…and make plenty of money to live or travel anywhere in the world, without relying on ESL, freelancing or any other job.
Have you tried making money online before, but failed?
Good. Me too. A lot.
I’m going to give you the three keys that finally ended my long streak of failures. But those keys are useless, if you haven’t tried and failed before…
How have I failed?
Let’s step back in time, to Shenzhen, China in 2014.
No advance notice. Nothing.
My school wanted me to stay late and judge a karaoke contest.
They didn’t care that I already had plans that evening. Or that the whole situation could have been avoided with a few days advance notice. Even telling me in the morning would have helped.
But that’s not how things work in China. Most schools have zero respect for their foreign teachers. The contest had been planned for months; I was told ten minutes before it starts.
So now I could either cancel my plans and judge their contest or try to point out how disrespectful they were being with my time. Anyone who has worked in China, Japan or Korea knows how futile the second option would have been.
Whichever way I choose, I lose.
So I sat there for three hours and judged 6 terrible versions of the same Taylor Swift song and 4 more songs that made me long for more Taylor Swift.
Why the hell was I working in China again?
This type of treatment was exactly why I vowed, 6 years earlier, to never again take another teaching job in China . Yet here I was once more.
You’re probably thinking I was desperate. That I needed the money.
That’s partly true, but I did have a plan.
If it succeeded, I would never work again…
But first, let’s back up a bit.
Roughly 12 years before this heavily Chinese-accented Taylor Swift attack on my ears, I had just completed my MBA and promptly moved to Las Vegas, where I worked as a security guard and bartender for a while, before heading to Japan to teach English for a year.
Clearly, I was trying to put off joining the corporate world for as long as I could.
That year in Japan turned into three and was followed by two years in China, a year in Spain and one in South Korea.
It was in Korea where I realized something needed to change. I couldn’t go on like this forever: moving from one entry-level teaching gig to another.
You know what it’s like.
You want to travel the world and experience new things, but that costs money. So you work in hostels or freelance or wait tables. Or teach English.
As far as these types of jobs go, teaching English as a second language abroad is a great gig. You get paid fairly well (though less so these days) and the jobs are pretty easy.
But once you hit your late 20s, a lot of the little problems start to bother you a lot more. Employers treat you with little to no respect and you realize you’re nothing but a western face. They could replace you tomorrow and not even notice.
I’ve taught every level and every age group except kindergarten and here are just a few of the things I dealt with:
- Classes of over 60 children in China, with no way to control them, because my grades meant nothing; in fact, if I gave a bad grade, the school would just change it.
- My language academy in Japan used to make me hand out flyers in front of the train station, often before my official working hours.
- They also expected me to up-sell students overpriced language aids and to then use all of my break time to coach them through those aids.
- In China, they often expected me to teach additional classes at a moment’s notice (even though they had known about it for days, even weeks)
- On the flip side, they often informed me after I showed up for work in the morning that all my classes were canceled. Naturally, they had known about this for weeks in advance too.
- And much, much more.
I’m sure you could add a few hundred items to this list yourself. How we are treated as teachers or freelancers or waitstaff or any other type of lower level job is demeaning.
It’s not a good feeling, to realize you have zero value to your employer.
On top of that, these jobs have no future. Sure, if you teach English, you could become a head teacher for slightly more money and far more work, but beyond that, there is very little opportunity for advancement.
I felt this urge to change my situation at every one of my teaching jobs, but I fed that urge by simply switching to a new teaching gig in a new country. That worked, until I found myself in Korea.
Seven years after I first left for Japan, I was suddenly the oldest teacher at my school by 6 years. My boss valued me a little more (mainly because I showed up for work on time and sober) and I was paid slightly more than my inexperienced colleagues. But that was the only difference.
In many cases, everyone actually gets paid the same, regardless of experience.
In the past, I had always felt sorry for the teachers in their 40s, 50s and beyond who were still working at these same jobs. They always complained about the low pay and the lack of respect, but they were still working there. Why?
And now I was on my way to becoming one of them.
Something needed to change.
I could try to get a job at an international school or university, but to do that I would need to become a certified teacher. The thing is: I never wanted to be a teacher.
This was always temporary solution to pay for my travels, not a permanent life decision.
I could also return home and get that corporate job I’d been putting off. But I didn’t want that either. At all. Ignoring the fact that I doubt anyone would even hire me at this point, I didn’t want to be tied down to a single location.
I wanted to travel. I wanted to see more of the world.
But I wanted to do it without having to stop and teach English for a year or two at a time.
So what could I do?
I’m sure you can guess my next step.