I was waiting to hear that she got lost and if a poor soul hadn't heard of her because of a webapp she had created, they wouldn't have brought her in when her car broke down, saving her from death by exposure.
Yes, it's clear, but I kept expecting to hear about how it literally, and not metaphorically saved your life.
I think if you added the 'creative' (or professional, or something like that) to the title, it would still work quite well and not leave people like me thinking "uh...wait...".
The main point of your article is good, and resonates a lot with my experiences.
And I don't mean saved my life in a hand-wavy, metaphysical way, like "Punk rock saved my life" or "Martha Stewart Every Day Living saved my life". This is not your typical vague Tomato Soup for the Soft-Seller's Soul crap—I can name dates and numbers.
This bit promises a literally life saving--i.e. you would be dead otherwise. The rest of the post is great, but opening with this is a big distraction since the post turns out to be exactly what you promise it isn't.
Please don't underestimate the power of music to change a life. A Perfect Circle's "Judith" was a song that came out as I was leaving an abusive religious group. That, and other music, was part of a major transition in my life, allowing myself to reprogram innate beliefs of my unworthiness as an individual, among other things.
Leaving that religious group, quite literally, saved my life as I was on a track to suicide. Punk music did the same to many in that generation.
> A Perfect Circle's "Judith" was a song that came out as I was leaving an abusive religious group.
May I recommend the song "Wings for Marie, part 2" by Tool? The lead singer of Tool and A Perfect Circle is the same fellow, and it's a song with a similar theme. I don't listen to much Tool any more, but I did check out the new album a couple years ago as I was a fan when I was younger. Not as good as Lateralus or Aenima in my opinion, but the track Wings part 2 was really really good.
Yeah, but 10,000 days came out years later. :) I was at the Coachella concert days before it was officially released. (Not to mention the Phoenix concert where he was hit by a water bottle thrown from off stage.)
"For the 12-week course, workbooks & other printables, teleconfs and support, you'll pay only $500."
I don't know whether the specific course she is selling is any good or not, but I'm fascinated by the possibility that little courses like this could eventually be the future of higher education.
I'm taking the Dave Ramsey financial course right now, and the experience compares favorably to university style instruction. People local to you congregate in one place each week to watch a video of Dave presenting a topic, break into groups after words to discuss the topic of the video, and then there's homework to do before the next class meets, along with a book and other materials, and more content on his web site. All for about a hundred bucks.
When I see people from the class outside the classroom, suddenly it's easy to talk about money, something that would otherwise be socially inappropriate.
Anyhow, is picking and choosing from courses like this a viable way to educate yourself? Are there subjects for which it wouldn't work? What does a university really add over these kinds of courses?
I was socially anxious in school so I didn't really experience that much of the last three.
regarding the first one, it's almost a tautology that you are being habituated into doing things you are ambivalent about for reasons you may not fully understand. perfect practice for the day job you get after graduating, really.
on the other hand, my self-actualized programmer friend - who never went to school and works on his own projects - occasionally has a tinge of insecurity because he never took a compiler class.
IMO, other than the "you're young and finally out of your parents' house, yippee!" aspect, most college experiences seem to come down to external validation.
In theory, if you're lucky, you'll be exposed to a whole new world of intellectual possibilities and meet many wonderful people who'll join you on your journey to maturity, transforming into friendships for life, but that seems to be more the exception than the rule.
I've paid maybe $4,000 over the past year for "professional development" courses (writing, business, marketing, etc.) and every single one was totally worth it.
I wish I could say the same about the thousands I sunk into college classes before I dropped out.
Shipping is awesome, and if you don't ship you've got nothing.
But to think your first product/site/whatever is going to give you creative freedom...I think that's selection bias. I've shipped a lot of mini-sites (mostly for my own amusement) and the traffic is very low and has not brought me any sort of fame.
Sure, maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I would say 9 out of 10 projects you create are not going to become popular or get you renowned.
That doesn't make it not worth doing. I've learned something new from every new project I've built and every person I've worked with. But it also hasn't benefited me financially.
Twistori didn't give me creative freedom and, as I said, it earned me no money directly. (Despite the fact that, nearly 3 years after launch, in the last 90 days people spent an accumulated 57 years on the site.)
I describe what it really did for me, which LED to the creative freedom.
If you want your projects to do something for you financially, and they're not, then you should tackle that as a project in and of itself.
"I describe what it really did for me, which LED to the creative freedom."
That is, selection bias.
I think you're understating the amount of work it took you to get to the point where you could launch Twistori and have it be a success. You put in years of effort as a blogger, speaker, and "thought leader".
I really admire how you've built and audience and leveraged it to build a viable lifestyle, but you can't teach that in a 12 week class.
Twistori's success had pretty much nothing to do with it. It was just that I did it. It didn't need to have the response it did. I didn't start getting the consulting work til >9 mos later, which was well after I realized what a fundamental change I'd just made.
I did calculatedly create something that would capture the zeitgeist, and that is certainly a skill you can teach. Tho that's not what the course is about.
What you can teach in a 12-week course is how to identify and/or create a money-making opportunity, begin to build an audience before you launch, the skills to self-manage a project and get it out there to earn money.
Which is, coincidentally, what it's about.
If you want to read it as being about "Twistori was successful and that changed my life," I can't stop you. But what it's actually about was "I shipped something on my very own and THAT changed my life."
Her personal experience with Twistori being an attractor for consulting projects jibes with the iPhone developers I know who don't make a lot of money from their well-crafted iPhone apps but make the bulk of their revenue from consulting on iPhone app development for companies.
"When you do your own thing, you give others inspiration and permission to do their own thing." - I once read in a psychology book, that a lot of us don't get permission from our parents to do specific things. Giving a person permission to do something they desire can indeed be life changing, so in a way (although not literally), shipping did save her life...
It's not really about defensiveness (which, no doubt, sounds defensive) -- it's about philosophy. If I were a delicate flower, I wouldn't be able to bear posting my own articles on HN.
Spreading my philosophy, on the other hand, is something I find worth doing. Also, it made me chuckle. ;)
To those who think "saved my life" was overly dramatic, try to remember that you were reading a sales flier, not a deep introspective blog post. The fact that it came across very much as such a blog post (because it partly was) is part of the brilliance, but also means that you might take the life saving part a little more literally than the "the best cola ever" advertising vibe that it maybe should have had.
That was a top shelf ad/promotion/infomercial Amy. Hats off.
If you'd met me before, you would have seen what I meant. I was utterly miserable, in the way that you can only be when you are trapped by your own great success and therefore don't even think escape is a rational option. Plus I always believed I was too much of a lazy asshole to ever be able to work for myself, really.
Making my own thing was absolutely a life-saving event for me.
"I spent a single day getting over my mopey co-dependence on clients"
The end result, as best I can tell, is simply more consulting work. So, "shipping" is simply a break from clients with the side-effect of bringing more in.
If I was a potential client, that line above would really turn me off.
You missed the part where I announced that I quit consulting and am living off the money made from:
1x SaaS web app, 1x self-published ebook, 2x 1-day in-person training workshops, 1x 2-day in-person training workshop (corporate training - yeehaw!
Plus, of course, this course, which is part of a plan. I have three other web apps in various states of completion, as well as the plans for another technical info product.
And I worked with a friend to ship a Mac app, although it's not making either of us any money. The other stuff has made a lot.
I also earned money with a 3-hour teleconference on the lessons I've learned from my "year of hustle"
That, my friend, is why it was called Year of Hustle.
PS -- even if I were still doing client work, that'd be a good thing. Being co-dependent sucks for BOTH parties to a relationship. Everybody wants to date the driven person who does for themselves - and wants to hire them, too.
After reading the top page of yearofhustle.com, I am still far too uncertain about what you're offering to commit $500 to it. I think you need to make the course description more precise.
The actual sales part is really tailored to the audience I already have, many of whom have seen the educational stuff I create (the book, the cheat sheets, the blog posts). I figure the course will be at least 85%+ made up of them. I've already sold 25/50 seats.
If you have any specific info I could provide that would clarify it for your fresh pair of eyes, I'd appreciate it!
Title could potentially be improved to "How shipping a product saved my life". I figured he was getting a liver or pacemaker on a container ship from China.
Being the literal-minded computer sort I am, I was waiting for the punch line, and it's kind of disappointing:
> Shipping my own projects saved my creative life.
Which is a bit annoying, because the rest of it seems like good enough advice.