Earned $25925.59 at 19. Quit my job. Started a business.

Hey everyone!
This is my first blog post, ever & I really wanted to bring some value to all of you guys through this. Hopefully everyone her can take something useful away from this and would share it to benefit others! So how did I manage to earn $25925.59 at the age of 19 and quit my job? I will be showing you the necessary steps that you need to take and some decisions you MUST make in your life in order to have the right mindset for getting the success you want for yourself.

(screenshot taken today on the 13th when writing this post)
Please note that this is not 100% of my income because I have other sources of income and that I have used currency converter to convert it into US dollars since its a more commonly used currency.

Story of my life!

Well I consider myself an average teenager who's hobbies are, going to the gym, watching funny content online and mountain biking! I didn't really excel in school but I didn't do terrible either. Iv always had this idea in my head that when I grow up I'll start my own business and it will be all good so i didn't pay too much attention at school. When we had school exams, I landed average grades just like most of my piers. At college (Highschool for any of my American friends :) I repeated this and got the same average grades last year July. However till this day (1 year from then) I still have not gone back to my college to collect my results...

I studied business in school and college, the education was really bad and lacked any real knowledge. In these 5 years that I spent learning about business in school all I was taught was really how to work for someone, how to use a computer and how not to get fired by your boss... Along with some laws about health and safety at the workplace! After I finished college I had NO plan of going into any further studies because of the value schools/colleges provide and so I decided to take a gap year.

In this gap year I wanted to figure out for myself what it was I really wanted to do and how I could somehow "make it" in life, help my family because our family is very linked with relatives coming over all the time, going places together and helping each other out. This was probably the hardest part of all this for me. My family, relatives, friends and teachers were all telling me how I should go university so that I could get a job otherwise I will fall behind and become homeless and stuff. Especially my family and relatives, they were trying to look out for me in a way by telling me, play it safe and live an average life so you can retire old instead of taking a leap and living the free life every individual dreams of living. I became mentally unstable for a short while because every time I sat down with anyone they would tell me how I should get my life back in order and study, again, and again, and again and again! This made me feel worthless and feel like I wasn't good enough to be related to these people who were giving me advice to "fix up" to the point where I was about to give up on my dream of ever starting a business and working 9 to 5 every day for the rest of my life as long as my family is happy with me and they don't think of me as a loser.

Being in the state that I was, I took on building for about 3 months doing hard labour daily to earn some money and make some use of my time and mostly just get away from my family because I had peace when I was at work although it was very hard. I did this to mainly help one of my friends out with his building work for a small wage and when I got home I was too exhausted to do anything except just have a shower, play Warframe online on PS4 and go to sleep. This was a terrible way to live because all my energy was being spent doing what I don't want to do and no time was being spent on developing myself. I realised that at this rate I would end up a failure anyway so I decided to quit.

It was at this point I took a bit of initiative and I made it my new job to do some solid research on how to start a business and also made it my job to get a new part time job. This was so I could spend less time working and more time on improving myself. So after spending another month or 2 at home I became really bored and depressed again because I was spending time with family again and my goals were not the same as what they had hoped for me. Also because I was playing a lot of video games at this time just make time go by. Every day was the same routine, wake up, have breakfast, play games, do some research on how to start a business, play more games, eat and sleep. This got boring, quick so I decided that I would spend my full efforts into getting a job now so I did.

I eventually found a job in a charity to help raise funds by knocking on peoples doors and convincing them to sign up to monthly donations. It was a terrible time to start this job because it was winter. December/January 2016. I worked 3 days a week for 18 hours a week. I thought that this was the perfect job for me because I could run my business and earn extra money form this job. However I was terribly wrong. This job was ridiculous! It was advertised on the job that we would be going around our local area knocking doors but little did we know, they sent us well outside the city traveling a total of 4 hours, knocking doors for 6 hours but only getting paid for the 6 hours. This really annoyed me and there was nothing that I could do to change this as I was told except to leave the job but I did not feel like giving up very quickly.

Little did I know, the hours were not the worst part of the job, there were days when the temperature was up to -3 Celsius (26.6 Fahrenheit). Spending an hour or two outside is not that bad in this temperature, however spending 10 hours out in the cold traveling and hitting your knuckles on peoples doors just froze the blood in my hands, kept me shivering through the whole day to the point where I would be running between doors, attempting to warm myself up but it would never work. It was just too cold for my running to have any effect. The worst part of it was that I couldn't wear gloves because I had to hold a pen and mark down on paper every door I knocked because every employee had a target of 150 doors per day. As though this wasn't bad enough, I had one of the worst team leaders and a terrible manager (I'm sure a lot of the elder audience can relate). There was times where I was just wondering what am I doing here when there was orders being given to me such "Go around the crescent this way not that way" I asked why when I was half way there I was told "Because I'm the manager and you do what I say" and this lead to an argument between me and the manager because it was stupid how because of his title and wages he was belittling me.

About a month into this part time job I had I got ill which wasn't surprising because of the conditions and hours of work. I called in sick because I just wasn't up for working and my condition would have only gotten worse if I went to work. Over the phone I was told in simple words that you signed up for this knowing what your job is, so you have to come in tomorrow 4 hours early and we will have a meeting regarding this day off and you can't work again unless you come to this meeting. This really shocked me, how an employer can pay an employee so little, have them work this socks off and then have 0 concerns about them. This was a real wakeup call for me and that day I decided to quit that job and use the money I had to make an investment! Take a risk!

I was 100% free of an employer. The days all to myself. I started getting very serious about the research I was doing on starting a business. My main goal was to start selling on eBay and Amazon. I researched hours on end trying to answer all questions and every question I had regarding this new world that I was determined to venture into. This was another 1 full month dedicated to the research I was doing. Having the self taught knowledge and key skills of starting an online business, I spent $388.26 into my first ever product. I really was very nervous about this because I knew how hard it was for me to earn this money and how terrible it would be for me to lose it all. So I had only enough stock to make my launch on eBay only.

The launch wasn't too bad. I was making sales, slowly. Sometimes 1 a day, sometimes 2 and sometimes even 0 but I was happy because I knew that no matter how long it takes, my stock would sell and I would make my hard earned money back. This was the little motivation to keep researching every single day for the next month and I learnt something new every single day. As I started to implement what I was learning, my sales started to increase. Knowing that every bit of effort I was putting into this was benefiting me 100% and it would effect the people around me in the near future was the best part about all of this. Because working your socks off for someone els's success is never as rewarding as this. After hours of work and research I was soon making an average of $65 a day which wasn't too bad since I was only 1 month in but still not good enough to convince anyone that this is what I would be doing for the rest of my life.

At this point I wanted to expand, fast so I needed a lot of money. This meant that I would have to get another job. However this time, I had a different mindset, a different attitude and a different drive. I knew that whatever I earned at my job would help me boost the results of my business faster. I was offered a job at a factory that did metal chrome, brass and antique plating. It was starting to get hot since winter was over and the weather was good. I was pumped and ready to start work.

On day 1 I was shown my workstation. A 1m x 0.5m table with tatty cardboard taped to the top of the table. Facing a white bricked wall, 3m from a giant metal heating oven that had winds of 130 Celsius (266 Fahrenheit)... This was where I was stationed, polishing chrome plated metal all day from 8 am to 4:30 pm 5 days a week. I had taken the wrong job at the wrong time, yet again. The travel wasn't too bad, about 30 minute walk from my house and the pay not not too bad either. I weighed up the goods and the bad so then came to the conclusion that I will put myself through this and learn from it but also get enough to invest more into my business.

This place was horrible, working here was a nightmare. It was slowly killing me. As soon as I got to my work place the smell of all the different chemicals would engulf my nose along with all the dust that was present. The smell of the place was terrible, with hazards of sharp metals and corrosive chemicals everywhere you look and then there was the massive 8ft x 4ft oven right where I worked.

I grafted for a solid 3 months at this place with the baking heat was there to welcome me every single day. The best thing was, about 2 months into my time working here something amazing happened! My business was growing so fast and my product made it way towards the top of the first page on eBay. This meant that I was getting a ton of sales every single day. I was actually making my weekly wages every single day by this point. However I didn't quit my job. Not because I still needed money but just to teach myself a lesson, a lesson I'd never forget. I wanted to hammer this thought into my head that if I ever become lazy and give up on my dream, someone else will just hire me and force me to make their dream come true. That thought just kept going through my head and every day I was so eager to quit my job but I kept telling myself "1 more day, then you can leave this place". I did this until I completed a whole extra month so that when I actually did leave the place I had 100% motivation, 100% time and 100% determination to make my own business thrive.

I still, till this day work countless hours on research, managing and expanding my own business. I learn at least 1 new thing every single day. Writing this post took a lot of my free time but I just hope that it might help at least 1 person to push for their dreams no matter what other people say. Today none of my family question anything I do because they have seen my work ethic and how badly I want to succeed, whats more is that I also bring results so there is no reason to doubt. I feel blessed to have to go through what I went through because it is what shaped me as a person and led me to this path. Within the last few weeks I have doubled my revenue earning half of my income within the past 3 weeks. Constantly growing.

$15642.06 revenue for the past 31 days.

I will be posting more related posts about how to get your business started. More of my journey about the technical stuff that I needed to do to get my business started and also some of my other streams of income will be discussed in future posts! Please Share with your friends, family or anyone who you think may benefit from this! Stay tuned for future posts.