This post is a bit different than usual, but I encourage you to read it anyway, if nothing because you may have some new idea at the end. Let’s begin.
As I’m writing this I’m on a plane flying to Madrid, my new home for the next few months —I relocated to Madrid in August, and now I was just paying a quick visit to my parents in Italy. I was dreaming about being able to do this five years ago when I quit high school at 18, and nobody in my family except me believed it was possible.
I want to clarify that I’m not doing or have ever done anything special or difficult. Still, the idea of working from home and living a location independent lifestyle was kind of new and exotic at that time where I lived (and still is to most people).
In this post I want to share what my situation was at that time and what I’ve done in order to be like I’m now. I’m not rich by any means, but I’m happy and I see a bright future.
As I wrote early, I quit high school at age 18. Not a smart move perhaps, but if I consider that I would still be in school now if I didn’t quit, I would do the same again. Anyway, I quit school because I failed to see its utility. At that time my interests were computers and parties, not learning how to work in a factory (they teach that at the school I was).
I quit school in June, and after 7 days I was already working in a factory, exactly where I didn’t want to go. Not that I had many other choices though, as my parents said that if I wanted to quit school I had to find a job very quickly. So I did.
This kind of lifestyle lasted for about a year, until I decided it was about time to change. If I wanted to achieve my dreams then there was no point in waiting, so on January 1st I started my first company.
At that time I knew nothing about business, personal development, etc, but one day while browsing the internet I somehow discovered that perhaps I could have made some money by selling products on Ebay. As it always goes, I bought a guide which explained how I could have started a business easily with Ebay and make a lot of money. I was sold. I asked an initial investment (around 1000 euros) to my father and began my journey. Needless to say, that business was a disaster. I still have some unsold products in my room today. The problem was that I knew nothing about how to run a business. I ordered some products from the United States (while anyone else was ordering from China!), and tried to sell them at an higher price in Italy. When I finally discovered a product that I could easily sell, I ordered thousands of units for a very small price, and started to make a small profit. Not enough for living, but enough for covering small bills, plus I was working from home and I had all the time that I wanted to study programming, which is what allowed me to start offering consulting services later that year.
Even though I wasn’t making a lot of money from my Ebay business, it still provided some very valuable lessons. Thanks to that, I was forced to learn some English beside what I knew from school (very little). I still remember using Google Translate in order to talk with international vendors. Working from home was also fantastic at that time considering that before that I was working 8 hours a day closed in a factory. The only things that was missing were money, I didn’t have enough to survive.
As my understanding of programming grew, I started offering services to friends and companies. My first “professional” service was Ebay shop and listings customization. At that time there was only one company providing that service, and not in Italy. I did that for a few months but eventually I started working for other clients on web applications and software. In the early days I was finding clients via online forums. Clients were happy and I was finally making money. After a few weeks I started to work for a real estate startup based in Italy. My job was to design the web application from the beginning, and I did this using a new language and framework. I learned a lot from this job, but I eventually left a few months later in order to work for a bigger startup, which I’m still working at right now.
During the next years I gained a lot of experience and I had the opportunity to work on a lot of exciting technologies. I also had the opportunity to travel to the United States and getting to know some important persons in the programming community. It was in that period that I became interested in personal development and productivity. Even though I was happy I knew that I could have grown a lot more and that I wasn’t pushing myself enough. It was time for a change, again.
That change arrived in 2009. 2009 was the year that changed everything for me. First, I stopped working full time. I went from 5 days a week to 3 days a week. Initially, my plan was to get back to school, but after a while I realized that school was not for me, and that I would have only lost money and time (again) by doing it. I then decided to take some other consulting work in order to pay bills (and taxes!), but overall I had more time available to think about where I was and where I wanted to be in my life. The final kick arrived in April when my cousin passed away. It was there that I realized how important is to live our life in the present moment, and to never wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow may never come.
After two months, in June 2009, I started this blog. I didn’t really know much about how to blog professionally, and my English was horrible (it still is, but it was worse), but I had something to say, something that I wanted to say. It didn’t take me much time to realize that odds were against me: I knew nobody in the personal development community, I didn’t know how to write well, and I didn’t even know how many other similar websites existed already. Plus, I wasn’t really an expert in anything, but at least I was willing to experiment, which eventually is what differentiates me from others.
It turned out that none of my beliefs had any foundations. Tim Ferris was right, what you do is more important than how you do it.
I must confess that after I started blogging here, I neglected a bit my programming career. In the beginning, writing here required a great deal of effort, and I still had to work full-time with two hours commute each day. The truth is that I wasn’t really good at managing my time, and I wasn’t applying the 80/20 rule as I should have. This situation changed early this year when I started working from home again, which means that I was finally location independent again!
Let’s do a quick recap. I started my career in a factory with no school and no future, then I started my first business, which was a failure. At that point I started offering programming consulting. Now in early 2010 I’m still offering programming consulting but I’m working from home.
Guess what I was missing at that point? Traveling. It’s true that I worked in the states for two months, but I really wanted to change my environment, I really wanted to relocate somewhere else. With that in mind, not even one month later I started planning my relocation to Spain with my friend Adam (who also writes on this blog from time to time). He wanted to escape, I wanted to escape, so that was it. We first planned to relocate to London, but after a while we went for Madrid as it was easier for us (and less expensive). I didn’t know a single word of Spanish, I had very little experience traveling, but I did it, and I’m very happy about it.
That was 2 months ago, August 2010. I’m still focusing on growing this blog, but now I know how to do it. I’m also focusing again on my programming career. I really love programming as it allows me to solve problems in an elegant and clever way. On the business side, I started to work seriously on affiliate marketing and seo. Because I know how to manage my time now, I’m able to do all these things and still get results.
That’s it, end of the story for now. But wait, there’s something more.
In these years I learned two things. The first one is that you can change everything if you want to. I also learned that it doesn’t matter if it takes years to achieve your goals, years are nothing if you stay focused and you’re willing to grow. The second thing is that changing directions is important for personal growth. I like to experiment every time I can. It doesn’t matter wherever I fail or succeed. Failure is temporary, all situations are temporary, and one year from now the only thing you’ll regret are those that you didn’t do.
That was my story. What’s yours?