Friday, 9 June, 2017 UTC
Summary
10th June 2017
I started The 1 Year to $1 Million Project today on a whim. We’re already 10 days into June but I didn’t want to wait it out until July so I’m starting with a shorter month. Right now, I’m having a Little Creatures Pale Ale. I shouldn’t be drinking and instead should be focusing on the million but I had 3 beers left in the fridge.
My wife and my son are leaving to Korea on Monday for 3 months – the timing is actually great for this experiment. I called it an experiment because I’m dedicating a year of my life to see whether making a million dollars in a year is possible or not. I’m sure it is possible, and I’m sure it is not easy – but the journey will be worth it. There will be a lot of learnings to share, and even if I don’t make it in the 1st year, I’m 99.999% certain I would in the 2nd year. I just can’t afford to stay drifting anymore, I need to make shit happen because I have bigger goals than a million. The real goal is not money, the real goal is creating free time to achieve and create bigger things.
On my mind
- Get more clients on board
- Pick up momentum on existing projects
- Create more blog content
- Team structure
- RTMP distributions via AWS CloudFront
- Blockchain
13th June 2017
11:30AM – 3 days have passed, and my wife and son are gone I didn’t start the day early today – I took a cold shower around 10AM and had a black coffee (called long black here in Australia). Sending a few emails around, 2 phone calls, a client asking me about progress, pace seems slower than I’d like it to be. Which on the other hand is an assurance that I’d be able to handle a bit more workload, if I can find it.
7:33PM – I don’t feel like I’ve spent a very efficient day at all. I’ve been sitting at the desk forever but not much productivity. I fixed an issue on my Google Calendar and sent an invoice out, had 1 phone call but really no revenue generating activities. I gotta get into a routine, I gotta start coding.
On my mind
- 1 blog article each day
- More exercise to lose weight, get in shape
- More aggressive marketing
14th June 2017
3:37AM – I had 3 things on my Google Calendar as reminders. I got 2 of them done and also wrote 2 blog articles (not including this). I did a whole bunch of other useless things, watching YouTube etc, scrolling on Facebook but I think I still did good today considering I’ve sat at this desk for nearly 16 hours now I think. Not the most efficient, but still commendable effort. I’ve got some emails to go out to clients at 9AM via Streak CRM‘s send later feature – awesome. If I lived everyday like today, I’d probably make a mill in a year, yup. Couldn’t go for a bicycle ride though or do the dishes but I’ll probably catch some sleep now and do it when I wake up. I have an 8AM call with a US client soon.
9:18PM – So I got about 3 hours sleep over night, did a tiny bit of work, mostly communication then ate and went to sleep for another 3 hours. Now it’s 9:20PM… I still feel full and I need to exercise. I did go for a quick bicycle ride around noon but there were too many cars so I came back early. Anyway, it’s time to get back to work.
On my mind
- Selling digital courses
Now Playing
15th June 2017
6:35PM – I haven’t had a very productive day at all. Went to Costco to buy some cashew nuts, tuna cans, a Nike hoodie, a bottle of tequila etc. and filled up the car, full tank. Had a meeting with a mate of mine in the morning, talking about a joint venture. That went on for about 2 hours I think. Time to work.
10:36PM – I sent an email to a client and I’ve only been watching motivational videos on YouTube. It’s highly demotivational. I just paid for YouTube Red to keep listening to these videos in background on my phone as I’m going for a bicycle ride.
16th June 2017
2:09AM – I did go for that bicycle ride. But the bloody gear broke and it was fixed a super low gear. So I couldn’t move any faster than probably like 8km/h… Any kind of slight downhill the pedal was useless. I was really pushing myself on the bicycle today before that happened. Anyway, I’ll need to take it back to the shops if I want to keep exercising through this $1M mission.
I’ve been thinking about it a while and I finally admitted about my compulsive trading habits in the Forewords section.
If you have read this far and if you came from Hacker News, Lobsters or Reddit – do give me an upvote to show your support!
10:30AM – A client called me who has waiting on an email from me. I had totally forgotten about her! I really need to make myself a tool to show me Google Calendar reminders as the start up page of Chrome (and also get into a habit of creating & using these a bit better).
On my mind
- Better organisation
17th June 2017
Today is a Saturday and I really didn’t do anything too productive. I did get my bicycle fixed again, and went for a 15km ride, sent an email to a client, and I’m running an automated script for a client… that’s really about it. If I spend everyday like this, or every weekend like this, I really think making a million wouldn’t be possible. Oh, I went to the car wash place and paid like $80 for a wash and polish – I hadn’t done that in a while.
19th June 2017
It was my best friend’s birthday yesterday = boys night out. Actually it started in the arvo (an Aussie term for afternoon) with bottles of beers, soju and Korean style spicy chicken.
Yup – I didn’t get ANY work done but, I still rode my bicycle out to the city and back – a total of about 28km. I think I’ve rode my bicycle almost every day since starting this blog series, as well as doing a cold shower once a day, almost every day. Both things are vital to the 1 Year to $1M Project as I see it. It keeps me awake, it reinforces the mentality I need to keep through the year.
Today I’m out at a client’s office for the whole day. It’s the biggest project I’ve secured so far, which is to build a brand new Magento 2 based online store. I feel like I’m still getting into gear, but overall positive.
21st June 2017
I didn’t do any exercise on the 19th, but I did ride my bicycle again yesterday for about 15km around town. I’ve been watching a lot of videos from Evan Carmichael – he has a bunch of motivational, inspirational videos that are curations of various famous people – it is just awesome.
One key takeaway I got from watching is that working and hustling is just like training at the gym – there is a thing called muscle memory. Conan O’brien and a few others go into the details of this but, the bottomline is that you get into a routine, you repeat what you do over and over and over again to a point where the movements and actions get embedded into your muscles, into your brain; you get to a point where you don’t have to think or procrastinate – you just do it.
Procrastination is the biggest problem I have, which falls within the broad spectrum of laziness I guess. Right now, I’m that newbie at the gym lifting very small weights, with the hope of becoming a heavy weight some day! I just gotta keep at it.
22nd June 2017
1:00AM – Today (by which I mean the 21st) I feel like I had a pretty productive day. Client work lacked a little bit but I still did some coding for myself, putting together an Express.js based to-do list, which feeds off parsed information out of Google Calendar. Reminders in Google Calendar isn’t available through the API so I’ve had to use ‘advanced web automation’ to fetch this via Selenium through a Node.js module called WebdriverIO – hands down the best way to do web automation at the moment, imo anyway.
I did some quick styling and I think I’ll make this my start page on my Chrome soon. Few good leads came through the past few days. I don’t know how people are finding me but possibly the biggest lead to date has come through tonight via LinkedIn as a recruitment call from the founder of this company (which is a household name here in Australia) but I quickly turned it around as a business lead. Go me!
I just did a 15km bicycle ride too and had a cold shower. I’m trying to change my ways. I’m sure every little bit is helping.
Deep Work is a book I’ve been listening to on Audible recently – great book. My aim is to try and do 4 hours of deep work each day, and I feel like I’ve achieved that today. Let’s start with 4 hours, and look to increase to 8.
Time to hit bed.
- The 1 Year to $1 Million Project - Foreword
- Month 1 - June 2017
- Month 2 - July 2017
- Month 3 - August 2017
- Month 4 - September 2017
- Month 5 - October 2017
- Month 6 - November 2017
- Month 7 - December 2017
- Month 8 - January 2018
- Month 9 - February 2018
- Month 10 - March 2018
- Month 11 - April 2018
- Month 12 - May 2018
The post The 1 Year to $1 Million Project – Month 1 appeared first on Francis Kim.