Career Path

My intended career path is to make enough money as an entrepreneur to retire from working as a programmer, and then to really make money as an entrepreneur, so I can retire from business and work as a cartoonist. I have a lot of ideas about how to practice writing and I want to expand what readers expect from novels, so while working as a cartoonist I’ll be practicing writing and working towards starting my career as a novelist.

My first big career milestone was to go from doing bullshit work to doing real work. I worked as a mason tender and apprentice brick layer, which was a million times more satisfying than my previous job as a bill collector. The next big milestone was getting paid for my intelligence. In masonry I mostly got paid for physical strength and work ethic, then I started work as a machinist where I mostly got paid to be smart.

Other career milestones were:

• Gaining location independence by switching to a fully online income
• Building a team to do my work for me while I lived in the tropics and enjoyed a 4 hour work week
• Getting paid to write a novel
• Working full-time as a programmer because my wife insisted I get a real job

Novelist/essayist/poet is basically my end game, but I enjoyed machining, so in retirement I’ll probably build a small machine shop or wood shop and build engines or watches or robots or wooden puzzles or something along those lines. Or I’ll see what I can contribute as an amateur mathematician and computer scientist.

Tags: writing programming career