My name is Gabriel and I am 28 years old. I have been on this forum for a few months now and I thought I wrote an intro when I joined but I never did, so here it comes.
I was born in the US but grew up in Austria and Sweden and currently live in Sweden. I am a pilot and “work” for a major European airline since about 3 years back and yes I have a lot of student debt, just short of a 100k USD to be exact and that’s after I have paid off about 20k. I have been interested in business since I was 14-15 but never really did anything about it until the fall of 2019. I started reading TMF and to be honest I didn’t like it at first. It was too much of a reality check.
So instead of following the great advice in the book I decided to create a course about investing and money management. Not because the market desperately demanded a course from me but because I was interested in it. The course was a complete failure. No one gave a shit and all I heard was crickets.
I quickly moved on to my next ignorant and selfish project. Dropshipping. I got the store up and running and again all I heard was crickets. However this time I decided to give more of a try so one day when I had a long layover in London I spent 10 hours collecting emails from Instagram influencers. I ended up with about 350 emails and contacted all of them. Most didn’t respond but I managed to get 3 of them to promote my product on their page. The first one resulted in no sales, the second one gave me one sale and the third, 20 something sales with a revenue of $500! I was ecstatic, however the joy was short lived because just days later the coronavirus arrived in Europe and America and the world entered a global shutdown. My little business quickly turned into a customer service job and I eventually had to shut it down.
On top of that I was furloughed from my job for 4 months just days later and had to move back in with my parents. During these 4 months I tried several different ideas and projects but without much success. It was also during this time I re-read TMF and Unscripted and really started to see the value in those books!
I started working as a pilot again in July of 2020 only to be furloughed again 2 months later but this time for 7 months. At this point my frustration reached its peak and I told myself in big capital letters “F*ck THIS SHIT!”. I had enough of someone with just the flick of a switch could turn off my income stream. I had enough of listening to captains over the age of 40 talk about how they hate flying and just want the day to end as quickly as possible so they could continue with their recreational activities. Or listening to my parents complain about how they dislike their job. But instead of sitting in a corner and crying about it I felt I had to move on and make the best of the situation.
With all this free time I decided to dive even deeper into business and entrepreneurship. I needed to figure out why almost every business venture I had done up to this point had failed. I came to the conclusion that I needed to stick to one thing, embrace the process and do the work. That one thing I decided to be web design. MJ’s books and @Fox's Youtube channel have been tremendously valuable for that. I am currently working on two web design projects and I am doing both projects for free. I figured if I just focus on providing value and solve problems for my clients, especially now in the beginning, they’ll be really happy with me and I think I’ll benefit from that much more further down the road.
Anyway that’s where I am right now.
I hope you saw some value in this post and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask!
Have a great day.
PS: I also want to say I am eternally grateful to you @MJ DeMarco for writing these books! They have become books that I constantly reference to when I am stuck somewhere.
I was born in the US but grew up in Austria and Sweden and currently live in Sweden. I am a pilot and “work” for a major European airline since about 3 years back and yes I have a lot of student debt, just short of a 100k USD to be exact and that’s after I have paid off about 20k. I have been interested in business since I was 14-15 but never really did anything about it until the fall of 2019. I started reading TMF and to be honest I didn’t like it at first. It was too much of a reality check.
So instead of following the great advice in the book I decided to create a course about investing and money management. Not because the market desperately demanded a course from me but because I was interested in it. The course was a complete failure. No one gave a shit and all I heard was crickets.
I quickly moved on to my next ignorant and selfish project. Dropshipping. I got the store up and running and again all I heard was crickets. However this time I decided to give more of a try so one day when I had a long layover in London I spent 10 hours collecting emails from Instagram influencers. I ended up with about 350 emails and contacted all of them. Most didn’t respond but I managed to get 3 of them to promote my product on their page. The first one resulted in no sales, the second one gave me one sale and the third, 20 something sales with a revenue of $500! I was ecstatic, however the joy was short lived because just days later the coronavirus arrived in Europe and America and the world entered a global shutdown. My little business quickly turned into a customer service job and I eventually had to shut it down.
On top of that I was furloughed from my job for 4 months just days later and had to move back in with my parents. During these 4 months I tried several different ideas and projects but without much success. It was also during this time I re-read TMF and Unscripted and really started to see the value in those books!
I started working as a pilot again in July of 2020 only to be furloughed again 2 months later but this time for 7 months. At this point my frustration reached its peak and I told myself in big capital letters “F*ck THIS SHIT!”. I had enough of someone with just the flick of a switch could turn off my income stream. I had enough of listening to captains over the age of 40 talk about how they hate flying and just want the day to end as quickly as possible so they could continue with their recreational activities. Or listening to my parents complain about how they dislike their job. But instead of sitting in a corner and crying about it I felt I had to move on and make the best of the situation.
With all this free time I decided to dive even deeper into business and entrepreneurship. I needed to figure out why almost every business venture I had done up to this point had failed. I came to the conclusion that I needed to stick to one thing, embrace the process and do the work. That one thing I decided to be web design. MJ’s books and @Fox's Youtube channel have been tremendously valuable for that. I am currently working on two web design projects and I am doing both projects for free. I figured if I just focus on providing value and solve problems for my clients, especially now in the beginning, they’ll be really happy with me and I think I’ll benefit from that much more further down the road.
Anyway that’s where I am right now.
I hope you saw some value in this post and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask!
Have a great day.
PS: I also want to say I am eternally grateful to you @MJ DeMarco for writing these books! They have become books that I constantly reference to when I am stuck somewhere.
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