Biggest bet ever!

Hello World.

I made the biggest bet I’ve ever done with my brother this week.  Its on like donkey kong.  The bet is that I will work on business for 5 hours per week and if I don’t have it done by Saturday at midnight then I owe that sucka…..$500.  Yup.  In one week if I don’t follow through this chump will get my hard earned dough.  This post is to do an update.  The other day I was looking into doing this bet on stick.com that my other brother showed me, which I really liked because on it they have a space where the individual can do a journal update.  Hence why I’m doing this post.  I’ll just do my journaling here.

$500 is going well.  I'm at 2 hours and 59 minutes and 56 seconds out of 5 hours.  I haven't made any money yet, but I think I've saved myself some time.  I can't quite discern how great asking w/o selling will be for me, but so far it is working out great.  Example.  I was thinking maybe instead of buying an eBay business I'd just contact realtors and ask them to ask their clients to list stuff to sell with me.  Turns out realtors can't accept commissions/kickbacks for stuff like that.  Plus I was thinking that isn't a home based business and would be a drag to have to go to someone's house and take pictures and then list and then coordinate shipping and and and...too much!  So I nixed that idea. 

Two days ago I read through the Utah state fair guidebook to see what is up with being a vendor there.  Then I looked up costs for buying stuff to do that.

I'm also onto to seeing if making eBooks could be a thing I could do or not.  I figured I could list my barter skills/items that I posted to udemy.com as an eBook to get the feel for it.  Turns out I deleted the text of it once I posted the video and I can't find it anywhere.  Only way I think I could get it, w/o having to transcribe the videos that is, is to ask my friend Tyler Warnick if he perhaps has that one copy I sent him that one time.  That'd be a bit of work and would have to search his emails for attachments I've sent him and then resend it back to me.  If not no worries.  I think the eBook thing though could be a good idea.  Ashlee bought some children’s temple book for like $9 and I’m just thinking that is dumb cause it is a big book and it'd be much better to have that and a billion other books on a tablet or something to save on weight and preserve colors and what not.  So I think I'll try and make that happen.  It'd be something I could do from home and ideally something I could outsource and automate 4-hour workweek style.

Another idea I think I may try and loop back around to as well would be selling people/companies on making apps for them like restaurants and small businesses.  So we'll see.  I figure I'll just keep going on this process of working on business 5 hours per week and eventually I'll land somewhere that makes sense. 

I've been listening to this podcast.  http://automatemysmallbusiness.com/   It's been interesting to listen to the different things they've got going and how they're doing it.  Listening to them makes me think I need to keep going with pursuing business ideas that I can automate for sure.  Its just the way to go and is way cheaper/efficient.  I definitely envy how they're able to work the 4-hour workweek life.  

One thing I really like about their podcast is the ease with which they're able to start new businesses because they have experience in automating their own existing businesses.  I also really like product based businesses.  I think I really want to transition eventually to digital products and ideally subscription based digital products.

One thing they recommend doing is hiring a VA (virtual assistant) to do some task for you.  It doesn't even have to be for business.  It can be for anything.  One thing I'm thinking I'd have a VA do for me is research the most reliable and cheapest solar panel unit to power small things like a laptop, ipod, phone, etc.  Tyler wrote me telling me where he's living that they had an ice storm that knocked out power for a whole day and it was cold.  Fortunate for them they had food and were able to stay at the in-laws who had a wood burning stove and so they were a toasty 75 degrees.  They didn't have anything as far as batteries and flashlights though.  So I think that may be something I work on business wise this week is hire a VA to do that for me so I get experience hiring someone and interviewing them and I can do it for cheap.  Exciting!

I figure I've just got to continue to surround myself with business ideas/success and then take out the option of not doing something and work on business each week.  On my way home from work I’m listening to the biography of Warren Buffet that my dad highly recommended.  Guy just kept trying to figure it out and was a little schemer since he was a kid.  He even wrote off his bike and helmet I think for his paper route to lower his taxable income on his newspaper delivery business ha ha....sigh.  That’ll be me.  I actually liked one thing a lot from the super bowl, specifically Russell Wilson.  His dad would tell him when he was growing up, "Russell, why not you?"  For whatever reason that really resonated with me.  Why not me?  I deserve it just like anybody else.

Things I've learned from others in business and some about myself and business

At the beginning of the year I wrote down the goal that I wanted to make 50k.  Currently I'm at around 42k-45k depending on whether you include health savings account money and 401k stuff that I'm foregoing.  What I decided to do at the first of the year was get a second job to bridge the gap and hopefully meet my goal.  The second job jerked me around a little bit and so I ended up quiting after just a couple months.  Part of the reason I quit was because I wanted to dedicate some time to learning new skills, specifically coding for computers and building apps.  I figured that if I could increase my skills, thank you Jim Roan, I could command a higher paying position within my company or perhaps elsewhere.

 

After some introspection and advice I came to realize that if I were to work to get a higher paying job that I'd still be at another job and not earning the type of money I want to earn and know I can earn.  With that in mind I was left with starting a business.  One thing I did to bridge the gap on linkedin.com was to increase my skills/marketability by building a course on udemy.com.  See/sign up for it here if you'd like.  https://www.udemy.com/easy-self-reliance-and-barter-skills/ 

 

After I came to that realization my brother chipped in and gave me a bunch of course material to earn1k.  See/sign up here if you're interested.  http://earn1k.com/  As seen in the Wall Street Journal...

 

One concept that I picked up from this guy and one other, Tim Ferris, is that one ought to validate their ideas before the jump into any business venture.  I hadn't done that with the course I built and...it is just sitting there, which I'm actually ok with cause it was something I was working on to increase my marketability for getting another position here or elsewhere, but hadn't actually tried to validate and upon further research doesn't appear the format that I went about doing it was ideal.  Lesson learned.

 

One thing I did/do like about informational products is that they're quite a bit of work to get started/built initially, again AFTER it is validated, but once done they hopefully sell themselves and can convert into a constant cashflow stream for my family. 

 

I started doing some thinking about all the ideas I had.  For starters they were in a million places.  

 

 On my flash drive.  On my laptop.  On my ipod note thing.  I've since consolidated all my ideas and need to set aside a time to go through them all.  One thing I want to do is go through the earn 1k material and come up with more ideas.

 

At this time my wife likes doing crafts.  She has submitted a couple ideas to a site that does flash sales where they sell items at a discount to their email list.  Her first two ideas didn't get accepted.  The third one did however about a month or so ago.  They ran her product, see here https://www.etsy.com/listing/165274395/the-world-is-your-playground-24-x-36?ref=af_shop_order, and she almost sold out of everything.  97 of 100 items sold.  She also ended up selling one more on the previous link and she sold another one to a friend of ours last night for 99 out of 100. 

 

One thing I love about her product/business is that it also jives with one of Tim Ferris' main rules, a simple FAQ.  He advises against any business that can't easily answer any customer issues with a simple one page FAQ.  Reason being is that anything more complex than that will need a bajillion customer service reps (more overhead) to answer the endless list of questions.  More questions = more problems, complaints, returns, and less repeat business.

 

I also love that she again did the work once, the product sells itself, and she is rolling in dough.  I think I may advise her to try and figure out how to automate the process for the next round.  That way it is all money coming in, but she doesn't have to do any of the legwork for getting the product out the door once it is sold.  Maybe we could hire out her sisters or something to do it.

 

With her experience I realize that really I don't want to be involved in service based businesses myself.  Now it isn't the worst thing ever and maybe I'd be more willing to do it once the product based business was covering my expenses and I'd finished traveling/seeing/doing everything I want to do and am back at home.  Larry Ellison is a billionaire who mascarades his business around as a product when in fact it is both a product and a service.  Once product is bought he has his team go in and install this and do that and and and...a service side to his product business.

 

One thing I learned or realized or finally had sink in is that if I, or my employees aren't working on the service we provide, then we aren't getting paid, whereas a product just ships out and I'd get paid.  With that in mind I've already started nixing business ideas that aren't product based or that can be automated/outsourced easily and cheaply.

 

Another concept I've come across is vanity metrics.  It was actually recommended to me to read the book, but after hearing the brief synopsis I'm not sure I need to read it.  Basically it is just calling out "busy work" and measuring things that have nothing to do with earning more money or improving anything.  I think this concept could be applied to not just businesses already up and running, but those that are building a product.  One may say, "hey in your barter course you need to cover this and that."  "Ok!  Cool!  I will do that."  Problem is these things may not have been validated in the first place to be valid and one would feel like they're accomplishing things when in fact they're just doing busy work and feeling good about themselves and something that is no good in the first place. 

 

Remit talks about this in his earn 1k course.  He says to NOT throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks.  Building up a bunch of twitter followers for the local garbage business doesn't really matter.  Why?  Cause we already know what they're doing.  Really I think people just want to know how much it is going to cost to pick up their garbage and the times they're coming and then that it gets done.  I would say maybe people would be interested to see what crazy things the garbage man finds in the trash, but is that going to help them get more customers.  Not so sure. 

 

One idea I had was to help list businesses on the local classified site, everyday, three times a day to avoid it falling to the back of the search results.  I did vanity calling right at the very beginning.  I was calling, to look busy and feel good about myself, when I hadn't even done scripting of general questions/responses, and I quickly realized I wasn't helping myself.  Once corrected I was able to validate things much quicker and move on from the idea.

 

My mom is turning into a mogul herself in her spare time.  She's joined a company that is earning her 2-300 a month on the side each month.  She reported to me that she just had her best month last month.  That is pretty dang cool.  Here is my mom, the lady who changed my diaper who knows how many times, and the diapers of my 5 other siblings, who didn't quite have the opportunity to finish schooling till after the kids were out of the house and is now working on a side business and doing well.  I advised that she figure out which of all the avenues would work best for building her business instead of keeping her busy doing things that don't add to the bottom line.  Her business is one of awareness, education, and networking with others.  I hope she's able to avoid busy vanity work and find the things that work best for her.  We'll see what happens.  Fortunately for her my dad has uber business experience and will be able to share with her what would work best and what wouldn't so she ought to be ok and do well after a while.  I'm excited to see how it goes.

I have app ideas, but it stresses me OUT!

I’ve got a fair amount of app ideas and if I let my mind wander I’m sure I could come up with more of them.  Apps are mini businesses.  Businesses ought to be validated before one dives into them so as to avoid investing tons of time, energy, and money into them only to see them fail.  I think if people validated their business ideas before they did them the number that you hear of, “9 out of 10 businesses fail in the first 5 years” would be a lot less.  If that was the case and the number was a lot less then I’d certainly be a lot more motivated to start a business.

So yesterday I decided to do some app validating.  At first I thought I needed to call book publishers for an idea my brother and I have and thought better of it and thought I’d just go straight to the end user to validate the idea.  Funny thing happened.  I more than validated the idea.  First app I pulled up…1-5 MILLION installs.  What is funny is…this totally stressed the hell out of me and even put a damper on the rest of my night.  Why?  Cause I thought, “How am I supposed to compete with 1 million plus download app?  I can’t ever get that many downloads and there is too much competition.”

What is crazy about that is I already KNOW that I need to validate and competition is validation.  I already know many people/businesses have become successful by taking an existing product and making it better and yet as I contemplated the competition all those thoughts went out the window.  CRAZINESS.

It wasn’t until this morning that I realized that I was being a friggin’ idiot and that I’d validated our idea and that if my desire to do the app was there I’d have some people who were willing to give it a try.  Weird how our brains selectively forget things when doing so destroys any excitement lol.

So if any of you have any business ideas and validate like crazy, on your first investigation/try no less like I did, please don’t get depressed. 

Sincerely,

Brock

Pipe vs platform, control chokepoints, don’t diversify.

           Where do I start with this post?  I definitely think my businessfail.com idea would be a good one.  I was thinking of whether it would be text or maybe doing a youtube channel for it would be better and I’m not sure so I’ll have to think further on that.  What I’m thinking I would do though when I start it up is to have it just be a weekly post or something.  With that post I’d just do the best fails/things learned from those fails as some weeks may have many to post.

            Last night I made my first call for my ad posting business idea.  It wasn’t really nerve wracking.  I did say to myself that my goal would be 5 calls.  I only made one.  That was all I needed to easily blow through my hour session of working on my business.  The call was a total disaster ha ha…sigh.  Tis ok though cause I have permission to suck at first.

            I looked up the company name and called.  The company name has the person’s name in it.  So when I called she answered, “Hello.”  I said, “Hi my name is Brock.  Is this Barbara?”  She said, “Yes”.  Again the lady’s name is in the business name.  I said, “Are you the business owner?”  It was one of those moments where you know you shouldn’t say what you’re about to say, but for whatever reason, mine being anxiousness/nervousness, you uncontrollably blurt out what you didn’t want to say anyways.  From there on the conversation lasted about 5 seconds longer.  I got halfway through my second sentence.  She cut me off.  I asked a question and she just hung up on me.

            Lesson learned is that I had to change my wording up a little bit to get even quicker to the point and not really ask for permission to at least get two words in. 

            Later that night I was reading my “Winning through Intimidation” book and it talks extensively about operating from a position of power and authority and that there are several ways to do this with many jobs/businesses that don’t normally command power/respect.  I’ll do a post on the notes I took from the book once I’m finished with it.

            I also read a summary of a biography of John D. Rockefeller recently.  He focused on a couple things.  Hiring geniuses to do the heavy lifting.  Another thing I gleamed from that summary was that he controlled checkpoints in the shipping industry so that he forced his competitors to do his will else he’d crush them and then buy them out.  One other thing I got from the summary was that Billionaires don’t really diversify.  They stick to just one or two revenue streams, but become masters at that one revenue stream, whereas the average millionaire has multiple streams of income from different industries.  The middle class focuses on credentialing up via degrees/job titles.  The poor just expect people to take care of them.

            Another thing I read just yesterday was a Harvard Business Review Blog that chronicled the institutionalizing of failure into PBS, the public broadcasting station.  They made it mandatory for their employees to purposely take risks and fail and make mistakes and see what worked and then move on from those things.  Start to finish has created a powerhouse of a company and change in traffic from their audience in a drastically positive way.

            Another thing I came across was a Wired magazine article talking about how there are two business models now.  One is a pipeline type, i.e. producers produce and ram product/services down consumers throats.  The other type is the platform type.  Platform would be the internet broadly, or more specifically things like youtube and twitter and facebook where producers can produce value and then consumers can then consume that value.

So I started thinking, “How do I position myself for the collapse that is coming?  What business do I need to start that will control in Rockefeller chokepoint fashion, that I could start/take over via my commanding position via proper intimidation, and that is a platform?”

One idea I had was to buy up an app building business like Appsmoment.com or something like that where it is cutting edge, platform based, can grow in capital appreciation, but also have monthly cashflow revenues.  I also thought of education sites like udemy.com or kahnacademy.com.  Buying up those types of companies and then merging them together.  Anywho there will definitely be more on this later as I do more introspection, but I wanted to put it all on paper before I couldn’t articulate it what I wanted to do.  Feel free to drop some bomb ideas in the comment section below on how to achieve business greatness.

Movies and lunch and time spent

I went to lunch with a coworker the other day and he boasted about how he has over 800 movies stored on an external hard drive that he and his family uses to watch films.  I was not impressed. 

At 120 minutes per movie and 800 movies that is 96,000 minutes.  That is 1,600 hours, which is 66.666 days, and 2.22 months.  If I know people like I know myself all those movies would have already been watched at least once and by having them on the external hard drive again I have to imagine that saying they’ve been watched a second time isn’t too much of a stretch.  That’d be 192,000 minutes, 3,200 hours, and 133 days, and 4.44 months of movie watching.

Needless to say that is a lot of movie watching.  That is a lot of no interacting with other people.  That is a lot of time that could be spent doing other things. 

Even if it is just leisure reading for the same amount of time I believe if someone did a survey and asked which of these two things is more appropriate that there would a resounding response saying that reading that much is a better use of someone’s time, though they’re both essentially a form of escapism, and when done in moderation and not at the sacrifice of urgent and important things is ok I think.

I poised the thought to him of “Imagine if you started at 27, like me right now of filtering movies and cutting out tv watching, how different your life would be at your current ripe old age of 37.”

Just an interesting thought. 

The latest thing I’ve been able to do since cutting out tv/movies is that I’ve been able to legitimately update my resume.  Since doing so I have already gotten one offer for employment even though I didn’t even apply for the job and the pay was quite a bit lower than what I already make.  I’ve also had a recruiter contact me to see about potentially interviewing for a position as a manager at another company.

This past weekend I found out I could download the lessons from treehouse and work on my projects without even needing to have access to the internet, which is awesome if I’m going to be working on building sites for other people and need to see how it is all looking when I update things.

Website master tinkerer of all!!!

So I'm pretty excited.  I signed up for teamtreehouse.com as you'll know from this post.  During lunch today I worked on the current project I have and wanted to get the pictures that I had referenced in my text editor that haven’t been showing up to show up in my website I’m building.  I thought that it would’ve been just a simple issue of fixing where the text was referencing back to as far as the tree to get to it. 

That may not make sense, but either way I added what I thought would be the tree/branch path to get to my images to my text editor file, hit save, updated in my browser, and…angels sang!

  It worked.  I was/am very happy about this cause I thought it might have been something to do with the text editor or the browser I was using, but twas not the case.

Back to School (coding)

I’m trying to move on from my credit analyst career and am wanting to move into the technology arena as a developer.  I’d been doing codeacademy and had been learning quite a bit.  I decided I wanted to give treehouse a try for while it is a paid thing I’m hoping it could give me a little more direction and even allow me to start building more pertinent projects that can help me build my portfolio of work so that people looking at my skills can have something more relevant to judge my skills off of.  I shall keep you updated on my progress.

App template, Coding breeze, systems are great!

In my journey of coding bliss (but not so much) I feel like I've learned quite a bit.  One thing I know I'd like to do for income and portfolio purposes is build apps.  Some of my own ideas and some for businesses.  In my journey I tried setting up my own development environments and then was trying to use their plug-ins and build my own code, but mostly I spent so much time trying to set up the environments, that by the time I got around to building code I wasn't excited and because I'm such a newb to the programming environment I wouldn't really be effective to build the things that I wanted to.  This is where turning to others is important.

I went upstairs to a co-worker and asked him some things about coding and found out one of his old professors had built a site that allows you to build code for an app and have that code simultaneously be uploaded to both IOS and android stores.  What?!  There are places where I can build one app, but have it go to several different publishers?  DUH!  One of those places you could do this is sencha if you wanted to check them out.

The next thing I stumbled across was udemy.com and their course on how to build an app w/o any coding experience.  Discussing this with my brother made even more sense.  Here is this site that not only lets you build one app that you can then publish to several different stores like sencha and others, but they also give you templates to use for anything from buttons and colors for your background to plug-ins for rss feeds, paypal links, maps to google, etc.  They also let you to switch to the back end stuff that I talked about earlier if you'd like and manipulate the data/format using html and css and you could add in more back end heavy languages if your heart so desired, which was exciting for me cause I feel like this is where the good polishing of an app would occur.

Systems!  They're great and they're the bread and butter of any successful business.  One thing my brother mentioned that I also liked and had experienced in my frustrations of setting up my own development environments I mentioned at the beginning is that often once set up it'd already be obsolete.  With this site that isn't the case anymore.  They do all the back end updating for you and you just use the templates to build away w/o having to worry if the latest api and patch is on your system after you scoured stackoverflow for how to get the correct said patch on your system to find out it is already old or your doing it wrong.

So while the nerdy kid takes 86.4 hours to build one custom app from scratch using his own code, be a really SMRT person



 and just swallow your pride and use what people have already done and make 10 or 20 apps in the same amount of time as the nerdy kid.  At least that is what i'm going to try and do.

Do you like it in the bow or the stern of the...

coding world?  Me personally I like it in the BOW, or front end, or for the uninitiated, the pretty stuff you see on an app or web page.

Yesterday I finished a work project and had some extra time on my hands since the boss is out of town till Monday so I was trying to figure out what I should do with my time and not have an anxiety attack cause I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself.  That is when I realized something.  I like front end work more than back end work when it comes to coding/software development.  This is how it happened.

I started code year about three or four-ish months ago on www.codeacademy.com.  It was and has been enjoyable to learn how things are working behind the scenes.  However as I was going back to code year yesterday and was yet again faced with trudging through this.

I realized that wasn't the funnest prospect for me at the time and so I begrudgingly started working on an app I'm building for a pizza restaurant down the street from me and...I found myself enjoying it.  I'm using www.appsmoment.com to build the app.  I'll discuss this site and what is going on with it and why I like it more later.  What I did notice though while working on the app though is that I enjoyed figuring out the layout and colors and images and what not and that is a big deal.  I'll tell you why.

There a BAJILLION things to do or you could do in coding/programming.  It really can be overwhelming.  Josh Kaufman talked about this in his latest book I read of his in which he mentions feeling paralysis by analysis when considering all the different ways he could go about improving his current website with the myriad of languages out there.

So while I think I have it pinned down on the direction I'd like to head, I'll need to confirm this through further experimentation and study.  I'll keep you posted if my mini epiphany was indeed true or not.

App World

So I’ve been reading about apps and how to build them. Dis is some scary stuff! Not really, but it is really uncomfortable learning something you’re not familiar with. Like currently I have a little bit of a stress headache and my stomach was achy just a second ago when faced with the prospect of moving on from Andromo.com, which is a site you can use to help you build your apps. I’m going to hop back over to the google site that they have set up to teach you about app building. Hopefully I can keep learning some stuff there. This weekend I tried setting up a developer program on our laptop, but that seemed to be a dud. I think I tried that once before and had similar results. This next time up I think I’ll try downloading the program from treehouses’ site because it actually worked when I downloaded/installed the thing. One thing I want to do is a tutorial once I’ve got this ish figured out. I want to do a step by step EASY tutorial to build a simple app cause currently it just doesn’t seem like there is much of that out there.

Fake it till you get slapped in the face by someone who just put on body odor lotion and then keep going

That is how I feel right now with coding!!!!!!!!!!!

Gah sometimes new concepts are like the perfectly crispy french fry or moist brownie or warm decadent sweet roll (heaven knows I love a good sweet roll).

Other times I feel like I just got slapped in the face by someone who just rubbed on body odor lotion and I can't clean it off of my face or get rid of the smell cause now its in my face pores.

I do know though one thing that I've learned.  People don't know jack squat about things when they go to a job interview and somehow they still con the interviewer/decision maker that going with them is indeed the right decision and that the person is actually qualified.  Well that is just what I'll have to do when I go for an interview for a junior developer job somewhere cause right now, SOMETIMES, I feel like a fake.

On a more positive note my issue currently seems to be that I'm learning a new concept, get the general gist of it, like associative arrays and splicing, and then go to do the exercise to see that I have it wrong in my head so I use the "tip" and then if that doesn't work I go to the forums for help and usually see the answer and often it is similar to what I've already got going on, but with a slight variation and if I'm lucky the person who put that on the forum will describe what they did and why they did it and what the code is doing and that'll help me tons get more of the nitty gritty that perhaps the course writer didn't have space to put in there.

This whole learning new stuff just reminds me of school.  You get it...kinda.  You're wrong...kinda.  Now to just get someone to make the leap of faith and hire my ace!

Coding update

So I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’m learning coding in my free time.  One idea I had was to start a website called webpagewehab.com (available as I checked godaddy) and have people visit it and I would get a business going that would basically rehab their sites for them for a small fee or even free to start out and get some reviews/clientele/portfolio going.  This weekend I was learning about html and it seems fairly straightforward and not quite as intensive, yet, as Javascript, which is what I’ve mostly been learning about in code year.

            The idea came from my wife’s mother’s day present actually.  I bought her a mani-pedi and when I went on the business’ website it was awful.  I thought I could do it better for them fairly easily and I don’t really know much about webpage rehabbing.  When I thought of a name to give my site and thought of rehabbing I thought of several variations with that one seeming to be the best even others might make more sense/sound better.  I’m going to do a survey on this.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2M2ZSNP 

As you're aware I've also made a bet to get coding knowledge.  So far I haven't missed a week of doing 5+ hours of coding else I'm out $20 to some chump I know :)  One cool thing that happened is that he called, my accountability guy, and said he talked to a buddy who works at American Express and mentioned that perhaps I could land something there.  While that is cool and a little bit exciting, I probably need more experience and the guts to actually pull a website off like the above to show people I'm serious/know some stuff and can contribute with higher pay!

Coding

So I’m looking to make an upgrade to my career.  I listened to a book on tape from Jim Rohnee-roner-sonz and he talks about “If you work on your job, you’ll make a living.  If you work on yourself, you’ll make a foooortune.”  Essentially for the uninitiated this means get skills else you’re never getting paid more.  Makes sense.  Why would anyone pay you more for doing the same thing when you haven’t learned or done anything to make things better for yourself or them?  Duh.  Common Sense.

            My older brother and I converse often.  At one point he mentioned, in response to boredom on my end I presume, looking into learning coding on codeacademy.com.  I promptly jumped on and wasn’t too impressed.  Then I did a little more a couple weeks later and actually liked it pretty good.  Now I’m in the nitty gritty of learning methods, do-while loops, dot notation, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes computers function and your websites load right up.  That is me now.

            That wasn’t always me.  When I first started I realized that technology is constantly changing and growing and so I wanted to know what the future is so I wasn’t wasting time on a dead or dying language that would soon become obsolete, focus/specialize on that, and make a bajillion dollars doing it through code academy, books, and schooling.  When I started looking into the different languages though and tried to figure out which one would be best my answer was…all of them.  Kindof.

            What I have learned is that there are some pretty good basic building blocks of coding and then things kinda branch out from there.  HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  Right now I’m on Javascript and then I think code year on code academy has you learn html next and then css.

            Before I learned this though…gahhhhh!  I wanted to gouge my eyes out after staring through them for hours trying to figure out the future and all the technologies and languages and how it all tied in to the best paying job and how I should get there.  I looked up questions like, “When do you know enough to list a language on your resume?” and things like that.  I want to know this cause people search extensively using keywords and if you don’t have the right ones on there you never get tapped for what they’re looking for and what you want to do.  Still not sure when to put it on there, but I think I’ll throw them on the ‘ol rez once I get finished with code year.

            I also looked up pros and cons to learning coding.  Surprisingly there are a lot more voices out there discouraging, rather than encouraging coding from what I could tell.  A lot of that even came from people who already code too, which is weird, but whatever.  I love the following quote though:

            Yishan Wong

CEO, Reddit

“One hundred years ago, people were faced with the choice of learning to read or remaining illiterate laborers who would be left behind as have-nots in a rapidly modernizing world. In the coming century, being able to command a world that will be thoroughly computerized will set apart those who can live successfully in the future from those who will be utterly left behind.“

This and many other great quotes can be found about coding here http://www.code.org/quotes

So currently I’m a complete noob at coding and have dreams of moving on and doing something more constructive with my time and effort then granting credit to a bunch of crappy companies that are going to go down the crapper when the dollar gets destroyed here in the next few years like I’m currently doing at my current job.

What I’d like to do is work on projects that are longer-ish.  Unique ones that kinda are all the same, but different enough that it stretches me and challenges me and aren’t repetitive like my current tasks are at my current job.  I’d loooove to build some apps that just went viral and made me passive income too.  I have a buddy who has a few simple apps built, that I’ve previewed and look real simple, that make him 400 bones a year.

So ya.  I’m coding.  I’m learning.  I’m going to keep going until I find something different that I should be doing.