In a few days, I will celebrate my second year as a full-time author, blogger, and entrepreneur.
It took me seven years to get here, and I never intend to go back.
People often ask me how I did this — how I was able to quickly build a popular blog, launch a highly profitable online business, and become a published author in such a short time. And the truth is I didn't plan any of it.
It all began with a conversation with my friend Paul.
The conversation that changed everything
"What's your dream?" he asked.
I was 27 years old at the time and "over" dreams. That was kids' stuff. I was now an adult — a married man with a mortgage, steady job as a marketing director, and plans of a baby on the way.
"I don't have one," I said.
"Hm, that's interesting. Because I would've said your dream was to be a writer."
Oh. Yeah. That.
"Well," I said, "I guess I'd like to be a writer … someday. But that'll never happen."
Paul paused for a moment before he spoke again: "Jeff, you don't have to want to be a writer. You are a writer. You just have to write."
That was the conversation that got me blogging. For the next year, I wrote every single day, sometimes twice or three times, and published without fail for 365 days on my blog. And through the experience, I learned an important truth about dreaming: activity follows identity. Before you can do something, you have to become someone.
As activist and author Parker Palmer wrote, "Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I have to listen to my life telling my who I am." And my life was telling me that I was a writer.
From three to six figures in less than a year
By the end of that first year, I had built an online following and had 10,000 email addresses on my mailing list.
"You've got a six-figure business," online entrepreneur Carrie Wilkerson told me when she heard those numbers.
No, I told her. I've got a three-figure business. I made something like $200 on it with a one-off ad. That was it.
"No," she continued. "You've got a business there. You just need to figure out what people want and give it to them."
I conducted a survey with my readers, asking them what they wanted from me. To my surprise, many of them told me they would pay for my advice in the form of an eBook or online course. So I threw together a PDF and started charging for it. I sent an email to my subscribers, telling them I was offering the eBook for $2.99.
And with that first eBook, I made $1,500 in a weekend. At the time, that was about half a month's salary for me. An entire paycheck in two days. I couldn't believe it.
That $1,500 changed my life, because it showed me what was possible.
Scaling the business
Over the next several months, towards the beginning of my second year of blogging, I experiment with other ways of making a living online. Ultimately, I decided to launch another eBook, "You Are a Writer: So Start ACTING Like One," which ended up being a rewritten version of the first one. When I relaunched it for $4.99, the new edition made $16,000 in six weeks.
After that, I knew I was on to something. Buried in this passion project was a real business. I just had to find it.
Several months later, I released a traditionally published book, "Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams Into Your Comfortable Life," which established me as an authority amongst writers and aspiring authors.
A couple months after, I releasedan online course teaching other writers how to build an online audience as I had done, for $99. The initial launch did $25,000. A few months later, five days before Christmas, we relaunched it and made another $36,000.
That was when I knew it was time to do this full-time. By the end of my second year of blogging, my wife had quit her job working in record sales and I was preparing to do the same.
When we did our taxes, we were amazed to see we had not only replaced our income. We had tripled it.
Since then, our income has continued to double every year and the business keeps growing. I wrote a fourth book: "The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do."
And the best part? It only takes a few hours a week to run, and I can spend as much time as I want with my family (our son, Aiden, is now 3 years old) or working on new projects. In total, I usually choose to work about 35 hours a week.
How to quit your job and chase your dream: what it really takes
When it comes to chasing your dream, people will say all kinds of ridiculous things like "just take the leap" or "do what you love and the money will follow." This is usually bad advice.
Chasing your dream, in my experience, is not a process you can plan. But it is something you can be very intentional about. Here's what I mean:
1. Know yourself. Do what Parker Palmer calls "listening to your life" so you understand what you're actually good at and passionate about. The worst thing would be for you to chase the wrong thing.
2. Use your environment. Don't wait for the perfect opportunity. Use whatever work you've done, whatever project you're working on and try to find a way to make a living at it. My first product was based off a free talk I did for a local university.
3. Build a bridge. Don't leap out into the unknown and hope for the best. Take small steps and iterate as you go. Eric Ries' concept of the "minimum viable product" is a great way to make something small that people are willing to pay for that you can then tweak and make more and more profitable.
There's a lot of bad advice out there about what it takes to do work you love. I think it ultimately comes down to these three things: knowing yourself, using your current environment, and building a bridge between where you are and where you want to go.
Jeff Goins is a popular blogger, entrepreneur, and author of four books. He blogs atgoinswriter.com and recently released a new book called "The Art of Work: a Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do."
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