| Folks, I am bracing for a tough winter. I live in Southern California so it’s not the weather that’s gonna be tough. It’s my professional life. Here’s where I’m at. If you don’t believe, why bother?In the spring of last year, I officially pulled the plug on my old career. The business model for that era was this: make the best videos I could, give them away, money happens. That method worked extremely well for me once, about a decade ago, but it was in terminal decline for a while before I finally let it go. For the rest of 2023, most of my income was generated by awesome freelance projects for people like Sysdig and Sandwich Video, Generation Genius, Nick Milo and Linking Your Thinking, and Bloomberg Law. But alongside this work, I was creating impressive growth selling educational products through the Everything is a Remix site. My first little hit was a downloadable guide to writing in ChatGPT. I followed that up by selling pre-orders for an on-demand video course about creating content with ChatGPT. That course is by far the most successful product I’ve ever created. Even though my educational ventures did well last year, it was still a minority of my income and nowhere near being a livelihood. My objective this year is this: turn my educational work into a real business. That means it entirely provides for me and my family. And I don’t have a full year to prove this is viable: I have one quarter. If the metrics aren’t good enough come April, it ends there and I look for in-house opportunities. One of three futures will arrive come spring.
This attempt fails utterly. I land somewhere in between and have to make a judgment call. This works well enough to continue the pursuit. You won’t hear me say this again, but number 1 is the most likely outcome. That’s the reality for all businesses – they mostly fail. But I’m putting on the blinders… now. I am going to run at number 3 with all my might, with moronic optimism. If you don’t believe, then why bother? I believe. |
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