300 Words 1/8/2023 | How a $9.00 Timer Will Pay Me Back 24.4X This Year.
Presuming I stick to my goals.
38 minutes and 10 seconds. That’s how much time is left on my little blue timer pictured above. It is counting down because I have given myself 45 minutes to write this Medium story. That is my allotted time to write and publish this story today. Only 45 minutes.
Can I do it? We’ll see. (I’ll take a photo of the timer at the end.)
In short this timer will pay for itself 24.4 X by the end of the year. Presuming a few things hold true through out the year.
- I continue my challenge to publish 300 words daily on Medium every day. You can read more about that here.
- I am able to maintain consistent readership over the next year.
- My cute daughter doesn’t sneak into my office and distract me during my writing session too often. (Like she is right now) It’s okay. She’s cute and I love her.
- I can continue to average a minimum of $0.60 cents per Medium article written throughout the year. (That was my average for all of the articles I’ve written up to this point from 1/2/2023 to 1/7/2023.) I think that is a fairly conservative estimate given such a limited amount of data. I hope the average increases as the year goes on, but I’ll maintain $0.60 as the proven baseline for now.
If I can have all four of those things happen I will be in great shape to 24.4X my investment into a $9 kitchen timer. (P.S. 24.4 X of 9 is only $219.60. That’s not a large sum at all, but it is definitely obtainable.)
Now what is the point of all of this. You see I spent 7 months on X building an audience and struggling to monetize. This is the first real money I’ve earned from a potentially consistent source of income, and I wasn’t even looking to earn it.
On January 2nd I decided that I wanted to write more. That everyday rain or shine I would put at least 300 words out into the world, and see what happens. I’ve committed to the process and not the outcome.
In my first article I predicted that if I wrote 300 words every day for 366 days straight that would average to 9,150 words a month. It has only been 6 days and I have already published 8 stories totaling to 5,726 words written and earned $4.82 in income from my Medium stories. (Not including this story.) That means I am already 62.6% of the way to hitting the writing goal for the month, and have earned 53.5% of the timer back so far.
The stories span the gambit from my first ever piece of poetry, to a technical breakdown of my habit system for the year, to why you should learn and how to give an Impromptu speech. They will continue to follow my interests and the interesting questions I get asked. I will only have two constants that I will write at least 300 words and that I will dedicate at least 45 minutes to doing it every day.
“Okay Jeff. It’s time to get off of your soap box. We get it already. You are kind of a big deal. So what? Why should we care?”
The answer is simple everything big starts small. These small wins compounded over a year or a decade can have a monumental effect on the direction of my life. What matters is that I’ve started and that I have a vision to work towards. As the cliched phrase goes: “If I can do it so can you.”
If you are on the fence. I hope this story inspires you to do something small that will compound over time. It may only take 45 minutes consistently put in over years or decades to change the course of your life, but you’ll never know if you never start.
Authors Note: Take small survivable steps. Don’t do what I did and leave a steady 9–5 to jump headlong into entrepreneurship without a backup plan or a solid income stream. If you can help it build slowly in the evenings and the weekends. That forward progress is what will set you up for success.
Okay I’m done. Stop the timer. Now. 1 minute and 6 seconds remaining.
Phew I did it. Now only 360 more stories to go.
Until next time.
-Jeff
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