It's gone free time with your host.

Ex Google, ex Facebook.

Tackle it now.

About four months ago, I was fired from Facebook and I wanted to check in today and kind of give you an update on what life has been like ever since having been fired, where I'm at, what I'm going to do about my career and my going back to work.

And today I'm in Helsinki, Finland, because there's just nothing.

Time it down so I can travel, as I wish I could be in the new city every two weeks or so if I want to do, and it would be no trouble.

There are a lot of pros to it, by law, the cons as well.

So let's get into it.

Quick post.

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So one of the biggest benefits of working for yourself is this ability to travel and work remotely, essentially anywhere.

There's a WiFi connection.

I can be productive.

And so I've pretty much just been traveling around over the past four months.

You may have seen and you can check me out on Instagram.

I have been working out of Hawaii, New York, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, of course, which is where on base.

And then recently I've been in Poland, and now I'm in Helsinki, Finland, and I could continue this lifestyle indefinitely.

I could be in a new city every single month.

If I don't like code, whether I could be chasing the summer's across the world, I could go to cities with better exchange rates.

So it's just that my money goes even further.

But the money isn't really the issue here.

I would say, actually, what's limiting me in my ability to just travel anywhere I want is the time that I have.

For example, I would love to go to Mount Everest on the two week hiking expedition.

But I just don't want to give up that amount of time just yet.

It's not what I'm looking for because what I'm looking for is not like a standard vacation.

I'm not here on vacation.

I'm not here to sightsee.

I'm kind of looking for this delicate balance between both being able to be productive and get my daily work done and just live a normal life while having a little bit of additional sightseeing in place.

I'm limiting myself to these big, safe cities where I can be fairly productive, easily and quickly.

I don't want to have to be running around town.

I'm not looking for a once in a lifetime crazy adventure.

There will be a time for that.

But it's not what I'm looking for right now.

So being with the travel, while it's great and the opens up a lot of opportunities and you can go through many different cities around the world, it may not be what you're imagining where you're working on the beach or working out of the rain forests of the Amazon, because chances are I know if I were to go to these locations, I probably wouldn't get that much work done.

I would just be so busy exploring and site scene, and for me, I personally still enjoy California is where my dog is.

I like the weather.

I have my family there, have a great computer desk set up there my big monitor, fast Internet.

Everything is just really well set up there.

So it's still a place that I consider my base now.

Another aspect of working for yourself is, of course, job security, of which there is none.

So half the time I'm just thinking, I'm just Maybe I should just quit this whole YouTube thing.

Hit that escape button and go back to working in the normal 9 to 5 job where I have all the job security.

I have my 401 K.

I have my health dental vision plan.

Have a stable salary.

My career is set and locked in, and my resume is going to look great.

I would have co workers reputation, social status.

I'll be invited to Christmas holiday parties, and there would be no doubt about my qualifications.

I would be building up engineering skills.

I would be building up my career right now.

What I'm doing actually is I'm not focused so much on the engineering skills because it's really more about entrepreneurship.

Engineering coding.

I still do that, say, 2030% of the time, but there's so much more to running your own business doing this whole YouTube thing come beom with additional material for content courses.

All these other projects that I'm working on and for me at least, and this isn't true for every youtuber out there.

But for me, the bar is incredibly high for what type of success I need on this YouTube channel for to be considered worth my time.

Because I know if I were to go pick up a job in Silicon Valley as a senior software engineer, I could probably be doing at least 405 100 K and salary like I was doing 500 k over at Facebook.

And so that may be part of the reason I'm just trying to explain this to you.

Why I tend to monetize this channel more than like a standard youtuber because I need to make sure that it's worthwhile for me to do in the long term.

If I'm doing this and losing money over it, then it's just not going to be sustainable.

Ad revenue alone is just not enough to support a professional software engineer who's trying to do YouTube, and that's really the reason why many professional sulfur engineers and any professional is generally not on YouTube because it's just not worth their time.

So anyways, generally, if you're looking for more professional, higher quality content in terms of education, experience knowledge with them, especially in likes a cell for engineering or any professional skill, just understand that the youtuber behind that needs to be monetizing or selling something to support themselves to make it worthwhile for themselves.

Now one huge shift in mindset is managing time and priorities, because usually when you're working in the standard 9 to 5 job, you're almost motivated to waste as much time as possible.

You get through the end of the day, you're just sitting there and then you can leave and we go home.

You can just relax and watch Netflix all day long, and then the next day you're going to work and you just put in your time your hours or nine hours of work, and many times you may not even doing the most important or high priority work.

You're simply doing what is going to get you the best short term result for some performance review.

It could be work that, you know, is not going to go anywhere.

That, you know, is going to just be trashed anyway.

Later on at Facebook, I've worked on projects that everybody knew was going to fail, that nobody really believed in, that people knew was going to be completely duplicated work with another team.

And yet we would still push through with that just so we could get this on the short term performance review.

Many people like two completely separate their professional and personal lives.

So they work their 9 to 5 job.

They come home.

They don't talk about it with anybody and is completely separate.

But when you're working for yourself, actually, I'm mixed the two other time I could be working 16 hour days.

I don't hesitate to work on evenings or weekends.

Sometimes I don't even know what day it is because it doesn't really matter for me.

My personal and business interests 100% in line with each other and even what I'm doing now is not even the vacation right.

It's kind of like half a vacation half business, while I'm still doing a bit of work while I'm out here.

So I think this type of lifestyle and time management, where you're really focused on making things work and you're 100% accountable for all of the results and impact that you're pushing or if you're wasting time, think you're accountable for that as well.

I think it takes a bit of training to really get used to this because let's face it, most people in cos they're wasting so much time, they may be over engineering something, spending hours, crafting this beautiful, well crafted email there, playing the politics games.

Or they may simply be working on projects that they know will fail.

And a lot of people they're just not really results oriented like that.

And beyond that, it takes a lot of self discipline.

And this is something I struggle with as well, to make sure that you're putting in the work each day because nobody is telling you to.

Nobody's forcing you to do that.

If you wanted to, you could just sleep in all day or just go to the park or go to the mall.

But you have to just manage and prioritize your time now working on your own.

You don't have a large company backing up.

You don't have all of the resource is and fast Internet and equipment and co workers and professional network that comes with a larger company.

You're pretty much just on your own, and what happens with that is also a loss of social status.

Because, let's face it, there's only a thin line dividing me and the homeless bum, and that is simply some income flowing it.

But other than that, you know, I could be homeless.

And if my business were not to make much income, then I'm pretty much a homeless bum who's calling himself entrepreneur or founder, which thousands or millions of people out there are doing.

Anyways.

There's just not much social status and the amount of respect I get.

I'm not getting much of it right.

You look at me and you think, Well, this guy used to work at Google or he used to work at Facebook.

But not anymore.

And many people they look at me as some random youtuber compared to, say, being a staff software engineer at Facebook or attack lead over at Google and these names carry far more weight.

But of course those are names that I would be borrowing from.

Another company is not a name that I would create on my own, which is something I think, that it's far more difficult to do, but at the same time gets far less respect.

I have no title, no co workers to vouch for me.

The projects I'm working on, very few people would know about, compared to if I were working on some well known product over Google or Facebook.

And so half the time I'm just thinking maybe I should just go back to work in Tech and wouldn't that be comfortable and secure and stable?

And so that's something that's always kind of in my mind, And it may be a sort of this wave where sometimes I work on, like a lifestyle type of business like this, where I'm running my own thing.

I'm giving myself probably a year of burn time or so before I think about seriously going back to a 9 to 5 job career where I have all of that stability, because that's important, too, and over.

I think that's not a bad way to go about that, where your alternating between working for yourself, sometimes pursuing some opportunity where you have a lot of freedom to travel and be your own boss.

And then other times you may be working as part of a larger company working for somebody doing the 95 grand.

You could be locked into a certain location.

You have to be playing the politics game.

And then that overall variety of different types of work just makes life more interesting.

And, you know, as they say, all good things in moderation so excited to learn more about our world, we'll check out curiosity.

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Icarus this dream dot com slash tack lied and use promo code tech lead so that do for me, but let me know what you think about this type of lifestyle.

If you were me, would you continue pushing it and traveling the world?

Or would you go work at a top tier tech company in Silicon Valley and get all of that job security and social status?

If you like the video, give it like and subscribe and see next time.

Thanks.