My story and why I'm writing this hub

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I have never quite functioned well in the 'normal' working class world.

I simply have too much ambition, too much creativity, and too much respect for my own skill sets and ability to excel in anything I do to be limited by a job that not only doesn't utilize my full potential but that kills my spirit in the name of selfishness and "protocol".

I have often held most of my jobs for no more than 6 months to a year and 2 months, because I'm not one to sit back and take employer abuse or allow someone to limit my potential when I have every right to exploit my potential for the betterment of the job and my team of associates working with me.

I see so many things that can be improved around the work place and often when I talk to other associates and lower level management I get kudos for having great ideas and often am asked why I work in "this dump" with all my skills.

When I've brought these ideas up to the people who could elicit change they both steal my idea and take all the credit, then crap on me if I say anything, or they tell me they don't have time to do it or whatever.

I've become impatient with the ignorance of bosses who I consider myself much more qualified to do their job than they are, but I'd never want their job due to the bad politics involved in the very work place..

The true mark or an intelligent boss is one who will surround themselves with people smarter than they are and whom will listen to those people's ideas but won't steal their ideas, one whom is humbled enough to admit that his talent is in networking smart people to synergize, and that makes him a great boss..

Unfortunately I've never met a boss like that in the working class world.

My current employers however are much smarter than myself, has the makings of the most amazing boss ever, and motivate me to make them look good to their clientele! As a writer this is a very good thing to have in an employee as your very credibility is in what your writers write!

I not only work hard without even having to be asked, but I put in 110% to show my appreciation for all they've done for me and how they rescued me from the cold world and allow me to work for them. I'm truly blessed by my current employment.

You don't get this kind of treatment normally especially in corporate America, which is ridiculous because if more bosses did this they'd have a very valuable work force, instead they treat their employees like sheep and hire and fire all the time to keep costs down.

Your job is actually in jeopardy if you end up making too much because often they can hire someone off the street to do your job for minimum wage so why would they pay you to do it for twice that? This is the mentality they have, loyalty means nothing.

This is the biggest problem I have with many employers.. Take one of my last jobs for instance (well 3 jobs ago). The walls reek of advertisements around the workplace stating we are where we are because of our employees input (Wal-Mart) but they don't actually (anymore since Sam Walton died that is) even listen to you!

I grew tired of this happening at every job I ever tried and I've never been satisfied with working under these rigid and ridiculously limited conditions, so I aspired to work for myself whatever it took.

After sitting and meditating on what I truly enjoy doing and what I've always loved doing I realized that I wanted to write. I'm good at it and thoroughly enjoy teaching other people what I learn/know.

I did everything I could to learn how to write better including getting here on HubPages and learning how to write professionally for adsense income. I took every opportunity to blog, write articles and hubs, and even to write personal books in my spare time. I knew if I kept at it and asked the universe to send me the resources to turn my writing into money it would happen.

This is the seeding process. You don't have to worry about the how, just the what.. the universe always handles the how if you pay attention and act on the what. And it worked this time too.

For two years I wrote continuously any chance I could I wrote and taught and learned things to write about, learning research. I just knew it would happen for me if I kept going and "seeing the signs" to follow.

One day I got an email from a friend in new York and here I am writing blogs for a living making unlimited income potential.. The universe sent her as my messenger and all my dreams were answered.

Looking back I realize that the universe did it in a perfect order.. All of my writing projects, my hubs, my blogs were like my training, my patience paid off because I trusted the universe and it kept sending me things I needed to train for what I do now.

As I was looking for a job on crags list and found HubPages and without what I've learned here I'd not be a writer today.

For the first time in my life I can't even make as much as their willing to pay me! It's an amazing opportunity and it's just getting better.

In doing this I often learn myself which I'll explain further down, but the last time I worked at one of these places was 5 months ago and I now have reached my goals and have a whole new set to chase, goals that are amazing to even think about!

The freedom I am now experiencing is incredible, I am no longer locked down by rigid rules like I have to call in sick 3 days in advance, or get yelled at for having the flu, and when all my buddies want to go on a 3 day ski trip with 2 days notice I would not be able to go.

With my current situation I can ALWAYS go and I don't have to tell a soul (although out of courtesy I do let them know I won't be writing for 3 days but its not that I have to get permission) The beauty of my current job is that I can just take my laptop with me and just write the blogs before bed after a long fun day of skiing! With this job I don't mind at all.

Although I still have a boss its more up my alley as my boss now does not stand over my shoulder judging me every second on my work, he tells me what a good job I'm doing, and always offers help when he sees I need it.

In my current profession as a blog/article copywriter I am living my dream; I have finally achieved a position that has a glass ceiling as far as earning power. It has the earning potential of a "sales" job without being in any way a sales job, and yet the wonderment of a creative job that allows me to peak my creativity and do what I love.

The problem now is not the job, or the lack of a future, it is simply learning to discipline myself. I admit I love a good challenge but this one I can't wait to resolve, because the motivation here is not making the money I can make.

I have nobody to blame if I don't make 3,000 a month but myself because they have given me the potential to do it and it was me not my bosses that stopped me, what a wonderful thing huh? I need to stop taking it for granted and get on the ball.

I hated working for someone else but I now see one benefit I didn't realize it gave me, something I need to learn to do myself now... as my own boss!

I'm finding that although I've always hated working in the traditional types of jobs due to the lack of organization and waste of utilizing my true potential, but I'm starting to see some of the things that were actually good about it such as having a boss making me accountable for doing my job in a way that was efficient and timely.

Working for myself I now find myself with more potential to make money, in fact I make as much as I want I just have to do the work available. In my job I write a 100 word blog and I make a dollar per blog I write (all original materials only) and I can work as much as I want my only real rule besides professionalism in my writing and timely completion of the blogs I accept (3 days to finish and return it) is that I do at least 50 per week. Of course I do that many every day so this is not an issue at all.

When work becomes mundane problems set in cutting my earnings...

The problem is that after a while of doing this the very job becomes mundane. You have to find ways to stay excited. You'd think that writing new blogs about new topics all the time would be stimulating but the truth is we end up writing about redundant keywords and having to tax our brain to write something we never wrote before about that keyword. It's harder than you think to come up with 3,000 new concepts every month!

Part of the problem is that I don't have to do anything if I don't want to. This is a blessing because it gives me amazing freedom to do what I want or need to. I can write when I like and watch television or go out if I want.

I can stop working at any time and go on a date, kick it with my friends or take off for a camping trip (I can even do my job anywhere in the world even without an internet connection!). This is both the coolest thing about my job and the thing that is making me lazy.

My schedule is completely my choice. But it can become a nightmare when you get to the point where you're sick of writing but in order to make the money you want to make you have to write anyway.

At a normal job your boss makes you do this (work regardless of what you want to do), the constant threat of losing your job makes you more than ambitious to do the work, you don't really waste time other than a few moments here and there when the boss is away, but over all you go to work, complaining and all you still do it.

The problem in this scenario is that you don't make more money if you work harder so you end up in a dead end mundane job there.

My job here (working at home) I can make $3,000 dollars a month or I can make $200.00 dollars a month if I slack off. With no boss towering over me I'm more inclined to make excuses for why $200.00 is just fine. When that low check comes and I realize I wasted a perfectly good opportunity to make thousands more I feel horrible.

For me my highest earning month was 2173.00 in a month and my worst month was (with a full month to earn it that is) 1304.00 which ironically was THIS MONTH.

With nobody telling me to get to work, my discipline became laxed and I am losing money, money that the only reason I didn't make it was because I got lazy. From +2173.00 I spiked down to 1650.00 I made -523.00 less, or rather I lost/sacrificed? it.

Then the next month I went even lower to 1301.00 a whole -300.00 more than that one, totaling -872.00 lost, thats almost a house payment, this turned out in fact to be all of my living expences.. I'm scraping by this month but its my own dam fault.

I've been making a goal of 3,000 since I started and when I hit 2173.00 I was excited, I truly believed I could make 3,000 the next month, but writing blogs started to become a lot of work and I took more time off than I did work.

If you guage the loss by my actual goal of 3,000 a month I've really lost -$3876.00 accumulated!!! Thats alot of money wasted only because I didn't try.. that would have paid all my tickets, my dental bill, and my eye exam/glasses, food for 3 months and more..

What was I thinking? This is the reason I wrote this hub.. to make aware the pattern and to hopefull help anyone who is thinking about going into a home based business/copywriter etc.. to see what to watch out for.

Although even in my worst month I made more than I did at the job I once held as a manager of Wal-Mart, I still feel like I wasted a perfectly good opportunity to make more money.

It could have been worse I could have caught it 6 months down the road, because honestly what I've been thinking is "eh 1, 300 is more than I made, what am I crying about" but the reality is I started to push my goals out of the way and SETTLE which is not acceptable.

I'm still 2400.00 in debt right now and I could have been completely out of it, clear and ready to start my life again. But since I wasted the first 3 months of pure potential out of laziness and excuses, I'm wasting my own time and money!

I can still fix this however by moving forward with more tenacious effort, perserverance through weak thought streams and rediculous lazyness.

I write hubs because it helps me "Give myself good advice" as well as document my advice to help others. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you go back and read my hubs you'll notice a common thread, their all self help hubs that I actually wrote for MYSELF.

When I wanted to learn something I wrote a hub after researching a bunch of sites because in writing the hub I regurgitated the information back and added my own insights. The hubs were built to read a couple days later and learn from myself.

I know it sounds a bit silly but this is how my brain is wired. I can give others advice very easily, very lucidly and very intelligently, but I have to write it down to actually do it myself... I hate it but I think god made me this way to force me to share my wisdom... It sounds like a good enough reason for me *Smiles*

I'm writing this blog to try to figure out the best thing to do about this and to help others with this same problem. I realize that I'm finding it very hard to maintain the discipline to keep my numbers up and that I have to do something about it so in writing this hub I hope all those nuggets of wisdom I'd give a friend if they asked me to help them figure something out, come out in my writing.

I may make excuses to myself and rationalize why I should relax and do anything but write blogs but I'm smart enough to recognize when I'm cheating myself and becoming lazy (usually I also get a reality check when my check is $1,000+ less than I could have made if I actually tried just a little bit harder and didn't give in to being lazy or so called "tired") and to do something about it.

I won't just accept disappointment, I can't, I mustn't and neither should anyone else. Bravery is being scared and doing it anyway, so I would have to conclude that discipline is being tired and not motivated and doing it anyway- fake it till you make it., I must learn from past not live in it, and I'm ambitious to change whatever is making me act this way.

This is one of my redeeming qualities that I earned from years of not living up to my potential. You could say I've learned to stop driving my life backwards with the emergency break up *Smirk*

I have a unique gift that comes out when I write. I can often help others resolve their problems with pure knowledge and common sense but when it comes to practicing it myself I often am too good at making excuses for myself and not using good judgment in that regard.

When I write a hub, and the main reason you will notice all of my hubs are written in similar form, is that this is my way of extracting what I need to help myself.

When I go back and read this I will learn what I need as if someone else told me this advice. So let's get on with it.

I have this great idea, the first of my solution concepts that usually come in from left field when I try to figure out how to replace the old solution (my boss, fear of losing my job being a motivator to work my arse off) with a new one (explained below).

I have an idea of how to deal with this. A program that would act like your old boss without all the ridiculous qualities. Call it The writers Discipline Incarnate 1.0. Being the computer addicted guy I am the solution to my problem is both interresting and logical.

Since I spent my work day pounding on the keyboard and staring at the screen, the best way to throw a vurtual boss in the mix would be to generate an automated program that runs in windows and uses articifial intelligence or fuzzy logic to nag me when I'm slacking off or breaking my work ethic (which I'd program based on my goals), and it would congradulate me when I surpass it!

Imagine the perfect vurtual boss program, a self discipline program for writers that do what I do!

If I somehow created a program that would use windows to "alert" me of when I'm being "irresponsible" and would even log this activity to give me a report of my progress then I could use this printout at the end of the month to see a snapshot of my month and why I didn't make as much as I wanted.

This could motivate me to do better. I could program it with my goals, my daily goals and what I want to achieve.

Accountability Incarnate

I could also program it with "nag" screens that pop up when I don't reach my goals.

I.e. if I want to do 12 blogs per hour it will nag me with "did you finish your 12 blogs? If not how many are you on?" then you could enter the number of how many you are on. The program would use fuzzy logic to determine how far behind you are by the hour and it could display messages accordingly.

This program would be very programmable and would allow you to interact with it like if you had a boss checking on your progress. If you programmed "if/then" nag screens then you could use this as a constant reminder of what you're not going to have if you continue to do this. It would allow you to enter your accomplished job amount so you're constantly checking in but it is checking in with you to keep you on track.

Say you go on a tangent to talk to a friend in instant messages, and the check in screen pops up, this will stop you from "losing time" as is something I keep doing. I'll be talking to a friend and we'll get into a stimulating business conversation and I'll be giving him business advice..

Before I know it I've been chatting it up for 2 hours and didn't even realize how much time has passed- time I lost 24.00!

With this program you start to see how much time your wasting and when it asks you how many blogs you did this hour and you put 0 it will show you how much that conversation cost. It's about accountability. The beauty is that you won't go 2 hours without it asking you how many blogs you wrote thus you will be well aware of how much time has passed.

The program can also be set up to watch the article helper program we use and it can tell if the screen is in focus of if its behind other applications i.e. instant messenger or the web browser and it can be programmed to pop up a box asking you why your not writing, and if you would like some more time (i.e. if your researching or want to take a moment for a conversation) it would have several choices i.e. how much time before it checks again.. 10 minutes? 30? the next hour?

You would, remember, program it yourself and you can turn features on or off if they become annoying but this would be a perfect digital accountability program that would help you focus, and stay on task.

One example is say you hit the second hour screen and you put 8 jobs completed instead of 12. Say you put 6 in the last one. You have it set up so you can click out for lunch (and it would count your breaks as well you sort of clock in and out for breaks and lunches etc...

an icon in the task tray or something) and it would give you a report of your current discipline levels (or lack of it). When your shift is over it could generate a report for you of your statistics, time wasted, overtime earned, money made, etc.. The angles are up to you..

You could even set it up so if your shift is over and you want to continue working it would tell you time to punch out [punch out?] [Continue working?] And you click which one you want.

A generated report could be like:

You've worked 6 hours today

You've taken 8 breaks totaling 3 hours and 30 minutes

Your total working hours is 2.5 (which would be in red showing this is not acceptable) you could even make it talk to you (use a girlfriend or parent as the voice?)

Then the program using the parameters you set say 10 hours work, 2 15 minute breaks and an hour lunch, 8 days off per month, 5 working days etc... could calculate how much time you've wasted how much time you worked, how much income, it could also tell you how much per hour your making at each check point based on your current work load vs. hours worked (factoring in the lunch and 15 min breaks)

(it could even tell you on the fly i.e. your current check is $323.00 had you stuck to the work schedule your check would have been to date 656.00 > you've wasted 333.00 that would have been on your check. This is not acceptable! (With an alarm).)

The same could work out when you exceed the parameters i.e. you do 13+ blogs instead of 12 it would say congratulations very good work.

This is actually a very easy program to make and it would work if you actually tried to work with it. If you turn it off or ignore the nag screens of course it will not work, but personally I would not do that, I'd pretend this was my boss and I had to do this.

I think when you don't have parameters and someone or thing (program?) there to remind you you're screwing up that its just too easy not to think about what you're losing. The part where it calculates how much money you've wasted I think would be a great reality check.. The above and beyond features would be a nice ego check, and like a video game you would try to get there just to hear it and see your "score" go up.

Just realizing I'm losing 300.00 because I chose to watch too much television instead of working puts into perspective that I just paid 300.00 to watch all that TV! Discipline is not always about strength of will, sometimes it's just too easy to justify taking too many breaks because we can't see what were losing.

Just like using a credit card instead of cash makes it too easy to spend your whole paycheck on shopping trips because you don't get that distinct feeling you get when you reach in your pocket that had a wad of cash in it and pull out just a dollar... something that tells you whoa boy slow down...

Discipline can be trained with this program or a routine you could create like it using probably a computer alarm clock program with programmable alarm screens.

I've seen these around, you program the alarm and it pops up a box telling you (with a sound playing) that its time to go to the wedding etc.. So you don't forget while your playing online poker etc..

This would be a cheap way to go about doing this. This would take some discipline but it would be a great way to keep yourself on track!

This is just my solution/idea for my particular situation but in this example program lay all the things you would need, to become aware of (if you work online) to figure out your own system. You don't have to use a program, this is just what I know would work well for me.

The point of all of this is that self discipline is often accountability driven, and many people who find themselves losing their work ethic/discipline do so because they are only accountable to themselves for the most part and unless your a driven person (although I am such a person and I'm not exempt) you should develop a program of some sort (not necessarily a "computer" program but a system that works for you) to keep you thinking about the things your boss for example would be there doing.

Working for yourself takes more work, because these things become tough, but I think you can do it. I hope this gave you some good ideas.