox are the buzzwords and the industry seems a lot more regulated than before. After spending copious amounts of time devouring amazing resources on R/Entrepreneur, Black hat world, Backlinko and others I have decided to take my first step back into this world by creating an affiliate marketing website. Thank you to those of you that read this far - if you'd like to follow my blog it's hxxp://eternalgambler.com Any feedback will be much appreciated.
