I spent the majority of my young adult life focusing on predictability because my childhood was unpredictable causing me to be terrified of the unknown

If I couldn’t guarantee a certain outcome, result, I wrote it off because it was safer to stay in the known.

I knew that if I didn’t take certain risks, then at the very least certain things were guaranteed to stay the same – the risk of them changing was minimal.

Now here I am once more a college student and I find myself stepping into the unknown which leads me to say…

I want to start operating outside my head for once.

I want to stop finding reasons why all these ideas that come to mind won’t work.

In the finance and investing world, there is a saying…

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Even though this is more about understanding that just because a company performs well in the past doesn’t guarantee it will do the same in the future, one can reverse this saying and apply it to their own life in the sense that past failure does not guarantee future failure.

Fear mixed within a bowl of childhood trauma creates a recipe for disaster.

During my 20s, I spent my years on the computer. I must have written over 500,000 words and spent over the recommended 10,000 hours mastering the online world of making a living.

The thing is, none of that was enough.

Because I didn’t know then what I know now, and that is most of what you read on the internet about success and making money online is bogus. For example, I was building informational niche sites, and one of them started to make a bit of money after a year of working on it.

It was about navigating public transportation in a nearby city using the bus pass system and visiting famous attractions.

I thought the site was a failure for two main reasons:

Reason one: I was in a panic during that time. My income was on rocky ground, and each month I paid my rent, I was reminded of the movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” the scene where he said each unit that he sold was a month’s rent.

That was me, each month I paid my rent, that was 28-31 days of breathing room.

This panic I was in created this giant ball of fear and with that came the inability to see things for what they were not to mention I was dealing with inadequacy issues from childhood

Reason two: The site began to make money after a year, and still, I made the mistake of being on Reddit (I am much wiser now).

Being on Reddit made me think that I had failed when so many were saying “I started making money after six months, if you don’t start making money after six months your site is a failure.”

“If you’re only making pennies or a couple bucks after a year your site isn’t going to grow into anything more.”

Being in a panic, I couldn’t see that most of those Redditors were most likely gaming the system and continue to be the reason Google has to create updates penalizing bloggers , but when I was desperate to create a living, I couldn’t see that.

What I learned about earning money online with creative endeavors.

Back to the original point, I spent years online creating content, writing eBooks, creating niche sites, learning how to code, and never once made more than $100 in a month from any of those endeavors.

Even though I have made money in every single one of those endeavors.

I now know the problem was me using the shotgun approach instead of being a rifle, being precise with one creative idea at a time long enough for it to grow from small beginnings to substantial windfalls.

That making money online is not linear it fluctuates.

If I had known this back in 2015 when I wrote my first ever book on the kindle publishing platform, I wouldn’t have changed a golden pair of keywords when I had seen book orders fluctuate even though kindle reads were steady.

I would have known that the first $3.00 on the travel niche site could have turned into $300 a month, possibly more.

That online will always be a patient game and it’s hard not because you can’t make a living out of it but because there are easier and ‘faster’ ways to earn money.

Most people approach earning money online the same way they approach earning money from a stable 9-5 job or wage job and both are the incorrect ways to go about creating an online business.

Earning money online requires a blank slate.

Philosopher John Locke believed that we are all born with a blank slate, other wise known as Tabula Rasa, he believed that as we evolve we have the ability to gain knowledge through sensory experiences.

Taking from his philosophy, the Tabula Rasa, earning money online is a completely different world in itself. It requires you to wipe away all preconceived notions about earning money especially if you only ever worked a wage or salaried job.

Pretend to start with a blank slate and that you are learning about a newly discovered world for the first time.

This will keep you from falling into the common trap, the same one I fell into in the beginning and that is, earning an income online has predictable variables such as when an influx of traffic arrives, the x amount of money given the x amount of views.

There are a plethora of success stories and Redditors who will tell you that you can out earn a living wage within a given time, but those are exceptions, not the rule.

Earning an income online is like building a town up from the ground.

First you have to find the land you plan to build your town.

For bloggers: Wix, WordPress, Blogger, Medium.

For video creators: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok?

Second what kind of town are you building? Think of your niche and what you want your blog or channel to be about.

Third let those who oversee most of the land know you are building.

For example, this looks like setting up a blog, publishing content and submitting a sitemap that tells Google, Hi, I am new here and am building a town over here.

For YouTube that looks like creating a banner, a channel icon and uploading your first couple of videos.

Fourth, understand that right now you are still in the building phase and each visit or watch is someone passing through to check out your town.

Over time the outcome wanted here is for each blog post or video to represent a ‘building’ for people to come through and have a look around and become loyal visitors.

Remember that building a town doesn’t happen overnight just like the very famous saying

Rome wasn’t built in a day

With that said these are some of the blank slate lessons I have come to learn over the years and the town analogy is one of my very own.

Letting go of the belief that I can’t offer something of value online to society.

After those first attempts online in my 20’s for a while, I thought I wasn’t cut out to be successful at anything that I set out to do, that something was inherently wrong about me and that my childhood abusers were right, that I was, to quote their exact words, shit.

Knowing what I now know, I know that isn’t true and that I was successful in those attempts. I was just naive, young, and desperate, a bad combination to build anything substantial online that requires patience and laser focus on one idea at a time.

Fast forward to now where I am all the much wiser

As I write on this blog as the person I am now, I see traffic coming to the site from Google search, perhaps, this is how you found this blog post.

Even though the traffic is very minimal, it reaffirms what I now know, that I have it in me to be successful at whatever I set out to do.

I just have to operate outside my head.

As someone who deals with a great amount of anxiety, especially towards the unknown, this will be the biggest self-development project I take on but one that will pay dividends down the road tenfold.

I want to take risks and chances (don’t confuse this with being foolish).

For me, this looks like…

• Maybe selling a product online after doing research and learning the market.

• Doing more investment research and trusting my abilities as an investor.

• Designing the life that I want, even if it’s a thousand times different from everyone around me.

• Not overly worrying about an investment or creative idea not working out. If I lose $1500, I lose $1500. I am not saying that I want to blindfold myself and throw a dart at a business idea or an investment and then hope I don’t lose money. It means that even if after all the calculations and research, the results don’t pan out, I can be at peace knowing I took the plunge.

• It looks like moving more freely in a world and taking the odd chance.

• It looks like all sorts of things outside of just career and finance.

• Operating outside my head means no longer allowing past failures and feelings to predict the future.

• It means no longer being scared to risk the known that is now for the unknown that could be.

Knowing that some of this also stems from childhood trauma, I know it won’t be easy, but I see it as the only way to forge forward as I am not getting any younger.

With that said, I hope this has sparked a light inside of those of you reading this article and you are inspired to overcome your own fears and take small practical steps towards the life that you always knew you wanted deep down but were too scared to go for.