What 5 Years Of Jumping From Method To Method Can Show You

Everything was so different with her.

It was straight-forward from the start.

Nothing felt forced.

There were no games between us or any of the usual confusion when you’re “talking” to someone.

We were both clear about each other from the moment we matched.

I asked her to be my girlfriend on our 2nd date.

Within the first year into our relationship, we started talking more seriously about our future:

At the time, my partner and I were staying at my toxic auntie’s place.

We just wanted to live together.

I had my phone connected to my laptop so that whenever I got a notification on my phone, it would show on my laptop.

One night, as we were in our room, I saw a notification on my laptop of an email saying my Bitcoin was moved from my crypto account to some other account.

My heart SANK.

Somehow, my laptop got hacked!

As I quickly checked my email account, suddenly, I was FLOODED with random emails from companies I never signed up to.

DOZENS of emails flooded my inbox.

I knew what these hackers were doing: they were trying to hide the important emails; the emails saying that my crypto moved.

I quickly did what I could at the time, that was to change my passwords as fast as possible to stop the transfer of my money!

In the end, I lost HUNDREDS of dollars. (Could’ve been a thousand or so all together)

I DID manage to save a couple hundred from getting transferred by cancelling them, but by then, most of the damage was done.

The hackers had all day to transfer everything.

I don’t know if you understood how I felt at the time.

I felt defeated.

I felt like such a loser.

I felt like my partner would be so mad at me for letting something like this happen, or worse, disappointed and let down.

I was SWEATIN’, heart racing, before I told her what had happened.

But to my surprise, she was extremely supportive.

You don’t understand the giant sigh of RELIEF I let out.

Like this huge barbell was lifted off my shoulders.

From then on, I knew I could tell her anything and I would always have a safe space if I ever needed it.

After that incident, I keep my crypto in a physical, digital wallet.

She felt so bad for me, she bought me an early birthday gift: a new phone.

A couple days before my 32nd birthday, we were visiting my partner’s mom and I was in her old room.

I was scrolling through TikTok and a video showed of someone talking about some challenge.

I had heard of this challenge before from another video.

I checked it out before, saw that I had to pay for it, and brushed it off.

I don’t know if it was because it was a couple days before my birthday, the fact that I was turning 32 and still unemployed collecting government disability cheques, the fact that it cost about as much as some wired earphones from Amazon at the time, or maybe a combination of all 3…

But something made me invest in that challenge that exact moment.

This lead to their higher-ticket program.

It was more than half my savings at the time, and after discussing it with my partner (who supported me 100%), I got it.

This is when I got serious about making money online.

I thought that this was going to get me financial success and financial stability and out of financial struggle and out of “just surviving.”

The program taught us how to do affiliate marketing using short-form video content creation.

And thanks to the program’s help, it wasn’t as confusing as it was back in 2018 when I got no help.

Then, one of the worst possible things happened to me that could’ve happened…

Within 3 weeks of joining the program, my TikTok account blew up.

Within a span of a few days, I got 20k followers!

I even got my first ever commission of $22!… along with some others.

So how can this be “one of the worst possible things”?

You know how you’re building something and every little “win” that you come across, no matter how little, feels like a huge step forward?

Well, because I got these big results so early on, I did not realize how much of a big deal they actually were.

So I took them for granted.

And that made me think anything I try would get me results in less than a month if I REALLY tried.

That that was just normal.

My timeline of success was totally messed up.

I also started posting on IG Reels and Pinterest video when they first got released.

After a while, posting videos every day became annoying.

I realized I was basically a dancing monkey.

And I didn’t wanna be a dancing monkey forever.

By this time, my partner and I had moved into our own place.

And at such a bad time, I decided to try a different method to making money online.

One where I wasn’t performing every day.

I was looking around, gathering information, and a lot of things came up.

But some of those things required YEARS to build, and since my timeline of success had been so messed up, I wasn’t even trying to look at those business models.

The next thing I decided on was still affiliate marketing, but instead of short-form video content, it was with Facebook Ads.

When my ads account got shut down, I changed to Microsoft Ads.

I was having moderate success with it.

Then my laptop got hacked for the second time.

Sigh… At this point, it HAD to have been my fault, right?

But it wasn’t a huge loss like the first time.

I was a little more prepared.

I wasn’t using one password like before and I was using an app called LastPass.

It’s a password manager and it saved me from losing anything this second time around.

I just had to change my passwords.

I’m not sponsored by them or anything, I just think everyone should be using it to save their passwords.

It’s free anyway so you should check it out.

But one thing I DID lose, was access to my Microsoft Ads account.

This asshole went into it and I guess tried to advertise some malware or something because Microsoft Ads said I was trying to spread malicious software.

I kept trying to explain to them that I got hacked but for some reason, of all companies, Microsoft didn’t understand (or didn’t want to understand) this happened to me.

So after losing my Microsoft Ads account, I moved onto Google Ads.

I kept trying something new and had to change to something else, kept trying something new and changed to something else…

I had to keep trying.

If I couldn’t make it work, we probably would not have been able to afford our apartment and would’ve had to move back in with my toxic auntie again, or worse, have NOWHERE to live.

That would’ve been bad enough…

But to then tell everyone that I failed at starting my own (online) business after how many years?

That would’ve been so humiliating as well.

That would’ve lead to having to go back to a job that I probably would’ve hated, which would make me miserable for the rest of my life.

I didn’t want to come home every night, tired and cranky, and take out my frustrations on my future wife and kids or something.

Not saying that every job leads to that, this was just my thinking process.

My Google Ads weren’t as successful as my Microsoft Ads were for some reason, and I was just losing money.

So after probably a month and still not seeing success, I decided to move on.

From then, I was just hopping from one thing to the next.

I tried to start my own agency.

Not one, but 3: lead generation, freelance CMO, and social media marketing.

Absolutely hated having to talk to potential clients on Zoom.

Gave me anxiety every time I thought about it.

After one Zoom call and having them ghost me right after, I decided it wasn’t for me.

Then something happened that changed our lives… not for good.

Our rent went up…

By over $200!

At the time, we didn’t think we would be able to afford that.

So in a desperate attempt, we reluctantly decided to move out and leave our first apartment, and move in with my partner’s old friend she recently got back in touch with.

I was so desperate, I even went back to creating short-form video content.

That didn’t go as well as it did the first time.

After a few months and only 52 followers, I quit that.

On top of that, this move-in turned out to be a huge mistake.

I’m not gonna talk bad about anybody, but basically, 5 months into our rental agreement, we had to cancel it early.

That forced us to make another desperate move.

We had no choice.

We had to find a place to move to.

And one of the things I feared would happen, happened.

On top of not being able to afford our apartment, we had to move back in with my toxic auntie.

Somehow, it was worse living there the second time around.

This is not what I wanted for my partner and I.

This is not how I wanted our lives to go.

It was a pretty low point for us.

But that December, I proposed to her on Christmas morning.

That at least gave us something to be happy about.

By this point, I had been trying to make YouTube Ads work for me after trying other little things for a few weeks and moving on again.

But I was bleeding money with YouTube Ads and had no sales coming in.

And I was noticing that with the low budget I was running, Google would only provide the cheaper, lower quality traffic.

Traffic is basically the people who come to your destination.

In my case, it was a web page.

But I had to make a decision.

I told my newly proposed to fiancée that I was going to make it work or I would have to find something else to do.

And something came across my laptop that I’ve never seen before.

For almost the next year and a half, I got into international trading and sourcing.

It was a really good experience but there were WAAAAY too many scammers.

It gave me a lot of free time and I also wasn’t spending money on ads so that was always a plus.

During that time, I decided I wanted to start posting on X.

And I was doing that every day whenever I could, no big deal.

Then I tried YouTube Ads again, knowing damn well I found out that low budgets don’t work.

But I found a course.

And it was advertising $5/day YouTube Ads.

I asked support to confirm if it was possible.

They said it was.

I told myself I would give myself 2 months to make it work, then I would go back to international trade.

But as I was tracking my progress, I was getting closer and closer to finding a winning ad.

That made me excited.

That also made me push my deadline a couple more months.

But after all that, I came to the same conclusion I previously had: Google provides cheaper, lower quality traffic to lower ad budgets.

Plus, Google’s policies got more strict than before and like, more than half my ads kept getting disapproved.

So I put an end to it a couple weeks early and went back to international trade.

This made me realize something: instead of trying all these business models and randomly changing to something else, a much more “proper” way I could do it was to give the new business model a fair shot period of, 90 days for example, and test it out.

If it works out, great! But if it doesn’t, I had data that showed me why and the knowing that I gave it a fair shot.

During my YouTube Ads, I started posting on Instagram.

Instagram would automatically repost to Facebook and Threads, so I reposted there too.

I also noticed my Pinterest account that I posted almost 5 years ago was still getting engagement…

…and saw that I was getting like 5k views every month and my followers grew to 4.1k!

So I felt like I had no choice and started posting there again.

Plus my Instagram posts would repost on Pinterest as well, so that was a bonus.

This lead to me posting on LinkedIn on top of all that, hoping if I post enough, one of my accounts would go viral.

I know now that was not the best way to look at it.

As I was trying to grow these social accounts, I came to a realization…

It was taking, and is going to take, so long for these accounts to grow… This was a long-term play.

I should’ve been growing these accounts a long time ago.

And that made me remember the long-term business models I saw in the beginning of my journey…

And that got me thinking that, with all the “fast” ways of trying to make money I tried, it would’ve been smart to have a long-term, backup play in the background.

That way, as I would fail at these business models, at least I would have one longer-term thing going on.

Blogging was one of them.

I wanted to go light, thinking this was a faster method, so instead of my own blog, I decided to write on Medium.

After posting on Medium every day for 2 months, I found out the strategy I was using was not going to work on Medium.

Well, that discouraged me so hard.

I gave it up and did what I should’ve done 2 months ago: create my own blog.

After this realization, I decided against going back to international trade after a couple weeks and decided I think it would be best if I just went all in on the long-term business models I should’ve done a long time ago.

So I got more serious about posting on socials and my blog.

But it was very inefficient.

I spent a lot of time posting.

And then I rediscovered a creator.

Turns out, he was doing what I wanted to do.

What a relief.

So I subscribed to his paid newsletter and learned he taught a very efficient way of doing what I was doing.

Only, it involved a newsletter as the main, long-term play and repurposing that into medium-form and shorter-form content.

It was clarity.

I thought maybe the medium-form was a little much for now and decided long and short forms were ok to start with.

I saw this funny post on Threads and it went something like: If you look at it, a scientists job is literally to f*ck around and find out.

According to my new mentor, I needed to monetize my business somehow.

So I needed a product or service.

And that post gave me an idea…

People, me including, would try all these business models to find the one for them.

We were just fucking around.

But we weren’t finding out much.

It wasn’t organized or anything.

We were Fucking Around & Not Finding Out (FA No FO).

This is a huge problem.

Because stay in this pattern too long and you end up like me: waking up 5 years later with tons of business models tried and with nothing to show for it.

You know how many courses and programs can be invested in in 5 years?

That’s wasted time and money spent.

So combine that with my idea of having a longer-term safety net in the background, I came up with FAFO Lab.

Where you Fuck Around And Find Out, and it’s also tests or experiments…

…knowing in the background, you’re building something that will last; it just takes time.

The strategy is simple but you have to know what you’re doing.

If you’re not careful, you could end up 1-3 years in, constantly restarting and starting over in a habitual pattern.

And believe me, you don’t want to end up like me: blinking and seeing 5 years flash before your eyes without a damn thing to show that you’ve been building.

Following FAFO Lab, I’ve been able to stick to one thing, and that’s written content creation.

Turns out, I like creating content, I just didn’t like having to perform every day in front of a camera.

If I had known this 5 years ago, I would be so much further along in my journey by now.

I haven’t been able to get us that house and those cars yet…

And we’ve been trying for kids but ultimately came to the conclusion that it would be kinda irresponsible of us to start our family without financial stability.

I mean, we knew this a long time ago, but some recent events really hit home for us.

On the plus side, we’re married now.

These last 6+ years have been the happiest of my life, and the day we got married was one of, if not, the happiest day of my life.

We don’t have the house yet, but we are living with HER auntie this time, a major upgrade.

We even have our own space: the entire basement.

One other big win for me is that…

I broke the pattern.

The pattern of working on something, getting distracted by something else, working on something, getting distracted by something else.

Shiny Object Syndrome is no joke.

But you live and you learn.

Now I’m hard focused on one path.

The right path for me.

And this is my most valuable lesson so far.