My story
Obsession always wins.
Four years ago I was standing ankle deep in mud at six in the morning, shovelling it into buckets, carrying them fifteen metres, and tipping them back out on the ground. Twelve hours of that. I’d get home, sit in my apartment and stare at the ceiling wondering if that was really it.
The work wasn’t the part that scared me. It was the men working next to me — twenty years older, backs gone, spirits gone, and still dead broke. That was my future standing right there in front of me every single day. Dad raised me on the old deal: keep your head down, work hard, and one day you’ll get there. Took me a while to work out that someday never comes.
So I tried everything. An agency, e-comm, crypto, anything I could get my hands on. All of it failed and I couldn’t work out why. Then it landed — every one of those things came down to the same thing underneath, and it was the one thing I’d never bothered to learn.
So I learned it properly. I was out of the job inside a month. The two weeks after I walked off site I made less than my rent, and I’d still rather fail at building something for myself than succeed at destroying myself. Now I work for myself from wherever I am — same person, still no degree, nothing special about me. I just stopped trying to earn with my back.
