September 2016 Progress Report

It’s October right now and I’m currently in Seoul, Korea! I spent September in Lisbon, and I loved it.

Lately I’ve been more focused on my feelings and thoughts that my mental/emotional/spiritual progress has been more important to me than my income progress. Some of it was good, some of it may have been the result of too much ruminating and overanalyzing.

Anyway I’m going to talk about my feels and learnings a little bit as well as some small pieces of progress. Hope you guys don’t find it too boring!

September 2016 Progress Report

Etsy

In September I believe I hit 50 listings on my Etsy store, but didn’t expand my inventory as much as I thought I would have. But the good thing about not working on my shop too much was that I could see how stable the passive income was as compared to August. To my surprise, my profits were down $11 from the previous month, which was not as bad as I thought it would be. So the threefold increase in profits have remained and the “passive” nature of this income stream continues strong, hurrah! (Check out how to make passive income via Etsy here)

If you’d like to open your own Etsy shop, you can use my link here which gives you a free 40 listings (and provides me with 40 free listings as well). 

Some blog monetization…

Adsense: So I hadn’t really monetized MWT and DNQ as I had my ads off for maybe two months. I decided to put them back up and now I maybe average $10-20/month with those blogs for ads. You don’t get paid until you hit the $100 threshold, and it’s not much but hey, better than nothing!

Amazon Associates: I realized some of my music listeners used to ask me about equipment I use for my songs. So, I recently started listing out what mic, keyboard, etc. I’ve been using in my video descriptions. I don’t really earn anything from Amazon Associates, but I might as well list the affiliate links.

Kindle

I haven’t had time to work on my Kindle books. I’m envisioning that I will put most of my efforts on Etsy for the time being (with the goal of 100 listings by end of year)!

Feelings/Learnings/Ramblings…

In September I stayed indoors a lot. I realize one of my flaws is that my introverted nature makes me lazy about making new friends. And because of this, I spent too much time by myself and I was in my own head too much rather than enjoying my surroundings.

Despite this, I also made some nomad friends:

I ended up mainly becoming friends with the guy on the right (John)!

Another thing I realized is, now that it had been 4 months, I started forgetting what it felt like to be in an office full-time. I started to lose the appreciation for my life abroad as opposed to being stuck in a 9-5, and I kind of slap myself for that. With that said I’m going to practice awareness more often and continuously remind myself of how beautiful life is and how blessed I am.

I had a really honest conversation with a successful entrepreneur and writer named Filipa, who I met through a digital nomad friend (who I’ve never even met in real life!). Within the first 10 minutes upon meeting I started crying. It was surreal – how did this person understand me so well without knowing me?

Dinner with Filipa!

Our dinner chat ended up becoming a 3-hour conversation. A lot of her teachings were around mindfulness and being in the present moment. I summarized some of my learnings from Filipa in the conclusion of this post here. But two valuable takeaways were:

1. Refrain from thinking of any partner as a “project” (AKA – would I marry this guy, can he be a father to my kids, etc.). This causes you to overlook a lot of problems or warning signs, and it causes you to forget to enjoy the present.

2. Never come from a place of “lacking” (e.g. I need to fill a gap in my life by finding another human being, or I need money so I’ll take this shitty pay as a freelancer). Whenever you accept something when you’re “lacking” you forget to realize your own self worth.

Mid-September I also went to Porto, where I met one of my blog readers named Alesso! It was crazy to hang out with someone from the other end of the globe who was reading what I was writing. I’d bring up some information about my life and he’d already be aware of it. And I learned a lot from the encounter, so I’ll probably make a post about it later! (Hey Alesso, if you’re reading this!)

During this month I hung out with a local I met in Stockholm named Frederico. Though I say I was by myself a lot, we hung out a decent amount of times. He taught me a lot about the way of life in Lisbon and some of the hardships when looking for employment and a decent wage. It again reminded me of my privilege and taught me gratefulness. It reminded me of how I would bother myself with the smallest “issues”, when in reality I had nothing to worry about.

Frederico’s a wonderful, good person with his motto being “it could be worse”. So despite what he told me in the previous paragraph he was always a ball of positivity and optimism! I love the glass half-full approach to life. And Frederico basically gave me the whole tour of Lisbon and its surrounding areas – from Cascais to Sintra to Cacilhas (is what I think it’s called). Yay! 🙂

At the end of my stay, I actually bonded with my flatmates literally the night before I left. They threw a dinner party, and we all opened up to each other over a bit of wine. This sort of made me realize that I should have put more effort into new friendships, cause who knows who I’ll miss out on?

My flatmates and I

Fortunately I still keep in touch with all these people as I’ve moved over to Seoul, Korea. They have all impacted me a lot, and I’m grateful for each and every one of them. Now that I reflect on the Lisbon leg of my adventures, I realize a LOT of personal growth happened that month without me knowing it, so I’m happy!