Jump!

[shadow]

Hi everyone,

For reasons I'll explain soon this won’t have any numbers or structure for now but I plan on some formal tracking here in the next few months.

Context:
Just dropped out of college. Living situation at college fell apart so currently working through breaking the lease etc. Living at home right now; writing from my job at a car wash. I have been very focused on dealing with this short term stuff lately but I am also always trying to look forward and align my actions with that.


Plan:
Currently planning on moving back to the college town and starting a podcast with an old friend. I will likely get a shitty service or retail job to pay the bills for now but I am looking to make some moves within the next few months monetarily. I have a passion for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and want to really delve deep into it and would rather exchange “value” for money instead of time. This has led me (in the past few days) to consider pursuing sales. I am writing this in part to think about the sales option some more + some other paths.


Problems:

Living situation - the options I am currently considering are a 1br or shared living space. Sharing a place would obviously reduce my spend by a significant amount. However last year has shown me that living with people can turn into a mess quickly — although I did know these people beforehand which likely didn’t help. The other main disadvantage would be the risk of not having access to a quiet space to record our podcast. In the same vein I think a lot of skill learning is limited by living with other people who aren’t necessarily like minded.

Sales - I have some extravert qualities (I like being around people) but I lean pretty heavily introverted; I can put on a high energy mask but it is exhausting. I am also very bad at clicking with people when first meeting them. I also am very soft spoken naturally. These probably sound like gaping holes in my sales plan, which is correct, and I do want to play to my strengths. But I have a decent amount of experience practicing verbal communication, I can speak passionately about a subject especially if I am actually passionate about it, and naturally have a problem solving/solution offering brain. In short I am not a natural salesman but I think I could become an artificial one.

If I could pick any job I wanted it would be writing or programming but I am deathly afraid of globalization or automation screwing me over on that front. I figure I will know whether the sales thing is going to pan out within a few months and I can go back to the drawing board then.

[Vaikeasti]

Welcome again!

Don't let fear stop you. You can't know the outcome if you don't try. And the classic: You are still so young you have time to change your mind many times. You don't need to get it perfect the first try. Everything you try teaches you of who you are and what you really want in life.

It's okay to be uncertain.

Good luck on your journey!

[AnalyticalEngine]

For what it's worth, as someone in the industry, I still think programming is a good field to get into. You want to make sure you study the right thing, but programmers will be needed even more if automation does pick up steam. And having worked with globalized programming teams myself, I think more and more companies are realizing they need someone with strong communication skills to maintain their enterprise-level software. And strong communication skills can be very hard to find in a globalized context.

[2Birds1Stone]

If I could pick any job I wanted it would be writing or programming but I am deathly afraid of globalization or automation screwing me over on that front. I figure I will know whether the sales thing is going to pan out within a few months and I can go back to the drawing board then.

I sold/helped implement business process/IT automation software for 6 years. It's a budding industry and if you focus on this angle when learning how to program/code/sell then it could be an incredibly lucrative career. Look up RPA/Intelligent Automation, the barrier to entry is low enough that I believe you could get your foot in the door without a degree.

[shadow]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions everyone.

I am looking into software sales more now and have also realized that I won't miss the boat with programming if I start now. However when I said "if I could pick any job" I really meant due to the remote freelance nature of a lot of the jobs because what I would really like is to be able to cover expenses with a very small weekly time commitment; this would let me seriously pursue BJJ.

With that in mind I am struggling to put together a medium term plan. Carpentry is very attractive to me because there is a 2 year apprenticeship program at a local community with job placement and from what I understand trades are really easy to move into contract work once you have a few years' experience. The major, glaring downside is the conflict with training BJJ. If I break a leg or something during training it could knock out my income for months. And even ignoring injury I would imagine carpentry is very hard on the body.

So the way I see it my options are:

-work shit job and build up a separate side business
-work shit job and learn a marketable skill
-do some kind of work that can be parlayed into a future income stream

Any kind of sales job would fall under the first two categories, although I imagine software sales could become third category with a SaaS business or something.

[RoamingFrancis]

Good luck on the journey! I'm used to being the youngest person everywhere; it's kind of fun to be slightly older than someone.

I think dropping out of college is wise for many of those in our generation, at least for those of us in the US. Best of luck; I'm looking forwards to hearing how your story plays out.

- RF