I've been thinking about writing this post for over a month, mostly because I rarely ask for help, but I feel like I'm at the lowest point in my life right now. Before writing, I spent a long time reading through the forum and thinking that maybe I had missed something that could help me.
I would like to divide this post into several parts and be completely honest and open here. To be honest, one of the reasons why I didn't dare to write was precisely the fear that there would be nothing but ridicule here, but I am completely open to it.
I would like to say a special thank you to:
@AllenCrawley @Andy Black @biophase @Ecom man @Eskil @G_Alexander @IceCreamKid @JasonR @JEdwards @Johnny boy @Kak @Lex DeVille @Likwid24 @RHL @Sanj Modha @Silverhawk851 @snowbank @Vick @Vigilante @Walter Hay
and many other forum participants whom I have omitted. The amount of useful and life-changing knowledge that these participants have provided here is simply immeasurable.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to @MJ DeMarco, the person who changed my view of the world and business in general. I have read all of your books and am now rereading them in order. I have read all of your posts and watched all of your videos. You are the best.
Now I want to start telling how I got to where I am today.
My name is Ross, I am 22 years old, I was born in Ukraine but moved to Poland when I was 15, a failed pseudo-entrepreneur and a person who doesn't know what to do with his life next. (classic)
At the age of 12, I realized that it would be good to start developing myself somehow, so I began reading books, nothing serious, just ordinary literature like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and many others. It replaced video games for me, and I felt much better. To some extent, it helped boost my self-esteem. At least, many people around me were surprised by my speaking skills. I'm not trying to sound cool here, I just want to be as honest as possible, as I said earlier. in any case, it doesn't really matter, except that it was, the first step on the path to self-improvement, I guess.
When I was 14, my grandmother (my mother's mother) kicked me and my mother out of our home. Fortunately, at that time, my mother had started a relationship with my future stepfather, and we moved into his parents' house. I don't have a father, he stopped communicating with me when I was 10. I never really knew him and saw him maybe once a year before I turned 10, and from that moment on, he made no attempts to contact me. All I know is that he beat my mother when she was pregnant with me and drank alcohol every day, and then he got hooked on drugs and, as I understand it, never got off them. Funny fact, but two years ago he contacted my mom and asked for my number so he could call me (guilt?), but he never called back.
At the same age, my mother and stepfather left for Poland to earn money and come back, leaving me alone with my stepfather's parents. I got a taste of freedom and learned some things, such as cleaning and cooking for myself, and other things, but I lived with my stepfather's parents, and they gave me no peace and treated me like shit, constantly trying to control me and find fault with me. His mother has some kind of diagnosis, but I'm not sure what it is. but I know that over the course of a year she constantly pissed me off in different ways. What a shitty time it was. Maybe it even toughened me up, I don't know.
And now, a year later, I'm turning 15, my mother returns with my stepfather, and instead of staying in Ukraine, they decide that it would be best to move to Poland, at least because I was expected to join the army and she categorically did not want me to go there. So we moved, settling in a small village, 25 km from the main city, and we lived there for about six months before moving to the city. We lived in 12 square meters, the three of us, plus a cat and a dog. There was also a farm and a stable next to us, which stank of manure every day in the summer. It didn't bother me much because I couldn't change it, I could only wait for my parents to do something. After six months, we moved to a nice apartment in a good neighborhood, and everything seemed to be getting better.
At that moment, I realized that I was completely alone and that I had no one except my mother and stepfather. A friend who had stayed in Ukraine finally told me why he had stopped communicating with me, saying that I was a traitor, and from that moment on, he stopped talking to me. Life in Poland became especially difficult for me because I had no interest in learning Polish, learning about the culture, or getting to know anyone. Of course, I tried to fit in and get to know people, but every time I felt uncomfortable because I felt like a hypocrite, since I was genuinely not interested in being in that particular society. Of course, I started learning the language then, and now I can speak it quite well, and so on. For me, it was a kind of revelation because I never thought I could speak another language, since all my English and German teachers in Ukraine kept telling me that I was too stupid for it and that I had no chance. To be honest, I didn't care, it was just a fact. Years later, I still had no interest in this country and its culture. I am not saying that it is a bad country or that the people are bad, on the contrary, it is very good and quite advanced here, but I simply did not find myself here as a person.
After six months of reflection and occasional crying in my room, I realized that I would not be able to find hope or someone here. I forgot to mention that this was during my school years, and I missed one school year here because my mother decided for some reason that it would be better if I skipped a year and started again the following year.
A couple of months before I turned 16, I met a girl online. We started chatting, and I found out that she lived in the same village where I had moved to. all this time she was 500 meters away from me. Soon after, I had my first relationship, and everything was completely new to me. Before that, I wasn't interested in girls at all. It's strange, but until I was 16, I didn't have any sexual fantasies about anyone when I was still in Ukraine. I had a strange approach to this. I was interested in girls, but I never pursued relationships. I was just interested in them, gave them gifts, walked them home, and tried to court them in some way, but I never wanted to get into a relationship. I don't know why. At 16, I tried alcohol for the first time in my life, had sex for the first time, and tried my first drug, weed. I'll say right away that I still hate alcohol and can't drink it at all. I tried weed a couple more times, once every 2-3 years or so, but I still have one addiction to this day, and that is smoking. That was when I smoked my first cigarette, and I haven't stopped for six years now. I've tried to quit many times, but I always go back to it because I caught myself thinking that I don't want to quit. I even liked it and still do, even though I know it's wrong.
That same year, I went to college, which was considered one of the best in my city, but my goodness, it was so cold there in winter because there was no heating at all. But that's not the point. For the first time, I was faced with the fact that I couldn't find any friends, and that people treated me like a special child. Sometimes, during class, teachers would ask why no one talked to me, and I would often hear the answer that there was nothing to talk about because I wasn't Polish. Maybe they were right. I'm not angry at anyone, to be honest. I don't think I'm a vindictive person. After all, it was an experience. After about six months at school, I realized that I had been isolated from everyone the whole time. No one even tried to talk to me, and my attempts to talk to someone were not very successful because they always tried to change the subject so as not to talk. I also realized that thoughts of suicide began to appear in my head. I wasn't depressed, and to this day I still believe that depression is bullshit, but I often found myself locked in my room, just staring at the ceiling.
After some time, one of my friends from Ukraine started talking to me. We didn't communicate much back then, but he found something interesting in me, and I remember lying on my bed while he was telling me about something called stocks, and at that moment it dawned on me. I started to learn more about it, downloaded various programs like MetaTrader, started reading books on the subject, and so on, until I realized that it required a large amount of money, but that didn't stop me. I started studying technical analysis and reading books every day, drawing charts, and so on (I know it all sounds crazy, but at the time it seemed like I was doing something serious). And this continued until I learned about cryptocurrency. It happened when I was watching a streamer who had no viewers, and I was alone. There was a girl there, and at some point, she received a donation of $1,000, and the donator started chatting too. After a short time, I decided to write to him and ask for his contact information to find out what he was doing, and he replied that it was cryptocurrency, he was just buying coins and waiting for them to increase in value, ordinary speculation. But I got so into it that I started to take an interest in day trading. However, I wasn't yet 18, so I couldn't open a trading account or invest capital. Therefore, I limited myself to studying it on YouTube and in books. Until I turned 18, I only studied it and nothing more.
But I never stopped being interested in other things. Once, someone recommended the book Rich Dad Poor Dad to me, and after reading it, I was shocked to learn that stocks and working for someone else weren't the only ways to make money, and that there was such a thing as entrepreneurship. I don't want to say too much about this book, it left me with the initial impression that many things were lies, but not as much as Millionaire Fastlane . I gained hope that I could still do something for people and get paid for it, rather than just sitting around thinking about who I wanted to become. In college, I studied to be a computer technician because I was pretty good with computers, but unfortunately, after a year of studying there, I started to hate them and tried to avoid them in every way possible. Also, after six months of studying, I skipped class for the first time in my life. I didn't know that was possible. I felt like a fraud. It happened because we often changed classrooms, and at some point, no one responded to my message about where to go, so I just sat in the hallway and waited for the next class. This was the first step towards me skipping college for the next three years. For all three years, I had absences of 50% of my classes. After I started reading self-improvement books and Rich Dad Poor Dad, I thought I was better than everyone else and that I would be an entrepreneur and that I didn't have time for your meaningless school. It's funny to remember, honestly, because I was the only one who ended up a failure.
From the age of 16-17, I started doing various side hustles. The very first one was reselling iPhones. I realized that I could buy broken phones, learn how to repair them, and sell them for more money. That's what I did for a short time. I got the money for my first phone to repair and sell from my iPhone 6, which I had sold at that time. I bought myself some screwdrivers and my first test subject for sale. It was the first time I had ever repaired anything, and I succeeded on my first try. It was actually very easy. Even before reading Millionaire Fastlane , I caught myself thinking about value skew. I just decided to do everything a little better. The first thing I did to sell the phone was take beautiful photos and write a good, concise description. Even then, I always put buyers first and didn't make anyone wait after the first offers. I later adopted the same principle for another business I started at the age of 18. A week later, I was able to sell my first phone and earn about $25. This is an incredibly small amount of money compared to what other forum members make, but at that moment I was overjoyed because I had earned money for the first time without working for someone else. At that moment, I felt that I was in control of my life and all its processes. This continued for the next five sales, where I was able to earn about $250 in total, completely from home. After the last sale, I decided to stop because I wasn't buying phones in my city, but simply on trust on the internet. and I could lose half of my money at any moment because they would send me either a blocked phone or nothing at all, so I decided to stop and not continue. I did this because there are very few ads in my city, even for a product like an iPhone. To this day, there are no more than 30 ads for the entire city, but I need a broken phone or one with a broken screen, so even though I didn't want to, I had to work on trust on the internet.
Well, I learned various things, such as photographing items, communicating with customers, and what I basically enjoyed selling, so I decided to sell not only iPhones, but also various other things. I settled on a niche with lighting devices such as ring lamps and LED strips, bought inventory with all my money, and started posting ads. To my surprise, I was able to sell everything, Although I didn't have that much to sell, I managed to make a profit of $1.5 from the LED strips and about $7-8 from the ring lights. It didn't sell that quickly, because, again, it's a city with a population of 150,000 and there wasn't much demand here. I just bought these things from the marketplace and sold them here at a higher price. Surprisingly, people were willing to pay more, I think because they didn't want to wait 2-3 days for delivery at that time. After selling all the items, I decided not to continue because I felt that it was not serious and the profit was very low. One LED strip could take a week to sell, and a profit of $1.5 didn't really suit me, so unfortunately I had to stop.
After saying goodbye to all that, I started looking into online business and began selling things online, such as game keys, on the same platform. They sold faster because this time I had access to the whole of Poland, not just my city, but I was blocked because it was prohibited on the platform. In the end, I earned about $40 from this product, nothing crazy again.
All this time, I managed to find time to study cryptocurrencies and so on, as well as for the girl I later had to break up with because we had been in a toxic relationship for quite a long time and I decided it was time to end it. She and I just ended it without any drama, I continued to study business ideas and what I should start again, and I settled on gambling. Yes, it's strange, but I decided that I wanted to do professional betting and went into gambling in the field of online games like Counter-Strike. After reading one book, I thought that it could be a business if I studied the teams and their players. I won't waste any more time, so I'll say right away that this idea failed. and after that, all sorts of crazy ideas started popping up, like selling services based on documents. I was just a middleman, selling services at a markup and transferring them to the performers. I earned about $100 and left because I couldn't find any more clients. After that, I found myself another girlfriend, and it was like I fell in love for the first time. but after six months, she dumped me, and to this day, I haven't had a long-term relationship, only some minor, non-serious ones. In a way, I lost my spark for girls, and I thought and still think that I'm somehow not ready for it.
Until I was 18, I was involved in various online ideas, and 99% of them failed miserably, such as affiliate marketing. I created an Instagram account and started posting reels, which got about 500,000 views per month, and a lot of clicks on the product link, but not a single sale, so I just stopped doing it because I thought the weight loss pills were a crappy product and I didn't want to promote it. I didn't want to keep deceiving women, weird, but I'm glad I didn't succeed in promoting this product.
There were also many different stupid ideas that I implemented. The point is that when I get an idea, I implement it as quickly as possible while trying to maintain the quality that I can, but usually these are either unnecessary services or products, or another scam that I don't want to do at all, so I stopped.
I am turning 18, and on my birthday, I am opening my first account on the exchange and depositing $100 to trade cryptocurrency. I already had the knowledge I had accumulated over 1.5 years and thought that now my life would change and everything would be different. After 3 weeks, my account drops by 30% and I stop doing this for a week because I realize that something is wrong, until I am told about futures, and then I got carried away. In a week, I managed to increase my meager $70 to $192, risking the entire amount, as I had a large credit leverage for this. I was lucky five times, and I wanted to withdraw $100 as a trophy when I reached $200, as proof that I had finally succeeded. But then, in two days, I completely wiped out my account without ever reaching $200 =)
Unfortunately, I know that this post has already gone on too long, and I want to say right away that until I was 21, I was busy closing my accounts and lost a total of $1,500, at which point I ended my journey in this field.
At 19, I decided to leave college without finishing it. I wanted to do this when I was 18, but my grandmother begged me to stay, even falling to her knees, which was strange. I did it because I thought it was the only thing stopping me from pursuing my path. At that point, I was only attending college about once a week, and my expulsion was inevitable, but I decided to expel myself. Surprisingly, I had very good grades considering that I hardly ever showed up, but no one cared, including me.
After a while, I found a job advertisement for a sushi restaurant. I was very afraid to go there, but I went anyway. It wasn't particularly difficult, and for about 3-4 months, I just learned the ropes while observing how the business worked from the inside. I thought about what I would do differently, what I would change, and how I would improve things. This probably helped me a little later on, but I ran into the problem that it was a very unstable job and my earnings varied from practically nothing to half the minimum wage in the country. I was also reprimanded daily and insulted behind my back for my silence. I turned out to be a quiet person. I stopped being particularly talkative and changed completely when I moved here, but I'm not used to blaming anyone or anything, only myself.
After a year of work, I was already beside myself because I was earning practically nothing, but working for two people. I realized that I couldn't do this anymore and that I was completely screwed up emotionally. I was physically unable to do anything because my head was filled with thoughts about work... and how fed up I was with doing it. Fortunately, my mother had a bit of luck. She was a cleaner and started her own cleaning business. She already had three business clients and just as many regular clients when she started, and closer to the new year, she suggested that I quit my job and go work for her to help with the business.
Two weeks later, I finished my last day at work and started helping her. She had absolutely nothing to attract customers, no one knew about her on the internet, and no one in general except her acquaintances. I also didn't have much experience in all this, so I decided to start from scratch. I came up with a logo that I made myself and then started learning how to create a website. After two weeks of studying WordPress, I made my first website, which I closed a week later because I had never seen a worse-looking website on the internet. I spent another two weeks learning HTML and CSS and made my website from scratch. This time it was much more attractive and presentable. Then I started learning about Google Ads and Facebook Ads and also installed Google My Business for the first time. I had the best results with Google Ads, absolutely zero with Facebook, and some results with Google My Business. I still put customers first and responded immediately when they called or wrote. We had a unique feature in that the two of us cleaned and delivered, providing much better service than the rest. I really enjoyed working with Google Ads, and I can say now that as a result of my efforts over a short period of time, I was able to earn $8-15 for every $1 spent. I really thought that nothing else was needed. Every two weeks, I changed the design of the website and constantly tried to make it better. Each time, it became faster, more attractive, and simply cooler. No other company had anything like it yet.
This went on for six months, but the problem was that it wasn't my business, I had no control, I constantly wanted to move forward and every day, but not my mother, she was afraid to hire employees and do anything more than what we were doing now, she wanted to do all the work herself, because of this we had constant problems and scandals. Sometimes customers would cheat us out of money and so on, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I wanted more and already knew how to take it to the next level, but then she told me that it was her business and she would decide. She followed this up by saying that I had done nothing for her or her business. I wasn't particularly surprised by this, she had been trying to insult me or make me feel uncomfortable in every way possible my whole life, but I'm not angry about it.
After that, I made some attempts on the internet, where I resold some services and so on, earning about $1,000 or less on Instagram. I didn't continue because somehow I always get one client with a problem at the start, I solve it, and then I think that I should continue, and then I continue for months and realize that I haven't gotten any more clients. This happened in different niches.
I left out a lot of things in my story, I think they are not so important, for example, the fact that I am a fearful person and every time something new is a big step for me to take, or the fact that most of my life I eat once every 2-3 days because there is usually no food at home.
I want to apologize right away if anyone thinks that I'm trying to get attention or sympathy. No, this is just my story to give a complete picture, and I hope to get some help from this community. I will say in conclusion that I am now 22, I continue to live with my parents, or rather with my mother, my stepfather played no role in my life, I have ambitions but no understanding of what to do next, I'm tired of chasing money, and my problem is that I can't imagine what I could do that would be useful to society. Thoughts of suicide haunt me to this day, because I don't understand what I'm missing or what I might not know, and the idea that I will live my life without fulfilling my dreams is killing me, to be honest.
I would like to divide this post into several parts and be completely honest and open here. To be honest, one of the reasons why I didn't dare to write was precisely the fear that there would be nothing but ridicule here, but I am completely open to it.
I would like to say a special thank you to:
@AllenCrawley @Andy Black @biophase @Ecom man @Eskil @G_Alexander @IceCreamKid @JasonR @JEdwards @Johnny boy @Kak @Lex DeVille @Likwid24 @RHL @Sanj Modha @Silverhawk851 @snowbank @Vick @Vigilante @Walter Hay
and many other forum participants whom I have omitted. The amount of useful and life-changing knowledge that these participants have provided here is simply immeasurable.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to @MJ DeMarco, the person who changed my view of the world and business in general. I have read all of your books and am now rereading them in order. I have read all of your posts and watched all of your videos. You are the best.
Now I want to start telling how I got to where I am today.
My name is Ross, I am 22 years old, I was born in Ukraine but moved to Poland when I was 15, a failed pseudo-entrepreneur and a person who doesn't know what to do with his life next. (classic)
At the age of 12, I realized that it would be good to start developing myself somehow, so I began reading books, nothing serious, just ordinary literature like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and many others. It replaced video games for me, and I felt much better. To some extent, it helped boost my self-esteem. At least, many people around me were surprised by my speaking skills. I'm not trying to sound cool here, I just want to be as honest as possible, as I said earlier. in any case, it doesn't really matter, except that it was, the first step on the path to self-improvement, I guess.
When I was 14, my grandmother (my mother's mother) kicked me and my mother out of our home. Fortunately, at that time, my mother had started a relationship with my future stepfather, and we moved into his parents' house. I don't have a father, he stopped communicating with me when I was 10. I never really knew him and saw him maybe once a year before I turned 10, and from that moment on, he made no attempts to contact me. All I know is that he beat my mother when she was pregnant with me and drank alcohol every day, and then he got hooked on drugs and, as I understand it, never got off them. Funny fact, but two years ago he contacted my mom and asked for my number so he could call me (guilt?), but he never called back.
At the same age, my mother and stepfather left for Poland to earn money and come back, leaving me alone with my stepfather's parents. I got a taste of freedom and learned some things, such as cleaning and cooking for myself, and other things, but I lived with my stepfather's parents, and they gave me no peace and treated me like shit, constantly trying to control me and find fault with me. His mother has some kind of diagnosis, but I'm not sure what it is. but I know that over the course of a year she constantly pissed me off in different ways. What a shitty time it was. Maybe it even toughened me up, I don't know.
And now, a year later, I'm turning 15, my mother returns with my stepfather, and instead of staying in Ukraine, they decide that it would be best to move to Poland, at least because I was expected to join the army and she categorically did not want me to go there. So we moved, settling in a small village, 25 km from the main city, and we lived there for about six months before moving to the city. We lived in 12 square meters, the three of us, plus a cat and a dog. There was also a farm and a stable next to us, which stank of manure every day in the summer. It didn't bother me much because I couldn't change it, I could only wait for my parents to do something. After six months, we moved to a nice apartment in a good neighborhood, and everything seemed to be getting better.
At that moment, I realized that I was completely alone and that I had no one except my mother and stepfather. A friend who had stayed in Ukraine finally told me why he had stopped communicating with me, saying that I was a traitor, and from that moment on, he stopped talking to me. Life in Poland became especially difficult for me because I had no interest in learning Polish, learning about the culture, or getting to know anyone. Of course, I tried to fit in and get to know people, but every time I felt uncomfortable because I felt like a hypocrite, since I was genuinely not interested in being in that particular society. Of course, I started learning the language then, and now I can speak it quite well, and so on. For me, it was a kind of revelation because I never thought I could speak another language, since all my English and German teachers in Ukraine kept telling me that I was too stupid for it and that I had no chance. To be honest, I didn't care, it was just a fact. Years later, I still had no interest in this country and its culture. I am not saying that it is a bad country or that the people are bad, on the contrary, it is very good and quite advanced here, but I simply did not find myself here as a person.
After six months of reflection and occasional crying in my room, I realized that I would not be able to find hope or someone here. I forgot to mention that this was during my school years, and I missed one school year here because my mother decided for some reason that it would be better if I skipped a year and started again the following year.
A couple of months before I turned 16, I met a girl online. We started chatting, and I found out that she lived in the same village where I had moved to. all this time she was 500 meters away from me. Soon after, I had my first relationship, and everything was completely new to me. Before that, I wasn't interested in girls at all. It's strange, but until I was 16, I didn't have any sexual fantasies about anyone when I was still in Ukraine. I had a strange approach to this. I was interested in girls, but I never pursued relationships. I was just interested in them, gave them gifts, walked them home, and tried to court them in some way, but I never wanted to get into a relationship. I don't know why. At 16, I tried alcohol for the first time in my life, had sex for the first time, and tried my first drug, weed. I'll say right away that I still hate alcohol and can't drink it at all. I tried weed a couple more times, once every 2-3 years or so, but I still have one addiction to this day, and that is smoking. That was when I smoked my first cigarette, and I haven't stopped for six years now. I've tried to quit many times, but I always go back to it because I caught myself thinking that I don't want to quit. I even liked it and still do, even though I know it's wrong.
That same year, I went to college, which was considered one of the best in my city, but my goodness, it was so cold there in winter because there was no heating at all. But that's not the point. For the first time, I was faced with the fact that I couldn't find any friends, and that people treated me like a special child. Sometimes, during class, teachers would ask why no one talked to me, and I would often hear the answer that there was nothing to talk about because I wasn't Polish. Maybe they were right. I'm not angry at anyone, to be honest. I don't think I'm a vindictive person. After all, it was an experience. After about six months at school, I realized that I had been isolated from everyone the whole time. No one even tried to talk to me, and my attempts to talk to someone were not very successful because they always tried to change the subject so as not to talk. I also realized that thoughts of suicide began to appear in my head. I wasn't depressed, and to this day I still believe that depression is bullshit, but I often found myself locked in my room, just staring at the ceiling.
After some time, one of my friends from Ukraine started talking to me. We didn't communicate much back then, but he found something interesting in me, and I remember lying on my bed while he was telling me about something called stocks, and at that moment it dawned on me. I started to learn more about it, downloaded various programs like MetaTrader, started reading books on the subject, and so on, until I realized that it required a large amount of money, but that didn't stop me. I started studying technical analysis and reading books every day, drawing charts, and so on (I know it all sounds crazy, but at the time it seemed like I was doing something serious). And this continued until I learned about cryptocurrency. It happened when I was watching a streamer who had no viewers, and I was alone. There was a girl there, and at some point, she received a donation of $1,000, and the donator started chatting too. After a short time, I decided to write to him and ask for his contact information to find out what he was doing, and he replied that it was cryptocurrency, he was just buying coins and waiting for them to increase in value, ordinary speculation. But I got so into it that I started to take an interest in day trading. However, I wasn't yet 18, so I couldn't open a trading account or invest capital. Therefore, I limited myself to studying it on YouTube and in books. Until I turned 18, I only studied it and nothing more.
But I never stopped being interested in other things. Once, someone recommended the book Rich Dad Poor Dad to me, and after reading it, I was shocked to learn that stocks and working for someone else weren't the only ways to make money, and that there was such a thing as entrepreneurship. I don't want to say too much about this book, it left me with the initial impression that many things were lies, but not as much as Millionaire Fastlane . I gained hope that I could still do something for people and get paid for it, rather than just sitting around thinking about who I wanted to become. In college, I studied to be a computer technician because I was pretty good with computers, but unfortunately, after a year of studying there, I started to hate them and tried to avoid them in every way possible. Also, after six months of studying, I skipped class for the first time in my life. I didn't know that was possible. I felt like a fraud. It happened because we often changed classrooms, and at some point, no one responded to my message about where to go, so I just sat in the hallway and waited for the next class. This was the first step towards me skipping college for the next three years. For all three years, I had absences of 50% of my classes. After I started reading self-improvement books and Rich Dad Poor Dad, I thought I was better than everyone else and that I would be an entrepreneur and that I didn't have time for your meaningless school. It's funny to remember, honestly, because I was the only one who ended up a failure.
From the age of 16-17, I started doing various side hustles. The very first one was reselling iPhones. I realized that I could buy broken phones, learn how to repair them, and sell them for more money. That's what I did for a short time. I got the money for my first phone to repair and sell from my iPhone 6, which I had sold at that time. I bought myself some screwdrivers and my first test subject for sale. It was the first time I had ever repaired anything, and I succeeded on my first try. It was actually very easy. Even before reading Millionaire Fastlane , I caught myself thinking about value skew. I just decided to do everything a little better. The first thing I did to sell the phone was take beautiful photos and write a good, concise description. Even then, I always put buyers first and didn't make anyone wait after the first offers. I later adopted the same principle for another business I started at the age of 18. A week later, I was able to sell my first phone and earn about $25. This is an incredibly small amount of money compared to what other forum members make, but at that moment I was overjoyed because I had earned money for the first time without working for someone else. At that moment, I felt that I was in control of my life and all its processes. This continued for the next five sales, where I was able to earn about $250 in total, completely from home. After the last sale, I decided to stop because I wasn't buying phones in my city, but simply on trust on the internet. and I could lose half of my money at any moment because they would send me either a blocked phone or nothing at all, so I decided to stop and not continue. I did this because there are very few ads in my city, even for a product like an iPhone. To this day, there are no more than 30 ads for the entire city, but I need a broken phone or one with a broken screen, so even though I didn't want to, I had to work on trust on the internet.
Well, I learned various things, such as photographing items, communicating with customers, and what I basically enjoyed selling, so I decided to sell not only iPhones, but also various other things. I settled on a niche with lighting devices such as ring lamps and LED strips, bought inventory with all my money, and started posting ads. To my surprise, I was able to sell everything, Although I didn't have that much to sell, I managed to make a profit of $1.5 from the LED strips and about $7-8 from the ring lights. It didn't sell that quickly, because, again, it's a city with a population of 150,000 and there wasn't much demand here. I just bought these things from the marketplace and sold them here at a higher price. Surprisingly, people were willing to pay more, I think because they didn't want to wait 2-3 days for delivery at that time. After selling all the items, I decided not to continue because I felt that it was not serious and the profit was very low. One LED strip could take a week to sell, and a profit of $1.5 didn't really suit me, so unfortunately I had to stop.
After saying goodbye to all that, I started looking into online business and began selling things online, such as game keys, on the same platform. They sold faster because this time I had access to the whole of Poland, not just my city, but I was blocked because it was prohibited on the platform. In the end, I earned about $40 from this product, nothing crazy again.
All this time, I managed to find time to study cryptocurrencies and so on, as well as for the girl I later had to break up with because we had been in a toxic relationship for quite a long time and I decided it was time to end it. She and I just ended it without any drama, I continued to study business ideas and what I should start again, and I settled on gambling. Yes, it's strange, but I decided that I wanted to do professional betting and went into gambling in the field of online games like Counter-Strike. After reading one book, I thought that it could be a business if I studied the teams and their players. I won't waste any more time, so I'll say right away that this idea failed. and after that, all sorts of crazy ideas started popping up, like selling services based on documents. I was just a middleman, selling services at a markup and transferring them to the performers. I earned about $100 and left because I couldn't find any more clients. After that, I found myself another girlfriend, and it was like I fell in love for the first time. but after six months, she dumped me, and to this day, I haven't had a long-term relationship, only some minor, non-serious ones. In a way, I lost my spark for girls, and I thought and still think that I'm somehow not ready for it.
Until I was 18, I was involved in various online ideas, and 99% of them failed miserably, such as affiliate marketing. I created an Instagram account and started posting reels, which got about 500,000 views per month, and a lot of clicks on the product link, but not a single sale, so I just stopped doing it because I thought the weight loss pills were a crappy product and I didn't want to promote it. I didn't want to keep deceiving women, weird, but I'm glad I didn't succeed in promoting this product.
There were also many different stupid ideas that I implemented. The point is that when I get an idea, I implement it as quickly as possible while trying to maintain the quality that I can, but usually these are either unnecessary services or products, or another scam that I don't want to do at all, so I stopped.
I am turning 18, and on my birthday, I am opening my first account on the exchange and depositing $100 to trade cryptocurrency. I already had the knowledge I had accumulated over 1.5 years and thought that now my life would change and everything would be different. After 3 weeks, my account drops by 30% and I stop doing this for a week because I realize that something is wrong, until I am told about futures, and then I got carried away. In a week, I managed to increase my meager $70 to $192, risking the entire amount, as I had a large credit leverage for this. I was lucky five times, and I wanted to withdraw $100 as a trophy when I reached $200, as proof that I had finally succeeded. But then, in two days, I completely wiped out my account without ever reaching $200 =)
Unfortunately, I know that this post has already gone on too long, and I want to say right away that until I was 21, I was busy closing my accounts and lost a total of $1,500, at which point I ended my journey in this field.
At 19, I decided to leave college without finishing it. I wanted to do this when I was 18, but my grandmother begged me to stay, even falling to her knees, which was strange. I did it because I thought it was the only thing stopping me from pursuing my path. At that point, I was only attending college about once a week, and my expulsion was inevitable, but I decided to expel myself. Surprisingly, I had very good grades considering that I hardly ever showed up, but no one cared, including me.
After a while, I found a job advertisement for a sushi restaurant. I was very afraid to go there, but I went anyway. It wasn't particularly difficult, and for about 3-4 months, I just learned the ropes while observing how the business worked from the inside. I thought about what I would do differently, what I would change, and how I would improve things. This probably helped me a little later on, but I ran into the problem that it was a very unstable job and my earnings varied from practically nothing to half the minimum wage in the country. I was also reprimanded daily and insulted behind my back for my silence. I turned out to be a quiet person. I stopped being particularly talkative and changed completely when I moved here, but I'm not used to blaming anyone or anything, only myself.
After a year of work, I was already beside myself because I was earning practically nothing, but working for two people. I realized that I couldn't do this anymore and that I was completely screwed up emotionally. I was physically unable to do anything because my head was filled with thoughts about work... and how fed up I was with doing it. Fortunately, my mother had a bit of luck. She was a cleaner and started her own cleaning business. She already had three business clients and just as many regular clients when she started, and closer to the new year, she suggested that I quit my job and go work for her to help with the business.
Two weeks later, I finished my last day at work and started helping her. She had absolutely nothing to attract customers, no one knew about her on the internet, and no one in general except her acquaintances. I also didn't have much experience in all this, so I decided to start from scratch. I came up with a logo that I made myself and then started learning how to create a website. After two weeks of studying WordPress, I made my first website, which I closed a week later because I had never seen a worse-looking website on the internet. I spent another two weeks learning HTML and CSS and made my website from scratch. This time it was much more attractive and presentable. Then I started learning about Google Ads and Facebook Ads and also installed Google My Business for the first time. I had the best results with Google Ads, absolutely zero with Facebook, and some results with Google My Business. I still put customers first and responded immediately when they called or wrote. We had a unique feature in that the two of us cleaned and delivered, providing much better service than the rest. I really enjoyed working with Google Ads, and I can say now that as a result of my efforts over a short period of time, I was able to earn $8-15 for every $1 spent. I really thought that nothing else was needed. Every two weeks, I changed the design of the website and constantly tried to make it better. Each time, it became faster, more attractive, and simply cooler. No other company had anything like it yet.
This went on for six months, but the problem was that it wasn't my business, I had no control, I constantly wanted to move forward and every day, but not my mother, she was afraid to hire employees and do anything more than what we were doing now, she wanted to do all the work herself, because of this we had constant problems and scandals. Sometimes customers would cheat us out of money and so on, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I wanted more and already knew how to take it to the next level, but then she told me that it was her business and she would decide. She followed this up by saying that I had done nothing for her or her business. I wasn't particularly surprised by this, she had been trying to insult me or make me feel uncomfortable in every way possible my whole life, but I'm not angry about it.
After that, I made some attempts on the internet, where I resold some services and so on, earning about $1,000 or less on Instagram. I didn't continue because somehow I always get one client with a problem at the start, I solve it, and then I think that I should continue, and then I continue for months and realize that I haven't gotten any more clients. This happened in different niches.
I left out a lot of things in my story, I think they are not so important, for example, the fact that I am a fearful person and every time something new is a big step for me to take, or the fact that most of my life I eat once every 2-3 days because there is usually no food at home.
I want to apologize right away if anyone thinks that I'm trying to get attention or sympathy. No, this is just my story to give a complete picture, and I hope to get some help from this community. I will say in conclusion that I am now 22, I continue to live with my parents, or rather with my mother, my stepfather played no role in my life, I have ambitions but no understanding of what to do next, I'm tired of chasing money, and my problem is that I can't imagine what I could do that would be useful to society. Thoughts of suicide haunt me to this day, because I don't understand what I'm missing or what I might not know, and the idea that I will live my life without fulfilling my dreams is killing me, to be honest.
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