How Are You Earning Money When You Don’t Have a Job?

Hi Gen, your comment reminded me of this exchange I had with a very good friend a few weeks ago in London. He came over from Singapore to London for a vacation, and at the same time to pay me a visit.
While he’s my good friend, he’s pretty much unaware of what I’m doing at TPEB, save for the things I tell him about it.

During our meet-up, we talked about the high cost of living in London compared to Singapore. Loosely speaking, things here are priced about the same as in Singapore, except that it’s in pounds – meaning it’s about twice as expensive to live here. I also told him the rent I am paying here, to which he exclaimed: “How are you getting the money to pay all of that?”
I threw him a weird look before saying: “You do know that I’m running a business and have been doing that for the past 2-3 years with growing results, right?”
Most people who do not know what I’m doing may not think of it as a proper job or a career, but the thing is that it is an actual business. I see it as a business with an international scope, whereby TPEB is the main platform in which I conduct it.
This is also very much my career too – albeit one with a unique development path, of my own creation.
While it’s not typical of a mainstream job, it doesn’t make it any less of a career to me.
I create my own career development plan (always have since I started out 3 years ago) and measure myself against the highest benchmarks in the industry, so I know I’m growing with the best.
I set astronomical targets to achieve on an ongoing basis – including traffic targets, social media targets, revenue targets, and goals for media features. In line with that, I track my results daily and am constantly reviewing my actions and creating new plans, so as to keep growing.
With regards to revenue, I’ve been doing fine in this aspect. As of last year, my monthly business revenue exceeded my last drawn monthly pay back in my corporate job – after less than 2 years of its inception. This was a big personal milestone, especially since it had been just a short period of time.
This year, the revenue has grown further, along with the business growth. Not only that, I’ve successfully shifted a big chunk of the income from active to passive – a major milestones this year. My main income sources shifted from speaking and 1-1 coaching, to ebook sales and blog advertising – a deliberate move on my part.
This means I no longer need to trade my time for money like before. Rather, I can now focus on creating high value content, while letting the systems do the work for me. I still do 1-1 coaching nowadays, but I’ve scaled it down tremendously as I want to focus my blog development.
With the monthly revenue I earn, it’s sufficient to fund my travels, support my parents back in Singapore (I give them money every month), pay my rent, and pay my expenses, with some leftover savings at the end of the day.
So in short – (1) Yes, I do earn sufficient money from my work to fund my travels and expenditures. I’ve been making a living from my work since over 2 years ago. (2) What I’m doing is essentially my career and my business, even if it may not seem immediately apparent to the casual surfer.
Of course, I’m not planning to rest on whatever I have before me and settle for status quo. Moving forward, my ultimate goal for TPEB is to reach out to everyone in the world, and it’s nowhere near that yet. The work is cut out for us, and I can’t help but feel very excited about what’s ahead.