Hi from Seattle

[SmilingRob]

Interesting fact, Seattle is named after Native American chief "Seattle". There's a photo of him at the end of the underground city tour.

This summer I took the tour for the first time because I moved here from southern California a year and a half ago.

I spent my first 11 months here trying to start some second lines of income via Apps or Games. The second month I was here I won 2nd place at Startup Weekend for making a game to help third graders with vocabulary in two days on three platforms.

But going from prototype to product took it's toll. My runway started running thin. And we decided it would be best if we just went seoerate ways.

Then I spent a few months "learning" and prototyping new apps. But not making anything sellable. So I finally ran out of runway and had to get a real job so I wouldn't go back into debt.

I'm a contractor now at Redmond's most famous company. And I work in the Games business with the most popular AAA titles. I thought being a contractor I could have more freetime but my "boss" wants me to work 40 hours at the office. I got it down to 30 hours temporarily until I get married. But I actually use those extra "10" hours for wedding stuff so that's not helping my independence goal.

And because I'm a contractor I have little say in the product development, which means I rarely interact with experts in the fields I want to learn. I could play card games at lunch with them, and network. But they don't want to talk about work durning lunch. So it's not as great of a trade for my time as I imagined when I picked up the job a few months ago. I mostly work on tech I never plan to use in my own products, or tech where I'm already a master in the field.

I've had one or two companies in the past that consisted of me trading my time (life) for cash. But I've always wanted to sell a product or service instead of selling my time. And then a few weeks ago "Fastlane" was recommended on a Hacker News thread. I would have never bought the book, and I would have made fun of anyone who read it if it wasn't a hacker who recommended it.

I'm up to chapter 12, and I am reading it slowly to remember it. The first few sections are talking to an audience that is not me. I don't care about fast cars or being rich. But I do care about being free to work on whatever I want. And that means I need to be able to fund my life or be wealthy. The sidewalk parts that do apply to me are how much time I waste playing games, watching people play games, and reading about people playing games. I falsely justify it as "research".

To some extent it is research and staying on industry trends. But more than a few minutes a day is wasteful. And I actually enjoy making games more than playing them, but after a hard day spending lots of my creativity and problem solving energy its hard to come home and be focused doing something for myself with no accountability. Plus games are not generally easy quick things you can throw together and sell.

I really just want the freedom to spend my time making whatever I want.

So I'm hoping that reading your experiences (and the rest of the book) will motivate me to get back into entrepreneurship. But this time with more control of my wealth accelerators, not just selling my time at a flat rate.

 

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