TTGers, I have been thinking on this for quite some time now, and I wanted to start a thread to strike some discussion and to learn more about your thoughts and feelings on this topic.

Given that so many people are just leaving school, getting exam grades, or are still in school (being pressured by teachers) and have no idea on where they want to go in life, I figured that this would just be a decent time to share my personal story.

If this helps one person ease their mind, relax, or simply stop stressing about school, grades, or life overall, it is worth it to me. This is my first ever time since I was 16 that I have felt a need to share my story, especially after reading some of the horror stories of students on this website who feel as if they are in a rut right now.

The purpose behind this thread is to learn more about you guys and how you wish to go through life. I would appreciate hearing your stories, as well as past experiences, and current / future plans and goals in regards to where you want to take your financial life, and your overall quality of day to day life. I will start with my story, but the goal here is to read yours.

Let's get deep here!

P.S.: Please read the full thread before posting. I understand a lot of people want to find loopholes for "easy post count increases", but I would rather you not do that on this thread.

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The ideology of monetizing your existence - Jake (AKA JRT)'s story.

I am a 20 year old stay-at-home entrepreneur and have been since I finished High School at 16 years old in the United Kingdom. At school, I was never really the type of student to pay attention to class, other people, or anything my teachers had to say. Of course, levels of respect were upheld personally, but from the grand scheme of things, I was an eager puppy stuck on a leash just waiting to be freed.

While at school, I was doing some remote consulting work for a YouTube Influencer Management Agency (which I will not name here). Everybody, my family included, concluded that what I was doing was crap and would never turn into something valuable and that it would fall after a couple months. My paychecks were determined by the number of sales I made per month (in this case, we were "partnering" YouTube channels).

As soon as the end of school came around, I quickly opened up my exam results booklet to find I got B, C, and the occasional D grades from the exams I was forced to take. Though, keep in mind that I was only there physically taking them. My mind was elsewhere, as I am sure most other young entrepreneur's are nowadays, thinking of ways to escape this godforsaken system we live in. I cracked open an old dusty box, threw my grade papers in there, and they have been left in the attic ever since.

My family and I were generally unhappy with the living conditions in our area in the United Kingdom, so the day after I finished school, I told my mother, grandmother, and younger sister to pack their stuff and that we will fulfil our goal of moving to Ireland to finally reside with the rest of my family. Keep in mind that my mother and grandmother were generally just stuck in the lower to middle class income bracket and were living day to day on government benefits. Even they did not believe I was onto something until I showed them the money, and eventually made their dream a reality. The last 6 months of my hard work paid for all of the expenses it cost to move, and I even picked up my mom a nice new-ish car to sit on the driveway in her newly rented home in Ireland near my family.

Fast forward a year, I climbed the ranks and I was finally earning more per month than the teachers who told me I wouldn't even be able to flip burgers in McDonald's. It felt good, but I wanted a new experience. So, after 3 years of working for the company that helped me get to where I got to at this stage, I decided to take another [well calculated] leap of faith into a new company. This new company was in the same field of work as the previous one, but offered more money and a cleaner title.

My position in this job started out remotely from home. As 4 years passed since I had left school, I found myself seeking a new challenge (naturally).... Hell, I had been staying at home with an automated income for 4 years essentially living as if a retired person would. It was fun, but I was still young, and I wanted more. With headquarters in North America and the Philippines, at 18 years old I decided to fly out to the Philippines with my [then] girlfriend, all expenses paid, into an apartment to grow the new business and to see some more of the world. Long story short, I was scheduled to be there for 6 months. My 6th month came around and I was scheduled to head home for Christmas and return to the Philippines a month later. I decided to call it quits with this job after two years after seeing so much of the world, and earning a very respectable amount per month on my pay checks. Similarly to my last job, given my experience, I managed to pretty much automate this job too. So, I was able to explore a lot of the Philippines while still building a team from my laptop to do sales and earn commissions. Sounds all fancy, but it was a very simple formula and the industry was in YouTube, so this was never a job to me; but always a passion.

So, there I was, 6 months later, back in Ireland, back to where this all began. I started to question my life as the job became a tiny bit corporate and I became unhappy. Not even my $96,000 USD per year salary at 19 years old made me happy. Guess what? I quit. My happiness and wellbeing came first, and I stuck to my instincts, and I quit.

What did I learn? That jobs are a dime a' dozen if you put the work, and that dreams really should be placed first. Well, "what is your dream?" you may be asking. My dream is to have true freedom. Not by money, luxuries, or anything else (well, kinda' by money), but let me explain.

- In order to have freedom, you need time
- In order to have time, and as much of it as possible, you need money
- In order to have money, society tells us to work 85% of our living, breathing moments on earth away to some godforsaken corporate hell hole just to survive.

So, from the above, we now learn that money becomes the number one priority. Without money, you have no time nor' freedom. So, what was next after I quit the jobs and found myself back in Ireland?

I scraped up my savings (a lot of my money went towards helping my family) and I came to the U.S. (for the third time since I was 16; I did a lot of back and forth on business and personal... FYI my girlfriend (now fiancee) is American and we met here while I was on business at 17). We came here to just take a breather, and to allow my fiancee to see her family. I took this time to relax and do a bit of soul searching. We planned on being here for three months before returning to Ireland to open an office for my newly founded online YouTube advertising vendor agency. I poured tens of thousands into clients, staff, and everything else. I took investment money and things were looking great. Guess what? YouTube pulled out and refused to sponsor me. Twice. This moved could have made or broken me as a human being. it made me. I was in the trenches, almost completely penniless broke before I was even 20 years old. I had truly seen both sides of the spectrum, in terms of living standards (lower, medium, and higher class) before I even left my teenage years.

One full year and 8 months later, my next steps are now to build an empire around my newly founded business in a completely different area, which is foreign exchange trading on the Forex Market, along with wealth management for top agencies and celebrities. It is exciting, and I carefully selected this option from the huge arsenal of opportunities we all have at our fingertips nowadays on the internet. And I am serious. We have so many damn opportunities nowadays, that if you plan on working a 9 - 5 for the rest of your life and you are unhappy about it, I have zero sympathy (hey - if you are happy working 9 - 5s, you have already won. Keep doing what you are doing, and most importantly, be true to yourself).

So, at 19, creeping up to 20, I had literally flew around the entire globed and lived in the three major regions (Asia/South-East Asia, Europe/UK, and North America) while earning upto $100K (before I quit) per year solely from my laptop just by following my passion in working with YouTube creators. That's it. Who would have thought that this would have been a monetizeable area? Helping small YouTube creators grow? Pshh! "That'll earn pennies!" you may be thinking. Guess what? That's what my parents thought. You aren't alone if you were thinking that. This was like 4 - 5 years ago. YouTube service providing really wasn't that established. I followed my passion, found my niche, and monetized my life for the next 5 years with only working probably 22 days during that entire time. Those 22 days were the last 22 days before I left the Philippines when my old job began turning corporate. I was out immediately. Done. Gone. Onto the next thing.

There are endless opportunities at your finger tips. PLEASE do not let them creep away from your grasp. If you are unhappy right now, or need a change, look into building your own entire autopilot income from your computer. I did it, and I was dumb. I also risked all of my savings a year later to keep my freedom, even if it meant my bank balance dropping significantly. Do not live your life by that number.

The moral of my story, and my notes to myself are: Take risks. We will always be provided for in some way or another (for me it was taking a spare room and living on canned foods for 3 months until I found that my next moves would be in the currency market). Jobs are a dime a' dozen. Be true to yourself (listen and follow your damn gut feelings). Try to reverse engineer your way out of a sickening system that will slap you silly if you let it.

The dollar will collapse during our lifetimes. Pensions will be non-existent eventually. Once we realise that the only way to true freedom is via ourselves, we have no reason to blame any person, system, or organisation, and we have every reason to start knuckling down and securing ourselves a future.

To me, having the ability to take 8 months off of my laptop in, for example, Summer of 2024, and still be financially well off because of some risks I taken and opportunities I built for myself in 2016, it is a no brainer that now more than ever is the time to try and literally monetize our existence. There are endless ways to do it, and I wont get into detail on this thread (I may or may not save it for a new one...) but you really have to educate yourselves and become leaders instead of waiting for some mystical person to have you the secret keys to the city on a plate. It will never happen.

We all have dreams, and respectably, some are different. For me, it is being able to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Not to buy stupid watches and unnecessarily large houses. Remember what I said, if you're already happy, you've already won.

I look forward to hearing your guys responses and stories as well. This entire topic just fascinates me. I want all of you guys to be happy; you really do deserve it. Take some time to do some deep soul searching and map out a 3, 6, 12 month plan and live out your dreams. Seriously.