Resurgent.Us — Create Your Own Freedom Dividend

I made $.01 in June as a writer. Within a year I’ll be making $1000/month. You can too. Here’s how.

In these times of uncertainty — from the pandemic, racial tension, political division, social unrest, and economic catastrophe — I believe Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend would have gone a long way towards calming people’s fears and easing the pain.

But since the suspension of his campaign, the government is unlikely to be of much help. I can’t control that, so I’m not going to focus on it. What I can control is that I’m going to get my Freedom Dividend anyway. And if you’re willing to join me through the rest of this article, I’m going to show you how I believe you can do it too.

First, some backstory

I was a die-hard Andrew Yang fan when he was running for the presidency, and I still am. He woke something in me that is fierce, something that I didn’t know I had. He is every bit as dangerous as his “bUt iSn’T tHaT sOciAliSm? vEneZueeeLaa!!!” critics are right to fear. But what Yang awakened in me wasn’t socialism. It was entrepreneurship.

I think it was the mega-successful Clickfunnels king named Russell Brunson who said his definition of a real entrepreneur is “someone who takes responsibility for solving other people’s problems”. Which, to my mind, is exactly right.

There’s more than one avenue to doing that, which was an important paradigm shift that Andrew Yang revealed. Yang had already sold a startup company and made enough money doing what people typically think of as entrepreneurship to not have to worry about money. But in taking up other people’s problems, he had also run a philanthropic organization to promote entrepreneurship in inner cities and helped to create over 3500 new jobs by his efforts. This is something even critics respect. He was a breath of fresh air, politically, and it is because he was doing it to take responsibility for solving other people’s problems that I view his approach to politics as “entrepreneurship”.

Is it about the money?

Up until a few years ago, I thought people only took the massive risk of failure to build a business if they either didn’t like their boss or wanted to get rich. I like my job, and wealth and power never really appealed to me very much, and so I had never bothered to run my own shop.

On my Facebook feed, I see tons of 20-year-old kids in fancy suits holding wads of cash in front of a mansion and a fast car. I guess they’re trying to hawk get rich quick schemes or something. But for me, rather than marking an achievement, a Ferrari just strikes me as a headache that I’d constantly have to repair and service. And besides that, I drive like a grandma anyway. Total waste. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the lure of wealth and status just isn’t the right bait to get me to bite.

But changing lives? Getting the nation’s systems to function properly? Freedom? Independence? Having an impact? Spending myself in a worthy cause? Yes, please.

So when I saw entrepreneur Andrew Yang with a measly 0.9% of the vote, but 100% of what I would want in a leader, my decision was easy. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Win or lose, majority or not, at some point you have to stop going along with the same old thing and push for what you believe in.

It is also through the lens of entrepreneurship that Russell Brunson helped me process the failure of Yang2020 to win the nomination, which was crushing to so many true believers like myself. But it need not be. Failure is part of the process.

I now understand that the change has to come from within first before we can have a real impact on the world. Medium has presented us all with an opportunity to accelerate the project of self-transformation. Here, we can find our voice, and losses are just part of the cycle leading to wins.

The shift from being merely a “worker”, whose value is derived purely from what people are willing to pay for one’s labor, to being a “creator” who owns the copyright to the fruits of one’s labor, is a profound one. It is everything. If “identity politics” is to be used for anything useful, then let it be for this kind of transformation in our identities. Let us go from being mere expense items on labor budgets that spend 30-year careers hoping to dodge a cut from the accountant’s pen, to becoming masters of our own destiny and builders of our own worlds. Painters. Speakers. Designers. Authors. Podcasters. Actors. Sellers. Owners.

But it all starts with writing.

I honestly don’t know for sure if or when a Freedom Dividend will ever be signed into law by the government, and I accept that it is outside of my control. But I do know that one has already been signed into law in my heart by me. It is an iron law, the unbreakable oath. It is the absolute certainty of a promise one can only make to themself. For me, and for those who follow me, there must be freedom from reliance merely upon jobs.

Is $1000/month possible for you?

There are already endless articles on Medium explaining how to tweak aspects of your writing to make more money. There’s everything from tips for beginners, what to write about, how to establish the discipline and writing process you’ll need. So you may wonder if there’s any room for you. After all, these articles have been written by authors who are already far more experienced and successful than you. In the shadows of these professional writers, what does a beginner like you have to offer readers?

That’s the instinctive feeling for a lot of people — and it is also completely backward from how you need your mind to think if you’re going to escape mediocre results.

Here’s the undeniable truth. Everyone starts a beginner.

The ones who get good enough to become professionals (at anything) are simply the ones who are humble enough to never stop improving and have such a strong reason “why” that they’ll never tap out. That’s it.

I know this with so much certainty and conviction because by this point in my life, there are already many other things I’ve started off lousy at and improved significantly within less than a year. That’s just the learning process, and if you give yourself enough time to figure it out, you’ll get there just like the other people who make it a priority are able to.

The key is to make short term goals that are ridiculously easy to fulfill, and to do them consistently and without exception. Tim Ferris sets his bar at “two crappy pages a day”. Sometimes it will be more, and that’s okay. But don’t challenge yourself in the near term, just set goals that are going to make you feel like a winner so that you’ll keep taking those actions. Life is a game of neurochemistry, and you don’t want to fight against the current. You want to put the dopamine in your favor, so set nice and easy low goals in the near term. “Stretch goals” come much later, once you’re already an ace and have strong habits built.

Here’s the #MATH

As I said in the beginning, in June I made just one, lonely, solitary penny from my writing, and that came at the end. I was thrilled because I actually wasn’t expecting to make anything for the first month. But having made my first penny, I’m now a “paid author”. I can’t overstate what a psychological transformation that is.

Anyway, both for accountability and to inspire you to see how achievable the progression is, here are my targets.

June 2020 Goal: $.01 Actual: $.01

July Goal: $.02 Actual: $.64

August Goal: $1.28 Actual (only three days into it so far!): $.84 [EDIT — Update of Actual: $6.59]

September Goal: $2.56 [EDIT — New Goal: $13.18]

October Goal:$5.12 (break-even for a monthly subscription to Medium)

November Goal: $10.24

December Goal: $20.48

January 2021 Goal: $40.96

February Goal: $81.92 (more than break even for an annual subscription to Medium)

March Goal: $163.84

April Goal: $327.68

May Goal: $655.36

June Goal: $1310.72

And just like that… the Freedom Dividend.

There are people who earn $10,000 a month and more on Medium, and honestly I don’t plan to stop until I’m one of them. But just as everyone successful will tell you, don’t worry about making $1,000,000 until you’ve first made $10,000. And don’t worry about making $10,000 until you’ve first made $100.

#Followback, use this hack!

So how have I managed to grow so quickly this far?

Every day, I make sure to follow the maximum number of people that Medium allows. Between about 1/4th to 1/10th of those people (depending on how selective I am) will follow me back. So if I can follow at least 400 people per month (which has been my average so far), and if 100 of those follow me back, then within a year that’s going to be 1,200 followers — my tribe of 1000. But I’m going to end up having a lot more than that because as I write articles and apply to publications that have each readerships numbering in the 10’s of thousands, that’s a lot more exposure.

It snowballs because most people don’t take the consistent actions that add up. Instead, they give up. So if you just show up day in and day out, then you stand out.

By the way, my day job will keep paying the bills, but all of the money I earn from Medium is going to go into investments in order to create a money-generating feedback loop. I strongly recommend doing the same.

I’ve elaborated more on this concept here.

If you want to hear more be sure to like my facebook page where I release all my articles.