Unprofessionals Dominate at Making Money Online. Professionals Suck at It and Make $0.

Do it the lazy way and remove 99% of the risk.

Professional bankers can be d*cks.

I was one for years. I lived, ate, breathed, and slept with bankers (my ex-girlfriend was a banker). They sit at the top of the professional ladder. The pinstripe suit and leather briefcase are the tools of their cult.

Many of these bankers I knew wanted to make money online. Every few months, a colleague would quit to try. 99% of them never made it and ended up right back in their banking careers, hating life.

Professionals are the worst when it comes to making money online from things that start as side hustles. They apply strategy, meetings, and Powerpoints and end up failing. I got out okay.

But I was always an unprofessional wolf pretending to be a professional in sheep’s clothing. Unprofessionals are scrappy. You must become one to succeed making money online.

The #1 reason to bother with the game

The reason to bother being unprofessional and making money online is simple.

Live life on your own terms.

Making money online, even if it’s small at the start, takes you down an entirely different path in life. $100 made online from leverage rewires how you think. What becomes possible and impossible, shifts.

Author Neil Gaiman provides the other reason

To make good art.

Life is a tapestry you get to sew. The art you make creates the threads. Making money online provides the platform for that art. The focus isn’t profit, revenue, or monthly user growth. It’s art — a noble freaking cause.

Professionals seek to replace themselves too early

Professionals treat making money online like a corporation.

After they’ve got their logo from 99 Designs they’re already thinking about how they can replace themselves. They’re desperate to hire an army of yes men and yes women to follow their smart, quirky, brilliant leadership.

This is a corporate p*rn fantasy. Making money online doesn’t work like that.

Many that succeed at it are one-man bands with perhaps one virtual assistant. Making money online isn’t about giving townhalls and creating huge mission statements bigger than Space X’s goal to get humanity to Mars.

Unprofessionals do it differently. They realize…

You need proof of work.

The #1 goal of making money online should be to bank some cash by yourself without needing employees. If you suck by yourself, you’ll suck even harder when you’ve got an army of employees milking your nipples for every drop.

Professionals are looking for excitement

Professionals I worked with quit their jobs to make money online to look naughty.

Sometimes it was a flat-out rebellion against a bad boss that ended in tears behind closed doors, followed by a rage quit as revenge. Making money online isn’t sexy, though, when you do it. I’m 8 years in.

Most days it’s boring as hell.

Unprofessionals learn to fall in love with the boredom. We rewrite our habits, worship consistency, and get to work despite what mood we’re in or what tragedy has b*tch slapped us in the face hours before.

Professionals think they are geniuses

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work — May Sarton

Unprofessionals are learners before they’re earners.

They don’t think they’re smart. In fact, they’re proud of how dumb they are. IQ isn’t part of their thinking. They realize that online side hustles are about making dumb money — because anybody with wifi can do it.

Professionals want progress to be silent until they hit success

Success was important to the professionals I knew. They wanted to build online in silence, then only talk about it when they had results.

The fear of failure kept them quiet. They’d keep their LinkedIn profiles clean and never dare talk about what they were doing. They became introverts trapped in their home offices.

Many of them suffered from loneliness after the transition.

Unprofessionals are the opposite. We figure sh*t out in public. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about documenting the journey to come across unlikely people who can take our online side hustle to the next level.

Figuring things out in public works because it creates accountability. Plus the internet loves an unprofessional underdog.

The present state is meaningless

Online guru Jack Butcher says this:

You miss opportunity when you evaluate everything in its present state.

In 2013 Bitcoin in its then-state looked like a con job. Everyone thought it was a joke.

“Magic internet money. What will they think of next? bahahahaha.”

Sure, it looked like a dumb idea at the start. Countries replacing their currency with a digital currency — owned by no one and that’s got no creator — isn’t so crazy anymore. It’s a reality in some parts of the world.

Professionals I worked with struggled to see the future state of finance. They get taught that innovation is risky when, in fact, it’s the only path to ensure you don’t get eaten by a tech company building the future.

Those who help to build the future make the serious money online. Those who refuse to accept it and call smart technologies like Bitcoin a scam — will work for the professionals, who will end up working for the unprofessionals.

Professionals think it’s about mind-numbing products

Humans don’t buy products.

Products sound like a way to drain our wallets. We buy thoughts, feelings, and solutions online. Professionals are hellbent on product-market fit and minimum-loveable-product, and many other startup turned corporate buzzwords that don’t mean jack sh*t.

Unprofessionals are obsessed with this mantra:

You need a community. You need a community. You need a community.

Famous investors like Raoul Pal have shifted from investing in businesses with good products, to communities with great leaders/ideas. They look at community growth, not professional Excel-Spreadsheet revenue growth. Let me prove it. Go on Twitter. Look up Web3.

Follow a few of the top conversations. What you’ll quickly see is some of the coolest most innovative communities on the planet. They’re full of energy and passion — not lifeless transactional behavior that the customer base of the professionals has.

A community is how you make money online.

Pro tip: help your community make money online with you.

Professionals make the #1 underrated mistake

Professionals live in a YOLO delusion.

They go all in and quit their job to make money online. The need to make it work turns them into desperate souls real fast as their savings begin to dry up.

Unprofessionals do it the lazy way and remove 99% of the risk. They build a side hustle after hours. Writer Stephen King was an unprofessional too. Sean Kernan wrote that he scraped together the energy at night to make his dream come true. I’d argue this is the hardest part.

Finding the energy to make an online side hustle work after hours is a challenge. But it’s possible. You’ve just got to remove all the energy leaks in your life that bleed focus from making money online. Start with meetings — that normally frees up about half the week.

*Smiles*

Once an unprofessional has made money from their side hustle they slowly shift their time away from their job.

The goal is this: They make their day job their side hustle, and their side hustle the main hustle.

Once the money they make online is enough to live, then they quit their job to pursue it full time. That’s how you work the smart unprofessional way, not the hardass professional way.

They live within their means while building

Follow Kenny from Accent Investing’s advice:

You should not buy the new Mercedes with a Toyota salary.

Act your wage.

Can I get an amen up in here!? Unprofessionals live frugally while they find out how to make money online. They measure every dollar of their salary in time, not purchases. An emergency fund comes in damn good use when you have a slow month making wifi cash.

Why everyone doesn’t “JUST DO IT”

Nike’s motto is just do it.

This is the motto of unprofessionals that make money online. They value execution over ideas. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about ideas.

Here’s an idea to make money online: sell an eBook on Amazon. There’s nothing new about that idea. You’ve heard it a million times. The ideas for making money online are painfully boring. That’s because it’s not about the idea. It’s about choosing an idea and getting to work.

Why else don’t we just do it?

Warren Buffett: “Because nobody wants to get rich slow.”

Patience builds online empires. Professionals want it fast, so they buy the luxury car and nice outfit and signal their status to the other professionals.

Unprofessionals are happy to eat beans and rice for the rest of their life in a hoodie working out of a $2 a day co-working space. Patiently be the frugal badass today, so you can eventually become a time billionaire.

Closing thought

Unprofessionals don’t give a f*ck about the result.

It’s the process they absolutely love.

Once you make money online from doing something you love, you’ll never go back and be one of the professional sheep ever again. Doing what you love will make you more money online than you could ever imagine.

It’s impossible to suck at it and make $0 when you adopt that mindset.

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