24 Short Lessons From 24 Months of Being My Own Boss

It feels unreal that two years ago at 25, I called quits on the safest corporate job in the world. The one that had plenty of women in leadership, was 6 minutes away from home and is known to not fire people.

It was underpaid as hell… but let’s look at the good side before I throw some truth bombs.

The resignation email I rehearsed in my head for three months suddenly left me frozen. It took me four hours to gather the courage to press the send button.

I kept thinking of everything that can go wrong after taking such a drastic step. My family couldn’t understand why I wanted to become a freelance writer after all this education.

Fast forward to today, I:

• have a cohort-based course that sold out 8 times out of 9
• prefer weekday brunches because less rush
• do what I love for a living, every day
• don’t freelance, I run my own biz
• have multiple sources of income
• am financially independent

Here are 24 short thoughts from my journey.

1. There’s no limit to your potential — what you can create, do, and how much you can earn. It isn’t a potential issue when things don’t work out, it's more of a patience issue.
2. The internet is an infinite game. There’s no end to anything, and that’s the beauty of it if you don’t let it screw you mentally.
3. It’s easy to let money drive you nuts. I used to think now that I’ve tripled my corporate income, let’s make it 5x. That became let’s 10x it, and now I’m trying to 60x it. But from a place of intention, not greed.
4. It’s important to have enough, else you’ll never have enough. Because it’s easier to not have enough. The world is designed to make us feel too old, wrinkled, poor, and inadequate in general.
5. My mom still doesn’t know what I do even though I explain it to her at least twice a month. I’ve become okay with most people in real life not knowing what I do, for it also keeps me humble.
6. I’m not the best writer out there, but I’m more hardworking than most and that’s how I’m going to pave my way up. Consistency wins, and I’ve been showing up every time even if shit goes down too.
7. Most people won’t understand what you’re doing when you follow your one crazy dream. And that’s okay.
8. Learning > Scaling
9. I’ve been happier with my cohort-based course since I de-prioritised getting more people and running it more often. Fewer people and a deep conversation with each one of them help me learn deep dark issues that people won’t otherwise share. I’m prioritising learning and getting better instead of chasing money because I can.
10. Doing is the only thing that helps. No amount of reading and learning helps as much.
11. Most of the time, I have no idea what I’m up to. Earlier, this used to make me anxious and extremely stressed out. Now I’m more relaxed and think if I’m having fun, all is well.
12. Limitlessness can make your chest explode sometimes.
13. Outsourcing is an example of loss aversion. We find it easier to think that we’ll lose $$$, not realising how we’ll gain $$$$.
14. It’s difficult. You see my four-hour workdays; you don’t know what ten hours of thinking about growing my business feels like.
15. I don’t see the internet economy going down anytime soon. I only see it growing, more than before.
16. My ex-colleagues, assistant vice presidents, etc. have told me how badly they want to quit their jobs. At work, I used to look at them being the most focused of the lot. Now it's the same ‘exceptional talent’ that I’ve realised is probably about to break under the pressure of maintaining perfection.
17. Make peace with $1000/day and $1000/30 days, and you’re ready to be self-employed. Uncertainty will be your best friend.
18. Passive income is a fancy term to finally earn by creating a product after you’ve worked years to create authority and build credibility in a domain.
19. Let your goals keep changing and be open to experimenting. I quit to be a freelance writer. Doing what I do today was never a part of the game plan (also because I felt I’ll never be capable enough to do it).
20. Screw networking. Do your work, appreciate other people’s work, and build genuine relationships.
21. I’ve become more aversive to meeting new people than I already was. I’m yet to meet somebody off the internet in real life who isn’t just digging my brain for LinkedIn tips or asking how they should quit their job.
22. It’s been a tough journey where I’ve spent ten months being burnt out and have battled an overload of stress. But I wouldn’t have it any other way — I’ve learnt so much from this.
23. Of course, I have no idea how long my internet career will last and where will it take me. But I want to continue following my bliss.
24. Being aware of your core values and aligning with them changes everything. You can make a living scamming people or following shortcuts, or you can have a pure heart and good intentions, and I promise others will feel it. As humans, we’ve always had the power to sense the other person’s vibe.

And of course, it was life-changing for me to be able to buy and do things that I never thought I’ll earn well enough at this age to do.

If you’ve read it this far, I appreciate you celebrating with me. Maybe have a cookie?

Haha, all the best!

Love,

N

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