Low Stakes Work Can’t Support You Forever
Just under two years ago, I was massively burned out. During October, 2021, I told all of my remaining clients and customers that I was going to be taking a hiatus. My main source of income had been pounded by the coronavirus nonsense, and bad habits regarding having one-too-many projects going at any one time had caught up with me.
So I took a hiatus that turned into a retirement from Direct Response work.
Two Months In
Doing nothing was boring, and after the effects of my stressed-out existence subsided during the next few weeks, I was busy experimenting with some business ideas that I’d not had time to implement due to the previous schedule.
I started a small publishing company. I’d release little books, pamphlets, e-guides; you probably get the picture. All under pen names, no set schedule, and thus no stakes.
I don’t really have many customers and it’s all quite hands-off in general. As long as I sit and write, everything works.
From that, I started reading, learning and researching intellectual property licensing and so on. I started an IP Licensing business, which is pretty small, but has the potential to grow exponentially providing I can keep pumping out intellectual property.
Finally, somewhere during the time where the original GPT came out, I decided to play around with language learning machine stuff. I developed an app that, without giving the game away, is pretty much unique and outside of five people, nobody else on the planet knows what it is and what it does.
Of those five people, only I have access to the source code, (It doesn’t use GPT and exists almost entirely on my PC) and only I know how it works.
That’s been making me money since January 2022.
So, generally, everything is going quite well on those fronts; I make money every day, I don’t have to worry about clients or customers, and that’s all great except for one issue.
That’s Not Enough
When I started these little side businesses, my goal was to make money where I didn’t have to constantly think about some aspect of business all the time.
I needed that, or so I thought, so that I could switch the computer off and work on fixing all the other things in my life. Health, relationships, and so on.
To the surprise of me and possibly nobody else who I’ve talked about this with; that didn’t work. Because it wasn’t a case that I “didn’t have time” to fix the other bits in my life. With the extra time I still didn’t fix them until I deliberately set out to.
Long story short; I started fixing those bits, have the income-generating machines going, and, if I’m honest with myself, the free time to put myself towards more serious business.
Like starting this little blog again; and all the things it entails.
Get To The Point, Jamie
It’s all a bit whimsical to point to a hobby-blog and say, “This is important” and mostly, it’s important for me and nobody else.
Because the old blog, which I’m slowly but surely fixing up on this site, was a diary, sure, but it was also a way to explore the new bits, stress-test that I knew what I was talking about with a live and randomly-selected audience, and, overall, put things into the world to make it better.
The blog was always, in that respect, a hypersigil.
I’ll talk about that in Thursday’s blog post, because, as a mark of how seriously I’m taking this all, I actually planned the week’s posts in advance so they all run together and make sense.
Until then though; a hypersigil is a work of art in which the creator tries to accurately reconstruct the world, and then alter it by writing the future.
It’s a microcosm-macrocosm thing based on the hermetic principle of As Above, So Below.
We’ll explain in Thursday’s post, but to get back on track, the blog was an accidental hypersigil which worked by turning me from a potential writer (among other things) into a full-blown pirate hustler.
And that’s what I’m recapturing now.
The Point, Finally
The point, finally, is that the reason I’m doing this is because you can’t concern yourself with low-stakes games forever.
Eventually, you get bored. Or, worse yet, you have to confront the fact that you could have achieved more if only you’d been stricter with yourself about your potential and your ability to achieve it.
The hypersigil concept works because it changes the creator, who in turn, by being changed is able to change the world.
It’s all an interesting concept for me, and it’s the high-stakes game I’ve been looking for.