Escaping wage slavery towards an Actualized Life

[Vali2003]

It’s hard not using the forum, honestly, because I love this place. But I know this is the better solution for me. 

Edited October 7 by Vali2003

[Vali2003]

Would’ve fallen asleep twice already now, but each time, someone in my shared flat making noise woke me up. Has to be one of the most annoying things ever, this. Especially if you’re wide-awake afterwards.

[Vali2003]

I love coffee, but I just can’t drink that shit. One small espresso has effects on me that are similar to 20ug LSD. It stimulates me so much, it’s incredible. Not in a positive way though. I just feel jittery and like I’m rushing everything. Of course it’s also sort of a concentration boost, but I just don’t like the feeling. It’s too much. And I will feel it almost the entire day afterwards. I definitely feel it for like 5-6 hours. 

Aditionally, I bought a little pretty timer that I want to use for working. I thought, I’d always set it on the time that the next task likely takes, and then I have a bit of a challenge to complete it in that time. It works, in that I’m less distracted, but it also makes me do everything very fast. And that feels kinda shit. 

Anyways, this plus coffee was just too much. 

[Vali2003]

I’ll try putting the timer on a time that I think is possible at a more normal pace.

[Vali2003]

I started outreaching to the first clients today. I’m offering them my service for free, in return for feedback and optionally a testimonial. Precisely, I’m offering them a dedicated landing page (+ hosting it for 45 days) and a five day e-mail course. It’s quite a lot of work for me, but I think it will be worth it. I’ll do this for two to three people, and then I’ll transition to paid work. 

[Vali2003]

Outreaching is really new to me. I reach out to people via e-mail, IG, FB, maybe WhatsApp, whatever I get from them. I would also cold-call them, but it’s a bit difficult as I’m targeting people in the U.S. and have a German phone number. 

It definitely feels a bit sketchy to reach out to people out of the blue. However, I’ve already had an insight how I can be less salesy. Just try to be as honest as possible. Of course it’s not 100% honesty. There’s some sort of compromise involved. But generally, trying to be honest makes messages seem more authentic — because they are! 

[Vali2003]

I’m really enjoying the whole process though. I’m hoping to gather a lot of feedback from my free clients that will help me improve my product. It will make paid work much easier. Especially if I have some testimonials. Man, I have some great plans for making really compelling testimonials. Alex Hormozi has an amazing guide on that. 

The only issue is that Uni is starting back up, so this whole thing will become more difficult. I can still do it. I really need to work on my capacity for work and be strategic. I think 4-5 hours of deep work  per day is the maximum I can reach. This is work, where I’m learning something new, difficult. Right now, this would be writing cold-outreach messages. But as I get more practice, it won’t be deep work anymore. Sometimes I’ll have to use my deep work hours for Uni, that’s ok. But I should try to put as many of them as possible in my business to learn the new, hard skills — learning sales, closing deals, writing social media posts sooner or later, improving my service, writing my offers and so forth. I’m thinking too far ahead… I’ll figure this out when the time comes.

[Vali2003]

Is it possible that the servers are working better again? 

[Vali2003]

There’s another issue that I’d like y’alls help with. I have a job (only 20 hours per month) at my university as a work student for a quite renowned sociology professor. It’s really a good position in terms of connections. I only got it because I wrote an A+ paper for somebody who works with her.

The thing is, the work is quite shit. Basically, I do whatever is too annoying for her. That’s not a problem for me per se. But the nature of this work is that it‘s little tasks that can just come in per e-mail at any point of the week. Then, maybe there’s something that’s super urgent, or there is a lot of work all of a sudden when there was nothing the last two weeks. It’s unpredictable, and always different tasks. Which makes 20 hours of this much more exhausting than 20 hours at Starbucks, for example, where you’re in your grove and have fixed work times. 

My contract has now ended. She wants me to continue working, but I’m unsure if I should. The connection would be good for my bachelors thesis, as she could be my supervisor. However, it also takes time and energy away from my business. But then also, it’s only 20 hours per month. 

What do you think?

[Vali2003]

To be honest, I thought it would be possible to do a poll somehow. Apparently not. Just feel free to share your thoughts via reply. 

[Vali2003]

I also painted a wall in my room today. It was quite fun and the color looks nice. I think the room will look pretty good when I’m done with it.

I’ll just have to wait until the rest of my furniture arrives. The mattress already came today.

[Vali2003]

Uni started back up today. It will be more challenging to work a lot, but I think it’s gonna go quite well. I’m steadily increasing the time I work, by 5 minutes every second day. This may not sound a lot but it would be 75min in one month and 150 minutes (2,5 hours) in two months. It’s also smart, because it gives me time to adapt to new challenges, since I slowly step into their territory. For example, maybe when working 6 hours per day (+uni) the challenge will be that I don’t have enough time for physical activity and thus feel bad. This will slowly creep up, giving me time to try different things to deal with it, as opposed to being there all of a sudden and overwhelming me. 

[Vali2003]

I’ve been slacking off writing here a bit over the last 4-5 days, so I want to catch up a little. 

On monday, it was super weird to go back to not using YT and this forum again. I almost forgot about the detox. But then I remembered and after, it was relatively easy to go back to staying off (That sounds like I’m detoxing from heroine, lol). I always feel this release when I’m not on social media. Like I can finally breathe again.

[Vali2003]

Also, I’ve noticed, the forum runs smoothly again, which is great.

However, what use is my habit of copying my message before sending now, in case the site crashes?? 

[Vali2003]

I still don’t have a desk, which sucks.

I sit in my bed all day working, which I definitely did not want to do because it teaches me to associate my bed with working, not with sleeping… And I do struggle turning off work-stuff in my mind in the evening. That’s definitely an area I need to improve on…

[Vali2003]

Since I last wrote here all my furniture arrived and I finally have a desk… thank god. 

[Vali2003]

This was now the second weekend of my dopamine detox/new strategy. It worked quite well. I feel that now, I didn’t go full into the addiction as I did last week. I stayed pretty even-keeled throughout. It’s gonna be more natural to wake up tomorrow and not use the forum or YT than the week before. Last week, I woke up, opened up YT first thing in the morning. Then realized, it’s Monday and I’m supposed to chill out. 

[Vali2003]

I’m working on my business all day pretty much. This opened up some new challenges. For one, I’m completely incapable of shutting off my mind in the evening. This makes it impossible to de-stress and will cause me to burn out with it sooner or later. I implemented a shutdown ritual now, which I’ll do everyday at ~20.15 PM. It consists of three things: 1) Noting all my open tasks 2) having a plan for completion that I trust for each and 3) Saying a sentence that completes the ritual.

The concept is from Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I think it definitely helped me today, but I reckon when I do it for a long time, the conditioning will help me to relax even easier. And relaxing is crucial for my longtime success.

[Vali2003]

I’ve sort of finished up the project I did for my mom today. It took way too long. But now it’s done. And for the first time, I’ll get some real life data from a landing page I made and an email-based course that I’ve ghostwritten for my mom. 

[Vali2003]

There is this formatting task that I have to do for my job. It’s literally just formatting academic texts properly. But the email thread with the guy I do it for is fucking 26 emails long, already. It’s nuts. Every time I thought I did it perfectly but turns out I missed a bunch. However, it’s the first time, I’m doing formatting of this sort and, literally, everything has to be perfect. I have no work processes, no ideal way to do it, no goal even, no guidelines what exactly to format, so it’s all a pretty inefficient work processes. I do it as best I can, send it to him, he sends it back, saying I missed something, and repeat. Next time I’d be a lot quicker. That’s for sure.