jonnyz's journal
Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2017 12:12 am
I'm 22, and I'm from a capital city in Australia. I aim to be done with the work-for-money thing by 2022. The *big thing* in life for me, and one of the main reasons why I'm trading my youth for ERE is I want to read books, and write books.
I discovered ERE last year, after Googling 'how to retire as soon as possible.' If you want to write beyond an amateur level, you want to be writing more than five hours a day (I'm not a natural, and I only started reading books at 17). I've tried getting less sleep to cram a few hours of writing before 9 hour work days, but that was very unenjoyable and the writing was awful. Granted, I did get a lot of the bad writing out during that period (early 2017).
I quit university after the first six weeks (tertiary education outside of STEM is a joke), and was delivering food on my motorcycle where I got semi-control over my hours and pretty good pay. "Great," I thought, "every day I will read and write in the mornings, and deliver food in the evenings a few nights a week, and repeat this until I'm a famous novelist."
Six months into this, I realised two things. 1) I don't want to write for money. 2) driving at night, in winter, in peak-hour traffic, on a motorcycle, is more unenjoyable than university (Australians are notorious for their road rage).
Here we are at the tail-end of 2017, and I've had ERE concepts in my mind for a year. There were some bumps this year which I'll probably talk about later in this journal, but these bumps have made me less uncertain about how I'm going to get to ERE.
It was unnerving writing all this on a public forum mostly from self-judgement, and because I never post writing on the internet. There's a floating jonnyz over my shoulder telling me I'm a pretentious hack looking for validation among people who are more grounded than myself. But the point of this journal is to give myself some accountability of my journey. I'm a relentless rewriter (IOW, I'll type a sentence, reword it, add to it, then repeat for 20 minutes until I decide that the idea I'm trying to get across is inane) and I think that rings true with how I conduct myself in life. But now I need to drop anchor, and not move until 2022.
EDIT: typos, grammar.
I discovered ERE last year, after Googling 'how to retire as soon as possible.' If you want to write beyond an amateur level, you want to be writing more than five hours a day (I'm not a natural, and I only started reading books at 17). I've tried getting less sleep to cram a few hours of writing before 9 hour work days, but that was very unenjoyable and the writing was awful. Granted, I did get a lot of the bad writing out during that period (early 2017).
I quit university after the first six weeks (tertiary education outside of STEM is a joke), and was delivering food on my motorcycle where I got semi-control over my hours and pretty good pay. "Great," I thought, "every day I will read and write in the mornings, and deliver food in the evenings a few nights a week, and repeat this until I'm a famous novelist."
Six months into this, I realised two things. 1) I don't want to write for money. 2) driving at night, in winter, in peak-hour traffic, on a motorcycle, is more unenjoyable than university (Australians are notorious for their road rage).
Here we are at the tail-end of 2017, and I've had ERE concepts in my mind for a year. There were some bumps this year which I'll probably talk about later in this journal, but these bumps have made me less uncertain about how I'm going to get to ERE.
It was unnerving writing all this on a public forum mostly from self-judgement, and because I never post writing on the internet. There's a floating jonnyz over my shoulder telling me I'm a pretentious hack looking for validation among people who are more grounded than myself. But the point of this journal is to give myself some accountability of my journey. I'm a relentless rewriter (IOW, I'll type a sentence, reword it, add to it, then repeat for 20 minutes until I decide that the idea I'm trying to get across is inane) and I think that rings true with how I conduct myself in life. But now I need to drop anchor, and not move until 2022.
EDIT: typos, grammar.
). Maybe the dishwashing job isn't a net gain.