Freelancing Series - 5 - Idle Hands, WTF

Will McLellarn -

 

 

Hey 🙂 I missed a day blogging, and felt it. The goal here to write every day, and I appreciate some of you readers keeping me accountable!

So today’s topic will be about idle hands. Thursday, the day I should have written this post, I had quite a chill day. I took a day off Jiu Jitsu because my arms were pretty sore, and so I had more time than normal.

By about 1pm, I had knocked off everything on my to-do list. What a weird, weird feeling. Honestly at first I felt a little anxious – I’m in a total eat-what-I-kill mode, and I felt like my income was slipping away. But I checked my financial model, and I’m still very much on track. So the cashflow is all good…

I thought about it, and realized that this idle time should be me-time. I’ve spent a ton of time and energy working on my ego, battling it, shrinking it, and helping others. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking business with all my buddies and offering what helpful perspective I can. All along though, I’ve wanted to create things myself. In the work stack, all these opportunities are with others – Shopify, marketing, consulting. I have partners. Blogging – that’s for me 🙂 and I love doing it!

So I want to think of a business that I can do for me as well. I’ve had an idea, and began executing but hit big road bumps. Since I’ve really gotten into hats lately, I want to put #TeamHealth on the front of an athletic material hat and sell it on Shopify. It’s a nice blend of my existing skill sets, but it’s just been a huge grind creating that product. I’m not a product person, but that’s not an excuse. 

What I learned by going to LA and visiting the garment district is that Nike & Adidas have patents on their dri-fit material, so no one else in the hat space makes these kinds of hats. Getting a custom print on the front, that’s easy. Making a site? Cake. Marketing? Easy. It’s the product that is stopping me. I could push forward with this, but I feel a bit like I’m facing a brick wall. Excuses, Team Health, excuses.

If I didn’t do that, I would like to explore doing something for behavior design on the blockchain. Something like my book club idea, which I’ve told everyone and their mama, but it looks like this: First, everyone commits to a smart contract on ETH to read x pages by y date. It’s all done on e-readers and integrates with the kindle API (unfort it doesn’t exist, I looked). If you don’t get to the e-page by the prescribed date, you pay some small amount of ETH to the network. Everyone who does read, gets paid a tiny bit of ETH. It’s that simple! I’d use the heck out of it because it’s crowdsourced accountability, and the best part is that it’s frictionless. I always have problems with people backing out of book clubs, and this would be a 12mth contract so they can fall off, but we all get paid then 🙂 If anyone does this – I want in!

I’m still thinking about what else I might spend time on…building a personal brand is really interesting to me, something like Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan. I’m not sure what else I’d do outside of blogging to do it quite yet. I don’t think I’m ready for a podcast quite yet.

I kind of think there’s something else out there I can put my time & energy into, ideally a software product. I’d love to hack something up and get it on the interwebs, then sell it. 

Overall, here’s the list so far:

  1. Team Health Hats
  2. Crypto Behavior Design Company
  3. Personal Brand
  4. Small software tool – something like alfred or rocket