I Quit My Six-Figure Job Because I Made $5.80 On Medium
(I was inspired by Ayodeji Awosika and Tim Denning)
Okay, I didn’t JUST quit my job because I made five bucks writing. But, I am fairly certain I wouldn’t have quit when I did if I hadn’t encountered Medium and some of its rock star inspirational writers.
I officially sent in my resignation letter to my job for many reasons. I was no longer enjoying the work I was doing in my position, I (luckily) have a partner who is employed and we won’t starve after a few months of unemployment, and, well, I want to be a writer. Like, for a living.
Now, you might think I’m crazy. “Everyone wants to be a writer for a living”, you might say. Well, that just might be true. And I just might be crazy. I literally made $5.80 in the month of August, I don’t have another job waiting for me, I have a family and a mortgage, and I’m pretty sure any rational human being would advise against quitting one’s job with benefits in the middle of a global pandemic.
I don’t care. Why? Because I am willing to put in the work.
Also, because I have found the inspiration and advice on how to do it (thanks to so many other writers here on Medium). Here are the top four things that inspired me to hold my breath and jump in the deep end of writing.
Building momentum is easy
To get really specific, building momentum is both easy and hard. I recently read the article How to Achieve World Domination by Ayodeji Awosika and completely understand that, as a new(ish) writer I will be pushing a veritable boulder up the hill toward earning any kind of liveable income.
I also understand that creating an audience in the overcrowded world of writing is massively difficult. But, here’s the easy part — you don’t have to do it all at once.
See, momentum is built one day at a time. There’s a reason you build momentum rather than receive or have momentum. It takes consistent work. Every day. One day at a time. In some ways, that is inspiring because I don’t need to create a perfect Pulitzer prize-winning piece of writing. I just need to keep doing it. And keep creating better and better content every time.
Writing for a living feels a little like running a marathon. People sometimes ask how I have been able to run three marathons in my life. Listen, deciding to run a marathon is easy. It’s the keeping on running that is hard. The fact is that I didn’t WIN three marathons. I just ran 26.2 miles on three different occasions. How did I do it? Easy. And hard. I simply decided to start running . . . and then, I decided not to stop until I had finished 26.2 miles.
So, how do I plan to eventually make a living as a full-time writer? The same way I ran those marathons. I have chosen to start writing. I will choose every day to not stop. I will build one little bit of momentum every day. And hopefully, I will inspire and encourage at least one other person per day while I’m doing it.
I want to do what I love
I used to enjoy my job-job. A lot, in fact. For the past year, though, I stopped enjoying it as much. Situations change and companies change and we, as humans, change every day as well. If we don’t choose to recognize change both inside and outside of ourselves, then we end up unhappy.
Time is the most important resource we have on this earth and I’ll be damned if I am going to spend it doing things I don’t like doing. In another deep dive into Ayodeji’s writings, I found a passage I wholeheartedly agree with:
“Life isn’t all about chasing your dreams.” Sure isn’t. But it’s definitely not all about spending the vast majority of your time doing things you don’t want — a job you don’t like, gaps of time lost with errands and commutes, a sliver of time on the weekend to enjoy yourself.
Currently, one of the top five things I love doing is writing. I wake up at 5am so I can read for an hour and write for an hour before my kid wakes up. There aren’t many things in the world for which I would wake up at 5am. A flight to the Maldives? Sure, I’ll wake up at 5am. Taking care of a sick kid. Yep. I’ll do that too. And . . . writing.
That alone says everything. If you have something that makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning, you need to follow that path like your life depends on it. Because, in fact, it actually might. Did you know that people that are happy with what they do for a living live healthier and longer lives? Yep. Sign me up for the long life, thank you.
I believe in exponential growth
Yes, I did make only $5.80 on Medium last month, but guess what? I have practically doubled the amount of money I have made every month since I began. And, as a person with a master’s degree in business, understand, appreciate, and respect the power of exponential growth.
You all probably know the magic of exponential growth in relation to compounding interest. If you invest $100,000 today at a 6% rate, it will be $320,713.55 in twenty years. Sure, after only one year, it will be only $106,000, but the more money in the account, the more money there is to grow.
I believe that the same rule applies to most things, including writing for Medium. I only made $0.41 my first month, but it has doubled every month and so have my followers. The more followers, the more people read my (hopefully) awesome content, the more folks I get to inspire, the more money I make.
So, at this rate, if I assume a doubling of income every month, I’ll be making $371.20 per month in six months. That’s not close to what I was making at my day job, but what happens in a year? $23,756.80 per month. No, I’m not dumb. I know that is not guaranteed. But I do know that if I keep working on it, I’ll continue to grow. One of my favorite sayings is:
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”.
I recognize that there’s more than one way to Successville
To be honest, right now, I’m shooting for Jupiter. Not the moon. Why? Because there are so many ways to make money from writing. How do I know? I learned it from Tim Denning. One of my favorite things he said in a recent piece in Better Marketing was,
“Learn to think about earning money as a writer differently and you can make it your side-hustle or even your full-time gig. There are tonnes of ways to make money writing when you think about the reader, process, platforms, and income streams differently.
If you can be creative with your writing, then you can be creative with how you earn money from your writing.”
I left my job almost three weeks ago and I have already ghostwritten an entire book on real estate investing. (And was paid pretty well for it!) Guess what? I learned a lot as well!
Again, there are so many ways to make money as a writer. I can keep ghostwriting books, I can write blogs to post on my website, I can create blog content for other folks, and I already have a new book coming out in December (I had already been working on that for a couple of years).
The long and the short of it is that there are so many ways to make dough creating content that I truly believe that if anyone worked hard enough at it, they could succeed.
So, here I go. Go go Gadget writing fingers. This is not an “I did it and here’s how I succeeded” story. Ayodeji Awosika and Tim Denning already have those stories right now. I encourage you to read them. (And thank you, by the way, Ayodeji and Tim for the inspiration!)
Here’s the thing: I’m not seeing immediate huge monetary results from writing. However, my emotional results are epic. I am now doing something that I love doing and the amount of daily happiness that brings me is an epic change in my life.
No, mine isn’t a story of success. Yet. For now, mine is an “If you are unhappy, be brave enough to make a different choice” story. With anything in the world, if you want it, you must work hard for it. You can run any marathon you want to run. You just need to get yourself to the start line and choose to not stop running until you get there.
