Yeah, maybe I did.
As a pagan, I tend to avoid using phrases that are Christian-centric. However, this is a phrase that really has been resonating with me in recent weeks.
A “come to Jesus” moment is a wakeup call, often inspired by someone in your close circles who sits you down and tells you that you’re making a big mistake. It’s a moment when you are being called to have a redemption arc or change your ways.
For me, my “come to Jesus” moment was not sparked by anyone. It was actually a long, hard look in the mirror that started when I looked at my website.
I’m an insomniac, primarily due to PTSD. After I was almost shot in my own home this past year, I haven’t been able to go to sleep at night. My body just won’t allow it. I try to use this time for late-night thinking and decompression.
My site, Ragged Riches, has been on my mind. So has been my current financial situation. This week, my client paid me half of what I was supposed to get without warning. My other client still hasn’t paid me.
I’m fed up. And I realized something messed up.
If I had worked as hard for my Ragged Riches site as I did for others, I’d have monetized it by now.
Currently, I’m dealing with a lot of ups and downs in my personal finance life — a bankruptcy, clients stiffing me, sudden upheavals…It’s a lot. I work pretty damn hard for my clients.
I’ve churned out a ton of articles for these people, often only to have them “poo poo” them. A lot of times, they told me I was doing great but somehow it was just never enough. They wanted more this, more that, never quite telling me what “this” or “that” was.
They’re now doing well — better than I am. Much of that is because they were able to hire people like me (and me) to do the work they needed to make their blogs or sites succeed.
I looked at how much work I did for so many of my clients and realized I wasted my time.
Because I’ve dealt with people being abusive to me my entire life, I’ve got a nasty habit of underselling myself. As a result, I’ve worked for many clients while getting paid roughly the equivalent of $15 per hour.
That’s the minimum wage in my state.
If I spent that time writing blogs for Ragged Riches instead of spending time doing stuff for clients who don’t even pay a living wage, I would have a lot of money in my hands.
I would be able to monetize my site with ease and would likely have hundreds of posts on my website. Hell, I probably would have been able to hire writers to write alongside me.
Don’t be me.
I made the mistake of underselling myself and putting my own ambitions on the backburner for clients that didn’t respect me, value me, or even pay me a living wage.
And for what? I wasted a lot of time when I should have been working on Ragged Riches. Ragged could be a full-time thing for me right now, if I had actually focused on it.
I was so hellbent on running in the hamster wheel of work, I didn’t take time to realize I didn’t have to run at all.
If you’ve ever been in “survival mode” in life, you know exactly what I mean. Survival mode gives you a strange tunnel vision where you’re so wrapped up in trying to survive the next two minutes that you don’t think about the big picture.
When you are stuck acting like that for a long enough time, you stop being able to remember to take it easy when you no longer have to worry about survival mode. At times, the idea of hitting the pause button or turning down work just feels like a foreign concept.
I got to that point. I forgot that I can actually say “NO” to work. I can focus on me if I want to.
There are certain times in one’s life when you have to look in the mirror and go, “Okay, this was a mistake.”
When I realized that I could have started monetizing Ragged Riches two months ago if I didn’t waste time, I experienced my ‘come to Jesus’ moments.
I’m in a position where I don’t have to earn a large income if I don’t want to. I currently have a roof over my head and that’s not going to change. So I don’t have to chase these clients and that means I can actually work on my own stuff.
I should have taken the time I already squandered to do that. But did I? Nope. I didn’t. Thankfully, I still have time to change that. So, I will change that because it’s better to be late than to never do it at all.
Several major lessons can be learned here.
So, what’s the deal? Here’s what I took away from this, and why it matters for you too:
- Money in the now doesn’t matter if it ruins your future goals. If I could, I would have said no to the cheap digs I was doing off Upwork in the past. My Upwork clients were, for the most part, awful to me. I don’t want to deal with having to chase around people for pennies while I slave away.
- You need to put your own businesses first. Yes, you need to put you first if you want a blog to succeed. This is also true if you want any business to succeed.
- No one will care about your business as much as you care about you. I kept waiting for people to come in an actually help me work through my business. No one ever did. So, I stopped trying to chase people to do right by me. No one will care as much as you do about your goals.
- No one will provide more stable income than the income that you provide for yourself. Modern employers and clients can drop you in the blink of an eye — and they will. There is no such thing as job stability these days. The only stability you have is the stability you bring yourself.
Right now, I’m getting my business back on track. Why? Because it will pay off when I start treating it as a big priority. So, I’m going to try to post on Ragged Riches at least five times a week.
By next month, I want to make it possible for me to start monetizing it — or at the very least, get some really good advice up on there. Here’s hoping it ends up helping someone.
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