Life Leveling

I really wanted to talk about this topic given that It’s been the biggest problem I have had for the past couple of years. Given that I am 21 years old and in that awkward period of becoming an adult, I have been trying to figure out how to choose the correct career for myself.

For some, this is a pretty easy task (lucky bastards), for others (me), it seems nearly impossible. Now, I’m not going to lie to you, I myself, don’t have everything figured out. But, I’ve figured out a pretty good method of deciding what to pursue with my time. So if that sounds interesting to you, read on.

Not only will I discuss the methods I use to navigate this tough choice, but I will also talk about various different “easy methods of making money online” that I myself have tried. It can be overwhelming in this age of technology and infinite opportunity to decide what’s worth your time.

It can be scary to think that you might be missing out on a golden opportunity to make money easily, while being lazy. It is especially difficult given that we live in a world of infinite promises, as people love to sell hope. If you didn’t know, selling hope is one of the easier ways to make money online, but also immoral ways.

That’s why you see all these quote on quote “Gurus” that are rich and will tell you how to get rich for a small fee of a couple thousand dollars. When in reality, all they do is rent expensive vehicles and houses to appear rich, so that they themselves become rich by tricking others into thinking that they will get rich.

This intro has already been way too long, so I will end it with a saying “If something sounds too good to be true, than it probably is” this is very much still prevalent today.

The Formula of Career Decision

Let’s skip the mumbo jumbo and get down to the useful stuff. How do you decide a career? This is how, we need to establish a couple different metrics that are crucial to career decision.

1. Interests: What are you interested in? Write everything down, even if it seems irrelevant, because it just might be the key to your decision.
2. Skills: These can be what you currently have or what you believe you are capable of learning. Realistically, I think we could all learn anything with a certain amount of confidence and support. But not everyone is able to get that. Start by writing what skills you have, again, feel free to write things that might seem irrelevant. Then I would make a section that will be important later, which is skills you need to/want to acquire for the career you choose.
3. Financial Desires: Do you want to be super rich or just be able to pay the bills? Does money matter to you more than happiness? This is going to change things a lot depending on where on the spectrum you place yourself. I personally, would rather be happy than rich, but I would also rather sacrifice a bit of job satisfaction if it meant not having to stress about money all the time. Things are never black and white, but having a rough idea of where you stand is important and in 99% of scenarios you will have to make sacrifices. You have to understand that in the corporate world, you often are paid on your skills. The more rare the skill, the more you will be paid. This is why people go to post-secondary, to acquire these rare, but valuable skills.
4. Purpose: This is one that will heavily vary from person to person. Some couldn’t careless about purpose if it means they get paid well and enjoy the job. While others can’t get it out of their head that they could or rather should be doing more to help others and the world. I don’t really need to go on and on about this, I think you get the idea. Simply decide if you care about making a positive difference or not and be honest with yourself.
5. Fun: The thing we all love the most “fun”. We desire it and want it constantly, but it heavily varies depending on the person. So let’s break it down simply into what I think fun could look like in a work environment. First we have what we’ve established in interest, skills, purpose, and even financial desires/income. If you are interested in what you are doing, then that is most likely fun to you. If you feel challenged in some way, that may be fun to you, on the opposite end, if you feel too challenge, this could be stressful and overwhelming, this is all relating to your skills of course. If you are doing something of purpose then you are likely feeling good about yourself, which I would attribute to positive feelings like having fun. And lastly you have financial desire/income. If you feel you are being paid fairly or good then you likely feel better about your job, making you more likely to have fun with it. But, if you are underpaid then you likely feel negative emotions about your job and that effects your ability to enjoy your work.
6. Happiness: This definitely has overlap with the other topics, but it has some slight differences that you should consider. Everyone is different, but despite that we conduct analytical studies to try and generalize. I believe these can be really good incite into what to expect. By doing some research you can see which are the jobs that have the highest job satisfaction and vice versa. You can also use sites like Reddit to see personal stories. I would just be careful with Reddit, as some people are very negative, and they might scare you away from an opportunity that would have suited you better than them. With the job satisfaction studies, they usually use the same metrics we’ve discussed. An overall happiness, which is determined based off income, interest in the job, fun, whether or not you feel satisfied with the challenge or qualified in your skills and purpose.

Compare and Contrast

Now that you’ve gathered all the information from the formula above, you can begin to look into careers and see if they match up with these values. Now in all likely hood, some of you might feel unsatisfied.

You say that nothing matches your values and this world just isn’t made for people like you. I know this, because I was you/am you. Like I said earlier, in this process you have to be willing to give a little or even a lot. I know this is very tough and can take time to accept, as it did for me, but you have to be realistic.

I found myself in quite the pickle after high-school. I wasn’t particularly talented at anything and I didn’t have any interests that I believed were career related. I struggled through my last two years in math, so realistically pursuing a career involving math wasn’t ideal.

I sucked at science and didn’t even attempt the useful sciences like chemistry and biology. I didn’t believe I could pick chemistry up, since I struggled with the little bit I had done in grade 10 and I wasn’t learning or memorizing the biology topics well so I left that behind too. I didn’t realize at the time that I was burning bridges that I would consider crossing in the future.

At the end of the day, we all make mistakes, and those bridges may be in tatters, but they can be repaired and crossed with significant effort. Moral of the story is that I was stuck, like step-sister in the washing machine stuck.

So what did I do, what have I learned since graduating almost 4 years ago. There is a career for everyone, it just takes open-mindedness and adjusting to find.

What I’ve Tried and Where I Plan to go

I’ll be blunt, this might turn into a long story but I will try to keep things concise and really just extract the morals of the stories and my general advice.

Drop-shipping: You know how I said that people like to sell hope? Did I ever say that I hadn’t bought it? Unfortunately I have, now I actually have zero regrets about doing this and I learned a lot from it. I did lose a little bit of money, but it was nothing disastrous, I mostly just lost time and energy. There’s a trend you will see with my endeavours, which is low chances of success.

Which I think is fine, but I wasn’t being realistic about the situations and gave myself a whole lot of false hope. We will get into the consequences of high risk, high reward, low success, in the next endeavour. The moral of the story with this is really positive despite it not becoming anything.

You have to try so you don’t have regrets, but be realistic of the odds and do your due diligence. I believe that drop-shipping is possible, but it requires hours of time and effort without seeing results, perhaps even months, and this is the reason I ended up dropping it (No pun intended).

I also realized that I wanted something that was a bit more purposeful, and wasn’t a bit scummy. As with drop-shipping you are essentially selling a cheap product for more than its worth through marketing, which I guess is just basically sales in a nutshell.

Day Trading: The second big endeavour I pursued post high-school was day trading. If you have heard of it, then you probably winced, if you haven’t, then I don’t suggest looking into it, seriously. It involves the stock market and making predictions to hopefully make a lot of money.

The only problem is that the predictions are very difficult to make and some even debate that they are impossible without insider information. I absolutely don’t want to get into that debate here. What I learned, the very hard way, is that even though we like to think of ourselves as the possible exception and tell ourselves that we will do everything it takes.

We make mistakes, we fall, and we fail. The odds of being a successful day trader are very slim, like 0.1 percent are successful or some stupid number like that. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely for taking risks, you need to do it so you don’t have regrets and every mistake can be learned from.

But you have to be realistic and careful, which are two things I didn’t do with day trading. This also plays upon the saying I said earlier, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is”.

YouTube: After that devastating lost, I was determined to put it behind me and focus on something new. I knew that I couldn’t or rather shouldn’t sit around and mope. The next venture I would pursue was yet again one with a very low success rate. YouTube is such an interesting topic that I could go on and on about, a lot of it applies to the other social medias as well.

There was a study done that I believe said that over 60% of young kids these days want to be a YouTuber and it makes a lot of sense. I think that the unfortunate part, which applies to a lot of careers, is that you don’t see the struggle or the process of actually making videos. If you have a desire to pursue YouTube I 100% endorse it, but be prepared to have your efforts show no return.

This is why I think it’s really important early on to just focus on having fun, because if you aren’t getting results, it can be very discouraging. I’ll probably make an article on YouTube itself, as it’s a very in-depth topic.

This like some of the other things I pursued, once again showed me that good things don’t often come easily. The mental battle is the most underrated battle in our society, and these “easy” careers often require lots of them. Like I said, I’m more worried about getting across the moral of the story rather than going in-depth as to what I did.

But for context, I ran a gaming channel to 1000 subscribers before realizing that it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I also ran a philosophy/talking head channel once again to 1000 subscribers before again questioning my motivation. And finally, most recently, I got a gaming channel but this time about the game NHL to 500 subscribers and this was actually the first account that I got monetized and made money.

But yet again, I realized it wasn’t for me. And that’s really the main moral of all these stories, you never know until you try. Do you really want to play video games while other people are watching you and you have to constantly be entertaining? Do you really want to spend hours editing and and sifting through footage just so other people can watch a video that they don’t appreciate?

Perhaps on a concept or topic that’s been done time and time again and significantly better than what you did? “Comparison is the killer of all joy”. I highly caution those who want to pursue this career to keep this in mind and use comparison strategically.

Remind yourself that it’s okay to not be as good as that person, they have years of experience on you and possibly staff. There is room on the internet to build a small community that can keep the lights on, its possible, don’t lose hope.

Not everyone gets to be the north star, but that doesn’t mean the billions of other stars aren’t beautiful too.

Current Day: So we arrive at today, I’ll quickly add that within this time I have also done some freelance work on Fiverr, I worked at Walmart for about 3 years, I’ve tried blogging (then quit, but I’m back).

I currently run an anemic Etsy store with my girlfriend (but at least we got a sale). I’m still experimenting. I really hope that this and the push I plan to do in this field will work. Blogging, YouTubing, book writing, and who knows what else I might do with this “brand”. Throughout all this time of trial and error, anxiety and depression, thinking I’m not good enough and a failure, mounting pressure from family to become something for myself and future family.

I’ve come to value stability above all, yes pursuing all these low percentage careers can be fun. But I highly recommend doing it on the side, until you can go full-time. Because if you don’t, it is severely anxiety inducing.

Which is why I plan to go into HVAC/am open to possibly other trades (I’m going this route since I have a friend in it who highly recommends it). I am not a handyman, I am not social, but I’ve decided to adjust as I value a respectful career, one where I can support a family. Something that I can feel secure in.

Sales is also intriguing, as you can make a lot of money, but it can sometimes involve scummy behaviour which I don’t like. I might have to go to school for it at some point, and that will come with lots of anxiety inducing challenges, but there’s an ideology that I adopted from a book called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” by Mark Manson, you can Click Here to check it out on Amazon (this is an affiliate link, so you support me by using it)

I am going to paraphrase the hell out of this, but it’s essentially this “Life is a struggle no matter what, so you might as well choose struggles that matter”. Life is hard, but you have the ability to choose how it’s hard (at times), life will always be hard, but you get to choose how you react and let this hard life affect you.