{"id":2550,"date":"2012-08-19T10:09:27","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T17:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=2550"},"modified":"2018-04-03T09:00:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T16:00:02","slug":"24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/19\/24\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m 24"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is my birthday. It\u2019s been a tradition here that I use this opportunity to write about my life, instead of sharing a new idea. It\u2019s a bit selfish, but I\u2019m allowed a little today. Feel free to skip this post and ignore my self-indulgence.<\/p>\n

Overall this has been a very different year than the ones preceding it. It involved living in a new city, speaking at TEDx<\/a>, and, of course, spending most of my year trying to learn<\/a> MIT\u2019s computer science curriculum.<\/p>\n

Technically, this was my first year not being a full-time student. Although some might count my intensive MIT experiment as evidence I never really left, it\u2019s been a stark contrast to my time in university.<\/p>\n

Going Pro<\/h2>\n

Although I had earned a full-time income during my last year and half of university, since so few of my peers had a full-time job on the side, it was easy to think of myself as a student during that time. Now I\u2019ve been running this business exclusively as my source of income, so I guess that makes me a professional blogger.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gotten a lot of questions asking me, \u201cWhat\u2019s next?\u201d Often the implication is that I’m going to get a “real” job. I\u2019ve spent nearly a decade building an online business that can support myself, so my learning experiments aren\u2019t preparation for something bigger\u2014they\u2019re just my life now.<\/p>\n

The biggest thing I\u2019ve missed since starting the MIT Challenge has been the lack of time to focus on my business. I\u2019m really looking forward to working on new courses, books and features for the website. Even keeping a once-per-week writing schedule has been tough, and I hope to spend the next year building things.<\/p>\n

What Do I Do<\/em> for a Living?<\/h2>\n

My career is certainly a strange one. It didn\u2019t really exist when I started this website, and even though I now know a few dozen people who do what I do, it\u2019s still a bit difficult to understand for most people.<\/p>\n

Luckily my career doesn\u2019t depend on everyone understanding. So when people ask why I\u2019m not getting a job, or going to get my masters, I just smile and nod. The best thing about running an online business is that you never need to convince anyone it works\u2014there are no VCs, admissions officers or HR personnel to tell me I can\u2019t, it either works or it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Amazingly the business carried on, with very little decline in income, even though I did no new projects during my challenge. Although for passive income, it\u2019s an awful lot of work, I was happy to know the systems I built over the last six years withstood me taking a bit of a sabbatical.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to applying the skills I\u2019ve built through my MIT Challenge to improving the learning courses I offer. In particular, I\u2019m excited about reopening Learning on Steroids which has been closed for almost a year. [You can find out when it reopens by joining the mailing list<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

A Year of MIT<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ll save a full dissection of the MIT Challenge for when I finish (which is still on-track to be completed at the end of September). But if there\u2019s been anything that\u2019s impacted my life this last year, it has been this project. By far the largest and most ambitious project I\u2019ve attempted, it\u2019s been a once-in-a-lifetime experience.<\/p>\n

The biggest constraint created by the challenge was simply the lack of extra time. In the past I\u2019ve had many extracurricular activities\u2014travel, volunteering, business, hobbies. Juggling this blog and following the curriculum, meant working six days per week, so the past year has been a more focused one.<\/p>\n

Despite the time commitment, actually following the courses has been relatively relaxed. The first few months were very intense, but I\u2019ve since adapted to the schedule and made it easier, so now I hardly notice. Instead of burnout, I only feel a bit restless.<\/p>\n

When I started the challenge, I said to a friend that part of my goal was to see if I could do it. Not a typical goal, in which the object of desire is my motivation, but rather a challenge where the motivation is to see if I\u2019d fail.<\/p>\n

I was terrified when I first started. Not only was the goal hard, but I was doing it publicly, where you can tell from my early detractors<\/a>, there were many hoping I\u2019d fail. I may not have done it perfectly, but having nearly finished I feel the confidence I\u2019ve gained to take on new challenges is vastly more valuable than anything else.<\/p>\n

What Next?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s an interesting question because, for the first time in my life, I don\u2019t have an answer. I spent nearly seven years knowing what was next\u2014building an online business so I wouldn\u2019t need to get a job. After that, the looming prospect of this year\u2019s experiment focused me. But what now?<\/p>\n

The easy answer is to just keep doing what I\u2019m doing\u2014continue helping people learn better, writing articles and books, maintaining the status quo.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been much for the status quo. Stagnancy is death. Although there may come a time in my life when I yearn for routine, now is not that time.<\/p>\n

Instead of a single answer to that question, I have a lot of them. There have been many dimensions of life I\u2019ve wanted to pursue, and perhaps I\u2019ll spend some time dabbling in each of them, enjoying the brief respite before I get swept up in another juggernaut of a project.<\/p>\n

In no order of preference or probability, here\u2019s some of the things I\u2019ve wanted to undertake:<\/p>\n