Juggling my future

I am at a pivitol point in my life. Soon I will be in the real world. The place without new student loans. In fact the last five years of life I will now have to pay for. Going back in time... I scrimped and saved my whole life and it only payed for about a semester of college. I worked in the summers and all that payed for was a few months of rent and food. The thing is, I have less debt than many of my friends and I feel I live in more luxury than most.

To avoid the inevitable unemployment that approaches I have begun work on several sources of passive income. That is work that I do once and make money off for a long time. This blog is among those but it has not paid out any money at all, yet. I also published my first book Monday. More details on that will be coming shortly after I proof it to make sure it is releasable to the public. If everything goes well I will release it next week along with the free identical ebook. I also designed my first website about two weeks ago. It is really rough but it will grow with time and eventually I will sell a book there as well. I am also working on two patents right now. Then I am also running races for prize money. So far I am one for two on that front but it does pay out a little. While the running is not passive income it is an alternative source.

The purpose off all of these is to have things that inform people about something and can also provide some money for me. In this, the 21st century, things are going to be different. I see a decentralizing of almost everything. Instead of huge corporations and giant facories there will be dozens of nearly identical smaller factories. This is because the cost of shipping will go up and the standard of living around the world will even out so that it is not cheaper to produce things halfway around the world. I think that the power grid will turn to alternative energy spread out before we discover how to contain fusion in which case one powerplant per continent might be enough.

What does that have to do with my passive income? Well, I am an innovator, an entrepreneur, and an inventor. The problem is that these things depend on me producing something that people buy. At this point in my life I am living by the seat of my pants. I have no contract for future income past December 15th. I want to run a company, even if that is a company of just one. So I am learning html and css coding for websites, I am learning blogging and website development, I am learning the publishing industry, I am learning the intellectual property industry, I am writing a business plan and I am writing the coolest thesis ever! Well okay, my thesis is less than perfect right now... The point is that if I want to help build a company from the ground up I have to know how to do a lot of different things. Of course in the future, when I can hire people to do that kind of stuff for me, I will be able to work on the things that I like doing more such as research and development.

There are also other advantages to this these passive incomes. Once you write a book you make money every time someone buys a copy. Since I am going with low budget print on demand publishing for my first book it never goes out of print unless I decide to take it out of print (or the company goes out of business). The advantage even if you only sell one book per month is that in ten years you can still sell one book per month. I would guess that you could also work this out with a traditional publishing house after they sell your 5,000 books and decide it is not worth a second printing and continued publicity. While it is nearly impossible to think of myself as a writer it would be nice to know that I could write a few books and use that money to travel around the world climbing mountains and sightseeing.

A few other thoughts about why I have been doing all of this and not working 12 hour days every day on my thesis: Publicity for me. You can call it my personal brand if you want. I get to influence the world. Now I can write a stellar thesis and maybe seven people will read it this year. Maybe two next year and then 14 people in the next 20 years. Unless it is phenomenal new science it will not make me famous. I average about 30 people per day on my blog now. Not too many by internet standards but more people read my blog in one week then may ever read my thesis. I have even helped some people with Abaqus problems and motivated a few people to run more or maybe work a little harder. Finally, I have fun! I like telling people about different things. Sometimes I feel like I have all this pent up information

Want a preview of what will be coming in the near future to Learning to DO: how to create a website from scratch, several running related book reviews, a retraction/clarification of the metabolism article, a few more Abaqus examples based on hits I get from Google, and my sister and I's free ebook and not so free identical paperback.