Horses for courses, as we say in the UK, but working for an SP500 company means a boss, reporting, office politics, and spending most of the day doing things that other people want you to to do. If you're independently minded and want to break out of that world, stories like the OP's are nice to see.
I was approached by recruiters asking me if I wanted to work for Google in Zurich. I had to decline them.
I'm happier being a solo-entrepreneur. The best part is that I get to learn a lot of stuff about running a business, which was impossible when I was a employee.
I know my case is an extreme corner case, but I did finally try my hand at writing a book to make money. Long story short, I left my job, was living on my savings, tried a few things, etc. The only active earning came via 1/2 workshops I conducted at my college. I started maintaing materials for those workshops and expanded it on my own interest and tried to get donations. But no one did (GitHub didn't have sponsors at that time).
Finally, as a sort of last ditch effort before being forced to start working a job again, I tried my hand at converting my materials into a book. I had been working to convert "Think Python" to "Think Ruby", so that gave a bit of experience and confidence as well. Second book gave an initial sale of $250+ (enough to pay two months of my expenses), so I've continued with it.
With the pandemic, my workshops have dried up. Fortunately, I have 6 books now and looks like I'll comfortably cover my expenses this year. My monthly salary from 6 years back when I left the job would've covered my current yearly expenses, but I'm unlikely to go back to working like that again.
I have to imagine consulting gigs would go up. And as the "guy who wrote the book on it" you can probably charge significantly more.
If you live in the US. Which I'm (maybe wrongly) going to assume the author doesn't. 100k dollars is a life changing amount of money in a lot of countries.
I'm not living in the US. I live in Romania. In Europe, salaries are not as high as the ones in California. But then, even in the US, the Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than in other states.
The great thing about selling products is that there is no upper boundary to how much money you can make. So, over time, you can end up making 250k $ from a single book.
The advantage of passive income is that you can use your time to create new products, which, in turn, can generate more income. It's not easy, but it's not impossible either.
I live in Poland and a one-off 100k USD as a side income in a year would absolutely change my life. I am _not_ exaggerating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#List_of_current_b...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...
Sorry for nitpicking, it really bothers me when such small and easily correctable error continues.
It depends on how you approach this investment. For me, a book is like any other product I make. It takes a certain amount of resources to produce and launch it, and it should generate at least as much revenue as I would have made if I had chosen to do consulting instead.
However, selling products can scale better than consulting. So, over time, you could end up making more money from a certain product (e.g., book, video course) than if you were employed or doing consulting.
Anyone that smart could make more than that - guaranteed just by consulting.
I’m most familiar with the Apple related ecosystem, but there you see people with a following making a money via optional subscriptions (Accidental Tech Podcast,Upgrade), subscription only podcasts (Dithering by John Gruber and Ben Thompson), or daily newsletters (Ben Thompson).
If he is not doing just for the money, then go for it. Another example is John Siracusa of ATP. He wrote large reviews of each version of OS X for the first 10 years that literally took months, did much more than his contract required and admitted that if he actually accounted for every hour he worked on it, it paid much less than minimum wage.
One more mention is Horace Deidu. He got his start as an analyst, started podcasting and now hosts paid workshops and conferences.
I keep on updating it and will release a second edition soon.
The marketing effort is not just for the book. It also helps me sell:
- video courses
- on-site training
- online training and workshops
- find consulting opportunities
- subscription licenses for a software product I created, Hypersistence Optimizer, https://vladmihalcea.com/hypersistence-optimizer/
So, it can surely help you sell other services. However, this Twitter thread aimed to point out that a book can also make good money, not just be an exposure mechanism.
I'd have absolutely no idea where to even start consulting, or whether I'd have any aptitude for it. I'd be very surprised if anyone anywhere wanted to pay me $100k for consulting!
But I could probably write a book.
People have strengths in different areas.
By the time you established yourself as an expert in the field like he did, consulting opportunities would open themselves up.
I just have a very small network compared to him, haven’t tried to market myself and just through word of mouth, I’ve had a couple of people asking me about consulting for their startups that could have easily netted $30K - $40K at $125-$150/hour.
I have a strict policy about not doing side gigs so I turned them down. But now, I probably would have had to turn them down regardless because of a conflict of interest since I do consulting as part of $day_job.
Lol thanks for the attack on my writing skill and ability to promote myself!
Being an expert in a field and being able to write a book doesn't mean you're any good at consulting. That's my point. It's a different skill.
Also, consulting really involves only a few things:
- marketing yourself
- being able to listen to people and figure out their needs
- being a good communicator and being able to explain concepts well.
- being technical sound enough to solve the problem.
- being disciplined enough to be a consistent worker.
Most of which overlaps with being a successful technical author.