Earn some money

Got my first pay packet, yippee :D

The job I’ve got sucked so after 2 days i actually quit.

but i found another way to earn twice as much a month for half the time and almost without any effort! And it’s taxfree, in cash and legal! This sounds like a bad joke but it aint.
The thing I’m talking about is giving me 10.000 NOK (about 1.600USD) pr. month and for a 17 year old student this aint so bad.

There is a store in Norway called “kiwi” and funny as it is they got a few garanties who sounds like this: “If you by fruit or vegetables and your not happy with the qulity, you get dobbel amount of money back”. Now I guess you figgerd out what I do?
After the school a few days a week I take the buss from kiwi to kiwi. there are 6 kiwis in my town. and there is a lot of rotten and moldy fruit in them. So I collect the bad fruit and vegetables, pay for it and get twice as much money in return. I’ve calculated that I pr/hour am getting about 35USD witch is twice as much as my working fellow students. and most of the time I am sitting at the buss!

Just got a new job! Hope I’m going to earn some money without spending it all at bs

kkku

Things I should do:
- give private lessons to Elementary and Junior High School students
- continue selling my handmade creations to websites and shops
- sell unused things on Ebay or similar
- sell used school books
- find a part-time job?

I saved up enough money so that I don’t need to work for six months. Now I’m working on a web project that I’ve been wanting to do for ages now, and when I go start my Ph.D. this fall, I won’t be impoverished from the get-go. My daytime hours are now devoted to my own projects!

I’m marking this goal Worth It, but I have doubts. I spent about a year of my life working at a job that I didn’t really care about. I took that job for money, not for love. My plan the entire time was to save up and get out. This is not a good way to live. It’s not a good way to enjoy a job.

I realize that the vast majority of humanity works most their best hours at jobs they hate, strictly for the money, but I really don’t want to settle for that unless I really have to. I think most people cave in too easily to a spurious “practicality”, and don’t explore options that are fun and fulfilling as well as practical. These other options require bold moves and taking chances, though.

So, would I have done better if I had dove straight into my own projects even back a year ago when I was down to $200 in the bank? I guess I’ll never know.

I’m in a good spot right now, so I’m going to enjoy it.

For about one more week, I’m going all-out at work. I’ve got a couple things planned Saturday (an improv class and planning my 10 weeks). Other than that, it’s working daytime, evenings, and Sunday, to finish everything up before my last day.

I find myself enjoying this level of focus. For months, now, it seems that I’ve been getting interrupted by one thing or another so that nothing really goes very far. I prefer total immersion as a way to do just about anything. The deadline of the job ending has provided the focus to get me to say no to just about everything else and immerse myself in the work. I wish I’d done this earlier, simply out of my desire to focus, and not waited for “a good reason” to immerse.

I’ve given up taking Caltrain to work. I’m driving every day, even though it’s 40 miles one way, because driving gives me the freedom to stay as late as I like. Also, while Caltrain is nice in that it gives me some time for reading or making inroads on personal projects, doing those things before work means that my brain gets seeded with something other than work at the start of the day. Driving time is “wasted time”, but at least it’s not distraction time.

go go go

i need a job. help.

I took a really close look at my finances. Despite making way more money last year than ever before in my life, I also spent way more. I paid off a lot of debt, so my net worth is much improved, but my savings are still shockingly low.

Observation: Never before have I worried about money as much as now, when I’m making more money than ever before. This is because I set the bar pretty high: I wanted to go to grad school this Fall with a hefty nest egg: at least $40K.

I look at my spreadsheet and think, “OK, better keep at this job. It’s hard to find anything that pays this well.” When I get to work, though, I feel frazzled, partly because the work is choppy jumping between extremely tedious programming tasks, and partly because my heart is truly elsewhere. I have ideas for web sites, I have ideas for interesting books, I have ideas for research, and I have studying to do to get ready for grad school. Switching my brain in the morning to focus on work stuff is painful.

I am torn between just quitting the job and taking my chances on highly speculative web work vs. holding out until I reach a savings goal. I think doing intellectual work just for the money is extremely unpleasant and also quite risky: you get money, but you spend time on stuff that you don’t care about. Will that money really pay off in well-spent time later, or will I look back and feel that I accomplished nothing of value? Time spent doing meaningless stuff can never be recovered. There is stuff I want to do before I die, and the kind of work I’m doing at the job is not it. By sticking with this job, I am not trusting the “improv way of life”.

Looking back, the best times of my life were times when I was unemployed. Of course, they were also times when I was living off a big pile of savings. It takes a lot of courage to refuse good money.

Quitting to do my own projects would be much easier if I reduced my expenses. I am feeling so exhausted from the job, I don’t have time for that! It’s a vicious circle. I think the way to break vicious circles is with drastic action.

However, my current plan is to delay drastic action until May. That’s when I will have enough savings that I’ll feel reasonably comfortable quitting.