As a captain who has been sailing since I was a little kid, I am at a place in life where I don’t want to drive a boat for someone else. It is an endless grind with a ceiling. Trading your time for money is never going to make you rich or self-sustainable. You will just keep going to work every day to make money for somebody else.

When I mention to people that work normal jobs, how I don’t want to have a job, they seem to get confused. They ask me, “what are you going to do?” The answer to me is quite simple: LIVE MY LIFE. Build things that I want to build for fun. Explore. Go out whenever I want without having to worry about money. Explore my hobbies.

The hard part, aside from actually reaching that financial freedom, is not worrying about subtle judgement. It seems they don’t understand me when I explain how I’d rather build things, and not work for somebody else.

Getting over that fear of what other people think has always been a challenge for me. I’m starting to get better at it, but it will be a lot easier when I’m out of debt and have tens of thousands of dollars in my bank account.

For now, I need to continue to dial in my focus and work on things that I know can make me money. I have a few good ideas right now, and none of them are really Extra Chill, my passion project music blog that I’ve been working on for over a decade now.

I’ve accepted that Extra Chill will probably never turn a huge profit again, but it’s fun, it gets me clout and connections in the music industry, and I intend to keep doing it.

The ship has sailed for organic SEO on blogs. I got in right near the end, finally learning SEO techniques just as Google was getting ready to change their algorithm. I lived one year of the good life, making over $10,000 per month off my own efforts.

It took me a long time to finally reach this point of acceptance. Now, I am hoping to get there again, in a different way. That comes down to learning new skills, one of which is sales. I have a ton of valuable skills, but I am not the best at marketing myself or being a salesman.

The only way to get better at it, I guess, is to just keep trying. That is the one thing I can do here. Keep learning, but focused learning. Stop throwing a million ideas at the wall and missing. Pick a few that are good, and scale them.

Another is niche sites. Sarai Chinwag is an experimental idea that now gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but since the audience is not very targeted, the RPMs are quite low.

So, I built a few more niche sites that are way more targeted, and I’m replicating those strategies. I also turned this very website from a personal blog into a portfolio site, to showcase exactly what I can offer people on the web.

None of it has bailed me out quite yet, and I’m getting to the point where it looks like I will have to spend this summer running a tour boat. I wish that wasn’t the case, because I didn’t move to Austin to drive a boat. But, that’s the way that life goes. You can’t always achieve the things that you want on your own timeline.

I also tend to spread myself too thin, instead of focusing on just one thing I always juggle a lot of things. For a while I was good at focusing on one thing, because that one thing (SEO content) was making me a shitload of money. Once that stopped, I scrambled for a long time. Scrambling is exhausting, but sometimes that is the only thing you can do. Like bugs when their secret rock is flipped over. You just don’t know where to turn.

I moved halfway across the country to chase my dreams and found out I was too broke to actually chase them. Here’s to hoping that my ideas start to take off within the next month or so, and I can avoid my fate of driving a boat all summer long. If I wanted to be a boat captain, I would have just stayed in Charleston.

Life ain’t easy, my friends. But the world keeps on turning, and I remain determined to take charge of my own future.