Side Gigs and Lessons Learned

Friday afternoon story time 🎉🍷🤔

One of the most pivotal stages of my early professional (and for the financial and other benefits, personal) life was writing my first maths "textbook", Not a C Minus, at age 18, and establishing my first educational publishing business. It was an unplanned, somewhat chaotic, and wonderfully enjoyable learning experience.

In brief, the book became a runaway hit, sold around 6000 physical copies, and spawned my lifelong love of educational and entrepreneurial initiatives, that branched out into more books, online, edutainment, tech topics, for all age ranges from pre-school kids to older adults.

At the time it was an incredible, almost entirely on-the-fly learning and "flying by the seat of my pants" experience - including learning how to:

🖨️ Create print-ready complex technical manuscripts (in Microsoft Word, you LaTeX snobs 🤣)

📚 Work with and negotiate with commercial printers

🚢 Including eventually doing overseas print productions and learning things you'd never normally learn, like that you need to insure marine freight at 110%

📞 Cold calling and approaching vendors like bookstores, negotiating terms, and keeping them in stock

📝 Write press releases and later, copywrite for ads

💰 Budgeting, tax reporting, and later starting a Pty Ltd company

🌐 Early online sales and marketing: a website, sales fulfilment, optimising freight and parcel delivery

and so much more.

This whole experience profoundly shaped my life, and I thought I'd relate the story here and the key lessons I learned, trying very hard to not fall into the trap of only analysing it in hindsight, but remembering back to what was known, felt and thought *at the time* as an 18 year old!

I hope you find it interesting! And have a good weekend.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Hha1_jYAKWk

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