I seem to have finally reached at that stage in my life where I find myself in need of an income. I’m not interested in a particularly large income; at the moment, I only want just enough to feed a Magic: the Gathering and video game habit, and maybe pay for medical insurance. Something like $8,000 a year, after taxes, would be more than enough, as long as I can continue to live in my parents’ house rent-free.
The usual method of getting an income is to get a full-time job. However, I don’t find that appealing, not one bit. I want to have lots of free time in which to use the things I buy with the money I would earn. I’d much rather just continue to spend down my savings than work more than two days a week at a normal job.
This suggests that instead, I should try to get a part-time job. Chances are, that would mean working in a local restaurant or store of some kind. Unfortunately, I tried one of these once before, and it didn’t work out very well. I was hired to be a cashier at a local supermarket. To my great surprise, I didn’t particularly mind the work, but on my third day after being hired, I was fired for insubordination. (I had a paperback novel with me, and I wouldn’t stop reading it during periods when there were no customers.) I’ve also tried working for a temp agency. That didn’t work out too well either. After completing my first assignment, I was told that the company I was contracted out to complained about my behavior (it’s a long story), and so I would not be considered for any other assignments. In effect, I was fired from there, too.
As far as I’m concerned, the ideal source of income would be something with no set hours, that I could leave and come back to as I please. In other words, if I decide that I’d rather play video games for a month instead of earning money, it won’t prevent me from earning money the month after that. Unfortunately, the only things I know of offhand that work like that are writing (which is extremely hard to make a living at, and requires a lot of time and effort anyway) and online poker (which I suck at). I’m lazy and undisciplined, and I’m not particularly interested in changing that, so I’m hoping to find a way to make money that works even if I don’t try very hard at it.
In terms of skills and education, I have a B.S. from Rutgers University in computer engineering. I can program, but when I’ve tried programming as a job (as a summer intern), it turned into a Dilbert cartoon very, very quickly. Basically, I was given vague instructions, left on my own to do whatever, and instead of working, I mostly sat and surfed the Web while feeling guilty about not working. I don’t think I want to do programming professionally. I ever have to sit in another cubicle again, there’s a good chance I’m quitting on the spot.
So, um… I need some suggestions on what to do. Bring on the other-optimizing?
I’m lazy and undisciplined, and I’m not particularly interested in changing that
Serious question: why? If there was a pill you could take that would magically make you disciplined and hard working, would you turn it down? The pill wouldn’t make you unable to play computer games, or surf the web; it would just mean that if you said to yourself “for the next two hours I’m going to do X, without getting distracted by computer games or surfing the web” you would carry that intention out.
I tend to be lazy and undisciplined, but I also tend to find that even if your job doesn’t really do anyone any good in the large, working at work is more fun than slacking off. I’m increasingly coming to think that the rewards I get when I’m lazy and undisciplined aren’t up to much. What are the upsides, for you, of being lazy and undisciplined?
Serious question: why? If there was a pill you could take that would magically make you disciplined and hard working, would you turn it down? The pill wouldn’t make you unable to play computer games, or surf the web; it would just mean that if you said to yourself “for the next two hours I’m going to do X, without getting distracted by computer games or surfing the web” you would carry that intention out.
I’ve always thought of “discipline” as a bit of a rip-off. To me, “discipline” suggests “the willingness to do something unpleasant now, in exchange for a later reward.” The problem with this is that, even though you do get the reward, you’ve spent all that time doing something unpleasant, when you could have been doing something pleasant—such as playing video games—instead. It doesn’t seem like a good way to maximize “moments of pleasure” over the near future. Being lazy and undisciplined means I don’t go off chasing future rewards that turn out not to be worth the trouble.
My mom says that, as a young child, I had a “low frustration tolerance,” which might explain a lot. I suspect that “doing something I don’t feel like” feels worse to me than it does to most people, although I can’t prove this. In college, I once started to feel physically ill whenever I looked at my “Engineering Mechanics—Statics” textbook. There was something deep inside me, screaming, “This is awful! Avoid this!” whenever I was confronted with my homework. I only ever got work done when I became more afraid of not doing it than I was of doing it, if that makes any sense.
In college, I once started to feel physically ill whenever I looked at my “Engineering Mechanics—Statics” textbook. There was something deep inside me, screaming, “This is awful! Avoid this!” whenever I was confronted with my homework. I only ever got work done when I became more afraid of not doing it than I was of doing it, if that makes any sense.
Not to play psychiatrist, but this sounds like a more likely explanation for your predicament than the hypothesis of contentment. If you could take a pill that would remove your anxiety when you faced the prospect of doing something that appears difficult or that you might be judged on, would you take that pill?
You know, I just might. The “don’t get frustrated” pill seems more in line with my preferences than a “be willing to play hurt” pill. The last time I tried—well, “was pushed into” is more accurate than “tried”—filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.
Incidentally, I’m a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.
Another note: I’ve generally found that, when I “work hard” at something, I’m usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months’ worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as “lazy.” I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don’t trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)
The only emotion that I’ve found that really motivates me to do things I don’t normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I’ll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to “design” digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.
In the book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Ralph Koster (of possible special interest to a game nerd) he basically defines “fun” as “learning without pressure”. Learning, in this context, means improving skills and responding to a challenge where there is no extrinsic consequence for failure.
Your desire for a job you can “take or leave” on a day-to-day basis, and your anxiety about homework, fits well with (but is more extreme than, I think) my own experience. If I were to diagnose myself with something (which I am loathe to do) it would be some type of anxiety disorder ( I have a friend with similar issues who was so diagnosed, medicated, and actually seems to be doing better, although it’s difficult to separate cause from effect here).
See if you relate to the following anecdote:
in grade 9 I entered a special school program which was kind of like correspondence (work through assignments at your own pace) except that it was held at a regular high school so that students could socialize, have progress monitored by and access to teachers, and take supervised written tests whenever we were ready. Sounds pretty great compared to normal classes? It was. But, my first year (grade 9) I got rather behind in my work, in more than one subject, and started getting concerned reports home. Even though the work I had to do was obviously within my capabilities, I found it very difficult to face. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and finish everything in one big cram at the end of the year, and I pulled OK grades, but I stressed out endlessly over what was really a trivial amount of work (which I recognized even at the time).
The following year (grade 10) I hit the ground running in September. By mid-october I had finished Math 10. I got similarly ahead in other subjects, and the further ahead I got the easier it was for me to work more and more. (To a point, I also had a defiant self-image of rational laziness so that I didn’t want to do more than the minimum amount of work, even if I could do it faster/better. So I never skipped a grade, I would just get ahead by a few weeks/months and then… yup, play Magic (the original (Beta/Unlimited)!) and basically fuck around with my friends, computer, porn, etc.
More recently, as a PhD student, I still encounter the same thing. When I’ve fallen behind on a project, often due to unrelated and mild doubts/laziness/underestimation, I become more and more unwilling to face work the farther behind I get. OTOH if a colleague comes to me with a problem which I am not “supposed to be” working on, I become immediately energized. Of course, I allow myself to work on side projects less and less the farther “behind” I am on the projects I am assigned to. I have finally seen the pattern, maybe too late not to suffer serious damage in my “career”. It is largely this: I hate exposing myself to the possibility of public failure. For me, the “consequence” which makes learning/trying/failing/mastering “not fun” is simply having to admit that a) I want to get/achieve/do/win at X and b) I failed (in this instance) to get/achieve/do/win at X. When I am doing something optional, and where I am not expected to succeed (e.g. because it’s someone else’s problem and any contribution I make will be accepted with grateful surprise), I can be extremely goal-directed and work with intense focus. In the very short term, fear of missing a hard deadline (mainly in undergrad) can also make me work til the break of dawn with amazing concentration, much as you described anger doing for you.
I’m not suggesting that you have exactly the same anxieties that i do. But recognizing what it is that separates the activities you can focus and work on from those you can’t may lead to surprising revelations about yourself, and may even suggest ways to find a job that’s a good fit for your temperament.
Sorry if this was a bit rambling and self-indulgent.
That’s really interesting… I think I understand you better now. I think that, because of this recurring anxiety and frustration, you’ve felt for a long time that your options were:
achieve in the way others want you to, but hate every minute of it, or
restrict yourself to playing games and doing things that don’t cause anxiety or frustration for you.
As per the second pill example, I think this is a false dichotomy, but a universal one; people take their emotional reactions for granted, and don’t often imagine that it could be possible to feel differently about something that persistently troubles them. (Of course, it doesn’t seem possible to just feel differently by a direct act of will, which is all that most people ever think of to try.)
Given that you’d take the second pill, though, you can now imagine a third alternative:
become able to do some difficult and long-term (but rewarding) activities without automatically feeling this anxiety and frustration, thus giving you many more interesting options for how to spend your time.
If that sounds appealing to you (and of course it doesn’t mean you’ll have to end up doing what others want you to do; it just means you’ll be able to genuinely explore some new options), then it might be time to start carefully analyzing why you get these feelings, and whether there’s something you can do to change that...
One thing I think I should look into in more detail is tutoring; I did a lot of that informally in high school and I was a teacher’s assistant of sorts for a math class during college. Does anyone here know anything about how to make money as a tutor? (I live within easy commuting distance to Rutgers University, so that might help.)
For CronoDAS or anyone else thinking of using poker as a handy side-income (or small main income), I have a few words of warning. First, the games have gotten tougher and will continue to do so.
Second, poker is really demanding game psychologically. This is because the expected value of a competent player is so small compared to the inherent variance of the game. The expected value in say one hundred hands might be 1-2 units whereas one standard deviation in similar sample might be 20 units (or even significantly more). This in turn means that a good player might have periods of tens of thousands of hands where he loses money. Dealing with this sounds easy in theory, but is really hard in practice.
That said, it shouldn’t take but couple of months to become a winning player with today’s resources (books and video coaching sites) and make a modest income with effort of only like 20 hours a week.
By the way, another downside of the occupation is that it’s completely useless for the humanity in general and your income will come from people that shouldn’t be playing the game in the first place.
When I played poker with my brother and his friends, I didn’t think it was all that fun, and I didn’t win very much either. I don’t plan on going into online poker for real money any time soon.
Well, there are a few things. I’m good at Magic, but I don’t think I’m good enough to play professionally. I’ve never qualified for the Pro Tour. There seem to be lots of players that are better than I am, and you usually have to be world-class in order to make more than pocket change by playing in Magic tournaments. (In order to get better at Magic, the obvious next step for me to take is to try to seek out players in my area that already are world-class and learn from them.) Additionally, competitive Magic requires a continual investment in new cards; $1000 or more a year is quite possible, and travel costs and entry fees also eat up a large chunk of change.
The closest thing to online poker for Magic is, well, “Magic Online.” At one point, I was playing it and turning a profit, at least in terms of the MTGO event tickets. However, turning MTGO event tickets into cash is difficult, as eBay and PayPal fees eat up a distressingly large percentage of what you can make by selling them, and if someone tries to cheat you, there’s little recourse.
By the way, another downside of the occupation is that it’s completely useless for the humanity in general and your income will come from people that shouldn’t be playing the game in the first place.
If you channel the income in the right direction, it won’t be useless.
I read jajvirta as saying that the occupation itself doesn’t produce positive externalities for mankind, unlike productive work in physics research or something.
Productive work in physics could produce negative externalities if humanity cannot be trusted with new physics results. Hell, even math education could produce negative externalities!
By the way, another downside of the occupation is that it’s completely useless for the humanity in general and your income will come from people that shouldn’t be playing the game in the first place.
In Hunting Fish, A Cross-Country Search for America’s Worst Poker Players, Jay Greenspan conceives of the poker world as a giant inverted pyramid, with the fishiest (i.e., least skilled) players at the top pouring money down the pyramid toward the most skilled players at the bottom, such as Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey.
Well, for one, I like the house I live in, and, for the most part, my parents let me do what I want. I just don’t feel any particular need or desire to move out and, financially at least, I’m getting a great deal. Moving out would drive up my expenses enormously, because I’d no longer be able to use my parents’ stuff, including their HDTV, their internet connection, and all those other things. (Incidentally, I have a first cousin once removed who never moved out of his parents’ house. Unlike me, though, he does have a job.)
As for giving up hope, well, yeah, I basically gave up hope way back in 1997. I have a lot of trouble trying to imagine the kind of activity that I would find fulfilling and could realistically expect to get paid for. For the most part, I just try to get through life one day at a time, doing my best to anesthetize myself and not think about the future.
Crono, that’s a horrible, horrible state to be in, and in asking for advice, you’re asking completely the wrong question. For your own sanity, you need to find something you enjoy doing, not just something that can soften the pain for one more day.
I’ve been in your position before. In some respects, I still am. I thought I couldn’t get a job and any job I’d get I’d be unable to handle. I had no connections, but finally was able to find one in my field.
Maybe a standard day job isn’t right for you, but you need to look for something more ambitious than living with your parents, even if you enjoy the amenities. There are many things you can try. Just keep churning through them, or resign yourself to worsening sadness.
If you think you can do well at Intrade, I’ll loan you the money if you can put up your karma as collateral.
Crono, that’s a horrible, horrible state to be in, and in asking for advice, you’re asking completely the wrong question. For your own sanity, you need to find something you enjoy doing, not just something that can soften the pain for one more day.
Well… I think I like playing Magic, or, at least, I like winning at Magic. (When I lose a lot, I have a tendency to take it pretty hard.) For some reason, video games start to become a lot less appealing when I don’t have some homework to put off. But, yeah, to paraphrase something I once heard about drug addiction, I don’t play video games to games to feel good, I play them in order to feel normal.
Maybe a standard day job isn’t right for you, but you need to look for something more ambitious than living with your parents, even if you enjoy the amenities.
Let me put it this way:
If I won a huge lottery jackpot tomorrow and could easily afford to maintain my current lifestyle with no effort, independent of my parents’ financial support, I still probably wouldn’t move out, because I like living with my parents. What bothers me is that I’m dependent on them for financial support, so whenever they ask me to do something, there’s always an undercurrent of “if you make us angry enough, you’ll be out on the streets.” (It still beats working, though.)
There’s only one thing that I want that I can’t get by living at home, and that’s a cat. It might be a bit silly, but I feel as though if I had a cat, I wouldn’t have to be lonely or sad any more.
If you think you can do well at Intrade, I’ll loan you the money if you can put up your karma as collateral.
That sounds flagrantly inappropriate. If you are confident that CronoDAS trying his hand at Intrade would be a good risk, why don’t you just loan him the money and ask for interest or some percentage of what he makes? If you aren’t confident that he’d do well enough to pay you back, isn’t this just outright karma purchase?
If you expect that he’d make some effort, and be defeated by akrasia, then clearly, you are not confident that he would do well.
My point isn’t that, however. My point is that karma is inappropriate collateral, even if there were some easy way to move it from one person to another.
The only thing inhibiting such a transfer is the very fact that those who consider it innapropriate would prevent it politically. Even then, if someone wants to and is uninterested in said social judgements beyond their political implications then it would not exactly be hard to make the transfer subtly.
Well, you really, really need to change your entire outlook and work on the laziness.
But if you’re not going to do that: Have you tried betting in prediction markets like Intrade? If you’re good at noticing things that are “obviously” going to happen but aren’t correctly priced, or have enough money to afford to be right on average, that could work. It does require an initial investment though.
I’ve been on it since August and have played conservatively so I’ve only made about a 5% return. (Made small amounts on the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies.)
Intrade is an interesting suggestion, but I don’t think he could make enough on it. He wants 8000 USD a year, and even if we assume he can get 10%, he’ll still need 80k invested.
I don’t think he has 80k to spare, and I have to wonder—is 10% feasible in the long run? I could see getting it in an election year easily, because the markets are so volatile and heavily traded, but what about off-years?
Well, I should clarify that I think a smart bias-educated person can beat the prediction markets fairly easily—I doubled my (small) investment in the IEM just by exploiting some obvious biases in the last presidential election, and I know I’m not the smartest bear around. My doubt is whether he can beat the market enough: any sum of money CronoDAS has is likely small enough he would need really absurd returns.
Are there differences between prediction and markets that make it easier for a “smart bias-educated person” to win fairly easily?
Besides what Nick said, people seem to treat prediction markets more as entertainment than seriously. For example, Ron Paul or Al Gore should never have broken 1%, and Hillary shares were high long after it became obvious she wasn’t going to make the nomination. These were all pretty clear to anyone suspicious of fanciful wouldn’t-it-be-fun? scenarios and being biased towards what one would like to happen.
If you think its fairly easy, then I’d be curious to know whether you’re putting your money where your mouth is… how much have you invested?
I started in the IEM with ~$20, and even after taking some heavy losses in 2004 and whatever fee the IEM charged ($5?), I still cashed out $38 in 2008. If you’re interested in more details, see my http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets
I appreciate your careful documentation. And I thought these words of yours were wise:
“I often use them [prediction markets] to sanity-check myself by asking ‘If I disagree, what special knowledge do I have?’ Often I have none.”
Words are vague, lets use numbers. Say you were forced to invest $1000 in the prediction markets over the next year. What probability would you assign various outcomes: e.g. [-100%,-50%], [-50%,-25%] [-25%,-10%], [-10%,0] [0,10%], [10%,25%] [25%, 50%], [50%,100%], [100%, 200%], and [200%, 1000000%]
One must be wary of faux precision. But I think I would put the odds of >100% or <-40% at under 30%; I’d assign another 10 or 20% to a gain between 30% and 100%, and leave the rest to the range of small losses/gains.
The ten categories I suggested may be a bit excessive, but it would be much easier to judge if you were a little more precise. You acknowledge a non-trivial chance of losing a non-trivial amount of money. The confusion is that I thought your previous statement that a “smart bias-educated person can beat the prediction markets fairly easily” would preclude this.
You acknowledge a non-trivial chance of losing a non-trivial amount of money. The confusion is that I thought your previous statement that a “smart bias-educated person can beat the prediction markets fairly easily” would preclude this.
There are arbitrage opportunities, but they’re not what I’m thinking of.
An analogy: knowing about biases and how to play optimally is important to play poker at any high level; but that still doesn’t mean you’re going to win every hand. I might correctly call an election for Obama, but that’s not going to help me as a trader if he abruptly dies of a heart-attack or Sarah Palin stages a coup with a crack unit of Alaskan hunters—I’ll still lose my money. I don’t see any contradiction here.
My answer to whether there are differences between prediction [markets] and markets was no, except in as much as prediction markets that are currently active are far larger (noise cancellation), more heavily traded (more information from more experts is represented already), and have had longer for biasses to be exploited and so corrected for.
Well, if we really wanted to other-optimize we’d try to change your outlook on life, but I’m sure you get a lot of such advice already.
One thing you could try is making websites to sell advertising and maybe amazon clickthroughs. You would have to learn some new skills and have a little bit of discipline (and have some ideas about what might be popular). You could always start with the games you are interested in.
There’s plenty of information out there about doing this. It will take a while to build up the income, and you may not be motivated enough to learn what you need to do to succeed.
Unless that changes then, I wouldn’t particularly recommend programming as a job. I quite like my programming job but that’s because I like programming and I don’t work in a dilbert cartoon.
You might want to look into setting up a business in Second Life. If you learn the programming language it uses, you can find work fairly easily writing custom code for people, and/or make various things to sell, and it’s all on your terms.
If you’re interested, and want help getting started, my screen name there is Adelene Dawner.
An e-bay business? When you feel like making money, you can post some things for sale, and as soon as the bid is over and you ship the item your obligation is done. It would require some research to find what makes enough money and what you wouldn’t mind making or finding. I know you can make money selling all kinds of personalized niche items. The materials needed to get started and try it out could also be quite modest. (To make 8K/year, you’d have to sell ~30 items a week, assuming a profit of $5 per item.)
If you have any crafting skills, or if you can make food of some kind that’s fairly portable and doesn’t need refrigeration, and you have access to someplace where you can park with your wares and bother passerby, that might work. I once made about $30 sitting in a hallway at school for an afternoon selling muffins for a buck fifty each (I was on a muffin-baking spree, and my freezer was getting full), and my town has a fair number of street vendors in nice weather (I have bought things from them before). If the only problem with cashiering was that you weren’t supposed to read, this doesn’t seem like it would present any problems for you, since, who’s going to stop you?
Some places might require you to have a permit; I’m pretty sure the street vendors have to get one every morning from town hall. Nobody bothered me when I sold muffins and I didn’t have any kind of permission, though.
Well, an afternoon, plus baking time for six basic muffins and variations, plus cooking time for the applesauce that went into one batch of muffins, plus the cost of all the ingredients, plus the time it took to write up little flavor labels for each muffin and individually wrap them in saran wrap… And transit time by bus to and from school… I baked the muffins for fun, though, and only decided to sell them when I did not have room to store them and wasn’t eating them fast enough.
I mean, I’m not knocking it as a way to spend time, or I wouldn’t have suggested it, but I’m not still doing it. I got thirty bucks, spent it on a used camera and a necklace, and called it good. And I had my laptop open the entire time and did exciting things like read Less Wrong, which is more or less what I would have been doing if I’d stayed home to goof off instead of selling muffins.
It doesn’t seem like she has a good grasp on what people are doing with Etsy and what it’s about. If you want to make a ‘profitable’ business, you’re already looking in the wrong place on Etsy. But if your time isn’t worth much and you want to sell some crafts, it seems to work fine.
No detailed suggestions, but one thing that comes out very strongly from what you wrote is that you don’t want a job and a job doesn’t want you.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Steve Pavlina wrote about why getting a job is a really bad idea; as for what to do instead, to make your way in the world, some of his other stuff may be of interest. (His other stuff also includes some things I think are woo, so don’t take this as a pointer to a pure fount of wisdom.)
I second the suggestions made by others to look for freelance computing work. It sounds ideal for your situation, if you can learn to take orders from yourself, which it sounds like you won’t from other people.
A retail job other than the supermarket might be interesting. Alternately, take a notepad instead of a novel and doodle/write instead of read when there are no customers.
I don’t know if your BS in comp engineering includes other aspects of computer work than programming, and I don’t know if people hire for Configuration management/process control or reliability testing right away. If the answer is yes to both, then those jobs are much more structured than “make the computer do this ’kay by.” I’ve never had a programming job where I didn’t have to report to CM/process often enough that I felt I could get away with slacking. Lots of itty bitty crunch times.
Also if you attend a lot of big magic tournaments it is pretty easy to make some money with smart trading and selling on ebay. Just pay attention to ebay values for cards. Also keep track of differing values of cards in different geographic areas.
As far as I’m concerned, the ideal source of income would be something with no set hours, that I could leave and come back to as I please. In other words, if I decide that I’d rather play video games for a month instead of earning money, it won’t prevent me from earning money the month after that.
You can easily do that with a business, if you set it up correctly, and you are willing to spend money to make money. More to the point, though, you’d need to actually want to have a business, a bit more badly than you appear to want a job. ;-)
I’ve always heard that having a successful business is usually an awful lot of work, even more than being an employee. At least, that’s what my father says, and he’s almost always right.
It’s a bit of a cliche for children of a certain age to say that their parents don’t understand them when, in fact, they understand them perfectly well, but my father has admitted to me that he doesn’t understand my feelings and behavior, so I’m not going to him for advice on how to live my life.
Perhaps it is possible that your parent(s) “doesn’t understand you” but still internally expects to, and so does worse than someone who doesn’t know you or knows you from recent experience.
So, I’m looking for some advice.
I seem to have finally reached at that stage in my life where I find myself in need of an income. I’m not interested in a particularly large income; at the moment, I only want just enough to feed a Magic: the Gathering and video game habit, and maybe pay for medical insurance. Something like $8,000 a year, after taxes, would be more than enough, as long as I can continue to live in my parents’ house rent-free.
The usual method of getting an income is to get a full-time job. However, I don’t find that appealing, not one bit. I want to have lots of free time in which to use the things I buy with the money I would earn. I’d much rather just continue to spend down my savings than work more than two days a week at a normal job.
This suggests that instead, I should try to get a part-time job. Chances are, that would mean working in a local restaurant or store of some kind. Unfortunately, I tried one of these once before, and it didn’t work out very well. I was hired to be a cashier at a local supermarket. To my great surprise, I didn’t particularly mind the work, but on my third day after being hired, I was fired for insubordination. (I had a paperback novel with me, and I wouldn’t stop reading it during periods when there were no customers.) I’ve also tried working for a temp agency. That didn’t work out too well either. After completing my first assignment, I was told that the company I was contracted out to complained about my behavior (it’s a long story), and so I would not be considered for any other assignments. In effect, I was fired from there, too.
As far as I’m concerned, the ideal source of income would be something with no set hours, that I could leave and come back to as I please. In other words, if I decide that I’d rather play video games for a month instead of earning money, it won’t prevent me from earning money the month after that. Unfortunately, the only things I know of offhand that work like that are writing (which is extremely hard to make a living at, and requires a lot of time and effort anyway) and online poker (which I suck at). I’m lazy and undisciplined, and I’m not particularly interested in changing that, so I’m hoping to find a way to make money that works even if I don’t try very hard at it.
In terms of skills and education, I have a B.S. from Rutgers University in computer engineering. I can program, but when I’ve tried programming as a job (as a summer intern), it turned into a Dilbert cartoon very, very quickly. Basically, I was given vague instructions, left on my own to do whatever, and instead of working, I mostly sat and surfed the Web while feeling guilty about not working. I don’t think I want to do programming professionally. I ever have to sit in another cubicle again, there’s a good chance I’m quitting on the spot.
So, um… I need some suggestions on what to do. Bring on the other-optimizing?
Serious question: why? If there was a pill you could take that would magically make you disciplined and hard working, would you turn it down? The pill wouldn’t make you unable to play computer games, or surf the web; it would just mean that if you said to yourself “for the next two hours I’m going to do X, without getting distracted by computer games or surfing the web” you would carry that intention out.
I tend to be lazy and undisciplined, but I also tend to find that even if your job doesn’t really do anyone any good in the large, working at work is more fun than slacking off. I’m increasingly coming to think that the rewards I get when I’m lazy and undisciplined aren’t up to much. What are the upsides, for you, of being lazy and undisciplined?
I’ve always thought of “discipline” as a bit of a rip-off. To me, “discipline” suggests “the willingness to do something unpleasant now, in exchange for a later reward.” The problem with this is that, even though you do get the reward, you’ve spent all that time doing something unpleasant, when you could have been doing something pleasant—such as playing video games—instead. It doesn’t seem like a good way to maximize “moments of pleasure” over the near future. Being lazy and undisciplined means I don’t go off chasing future rewards that turn out not to be worth the trouble.
My mom says that, as a young child, I had a “low frustration tolerance,” which might explain a lot. I suspect that “doing something I don’t feel like” feels worse to me than it does to most people, although I can’t prove this. In college, I once started to feel physically ill whenever I looked at my “Engineering Mechanics—Statics” textbook. There was something deep inside me, screaming, “This is awful! Avoid this!” whenever I was confronted with my homework. I only ever got work done when I became more afraid of not doing it than I was of doing it, if that makes any sense.
Not to play psychiatrist, but this sounds like a more likely explanation for your predicament than the hypothesis of contentment. If you could take a pill that would remove your anxiety when you faced the prospect of doing something that appears difficult or that you might be judged on, would you take that pill?
ETA: This is starting to remind me of Robin Hanson’s recent post.
You know, I just might. The “don’t get frustrated” pill seems more in line with my preferences than a “be willing to play hurt” pill. The last time I tried—well, “was pushed into” is more accurate than “tried”—filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.
Incidentally, I’m a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.
Another note: I’ve generally found that, when I “work hard” at something, I’m usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months’ worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as “lazy.” I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don’t trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)
The only emotion that I’ve found that really motivates me to do things I don’t normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I’ll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to “design” digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.
In the book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Ralph Koster (of possible special interest to a game nerd) he basically defines “fun” as “learning without pressure”. Learning, in this context, means improving skills and responding to a challenge where there is no extrinsic consequence for failure.
Your desire for a job you can “take or leave” on a day-to-day basis, and your anxiety about homework, fits well with (but is more extreme than, I think) my own experience. If I were to diagnose myself with something (which I am loathe to do) it would be some type of anxiety disorder ( I have a friend with similar issues who was so diagnosed, medicated, and actually seems to be doing better, although it’s difficult to separate cause from effect here).
See if you relate to the following anecdote: in grade 9 I entered a special school program which was kind of like correspondence (work through assignments at your own pace) except that it was held at a regular high school so that students could socialize, have progress monitored by and access to teachers, and take supervised written tests whenever we were ready. Sounds pretty great compared to normal classes? It was. But, my first year (grade 9) I got rather behind in my work, in more than one subject, and started getting concerned reports home. Even though the work I had to do was obviously within my capabilities, I found it very difficult to face. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and finish everything in one big cram at the end of the year, and I pulled OK grades, but I stressed out endlessly over what was really a trivial amount of work (which I recognized even at the time).
The following year (grade 10) I hit the ground running in September. By mid-october I had finished Math 10. I got similarly ahead in other subjects, and the further ahead I got the easier it was for me to work more and more. (To a point, I also had a defiant self-image of rational laziness so that I didn’t want to do more than the minimum amount of work, even if I could do it faster/better. So I never skipped a grade, I would just get ahead by a few weeks/months and then… yup, play Magic (the original (Beta/Unlimited)!) and basically fuck around with my friends, computer, porn, etc.
More recently, as a PhD student, I still encounter the same thing. When I’ve fallen behind on a project, often due to unrelated and mild doubts/laziness/underestimation, I become more and more unwilling to face work the farther behind I get. OTOH if a colleague comes to me with a problem which I am not “supposed to be” working on, I become immediately energized. Of course, I allow myself to work on side projects less and less the farther “behind” I am on the projects I am assigned to.
I have finally seen the pattern, maybe too late not to suffer serious damage in my “career”. It is largely this: I hate exposing myself to the possibility of public failure. For me, the “consequence” which makes learning/trying/failing/mastering “not fun” is simply having to admit that a) I want to get/achieve/do/win at X and b) I failed (in this instance) to get/achieve/do/win at X. When I am doing something optional, and where I am not expected to succeed (e.g. because it’s someone else’s problem and any contribution I make will be accepted with grateful surprise), I can be extremely goal-directed and work with intense focus. In the very short term, fear of missing a hard deadline (mainly in undergrad) can also make me work til the break of dawn with amazing concentration, much as you described anger doing for you.
I’m not suggesting that you have exactly the same anxieties that i do. But recognizing what it is that separates the activities you can focus and work on from those you can’t may lead to surprising revelations about yourself, and may even suggest ways to find a job that’s a good fit for your temperament.
Sorry if this was a bit rambling and self-indulgent.
This, too, makes a lot of sense.
That’s really interesting… I think I understand you better now. I think that, because of this recurring anxiety and frustration, you’ve felt for a long time that your options were:
achieve in the way others want you to, but hate every minute of it, or
restrict yourself to playing games and doing things that don’t cause anxiety or frustration for you.
As per the second pill example, I think this is a false dichotomy, but a universal one; people take their emotional reactions for granted, and don’t often imagine that it could be possible to feel differently about something that persistently troubles them. (Of course, it doesn’t seem possible to just feel differently by a direct act of will, which is all that most people ever think of to try.)
Given that you’d take the second pill, though, you can now imagine a third alternative:
become able to do some difficult and long-term (but rewarding) activities without automatically feeling this anxiety and frustration, thus giving you many more interesting options for how to spend your time.
If that sounds appealing to you (and of course it doesn’t mean you’ll have to end up doing what others want you to do; it just means you’ll be able to genuinely explore some new options), then it might be time to start carefully analyzing why you get these feelings, and whether there’s something you can do to change that...
Thank you for your help. I’ll have to let this stew in my subconscious for a while, then get back to you.
One thing I think I should look into in more detail is tutoring; I did a lot of that informally in high school and I was a teacher’s assistant of sorts for a math class during college. Does anyone here know anything about how to make money as a tutor? (I live within easy commuting distance to Rutgers University, so that might help.)
For CronoDAS or anyone else thinking of using poker as a handy side-income (or small main income), I have a few words of warning. First, the games have gotten tougher and will continue to do so.
Second, poker is really demanding game psychologically. This is because the expected value of a competent player is so small compared to the inherent variance of the game. The expected value in say one hundred hands might be 1-2 units whereas one standard deviation in similar sample might be 20 units (or even significantly more). This in turn means that a good player might have periods of tens of thousands of hands where he loses money. Dealing with this sounds easy in theory, but is really hard in practice.
That said, it shouldn’t take but couple of months to become a winning player with today’s resources (books and video coaching sites) and make a modest income with effort of only like 20 hours a week.
By the way, another downside of the occupation is that it’s completely useless for the humanity in general and your income will come from people that shouldn’t be playing the game in the first place.
When I played poker with my brother and his friends, I didn’t think it was all that fun, and I didn’t win very much either. I don’t plan on going into online poker for real money any time soon.
Magic is my game. ;)
Could you play Magic profiessionally? What’s in the way? Just a matter of startup money?
Well, there are a few things. I’m good at Magic, but I don’t think I’m good enough to play professionally. I’ve never qualified for the Pro Tour. There seem to be lots of players that are better than I am, and you usually have to be world-class in order to make more than pocket change by playing in Magic tournaments. (In order to get better at Magic, the obvious next step for me to take is to try to seek out players in my area that already are world-class and learn from them.) Additionally, competitive Magic requires a continual investment in new cards; $1000 or more a year is quite possible, and travel costs and entry fees also eat up a large chunk of change.
The closest thing to online poker for Magic is, well, “Magic Online.” At one point, I was playing it and turning a profit, at least in terms of the MTGO event tickets. However, turning MTGO event tickets into cash is difficult, as eBay and PayPal fees eat up a distressingly large percentage of what you can make by selling them, and if someone tries to cheat you, there’s little recourse.
If you channel the income in the right direction, it won’t be useless.
I read jajvirta as saying that the occupation itself doesn’t produce positive externalities for mankind, unlike productive work in physics research or something.
Its not only a lack of positive externalities, but the presence of negative externalities. Your gains are someone else’s losses.
You provide entertainment to people. Both players chose to play so even if one player has a negative expectation in $ he might enjoy playing the game.
Productive work in physics could produce negative externalities if humanity cannot be trusted with new physics results. Hell, even math education could produce negative externalities!
In Hunting Fish, A Cross-Country Search for America’s Worst Poker Players, Jay Greenspan conceives of the poker world as a giant inverted pyramid, with the fishiest (i.e., least skilled) players at the top pouring money down the pyramid toward the most skilled players at the bottom, such as Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey.
Another thing: Can you go over this one more time:
Something like $8,000 a year, after taxes, would be more than enough, as long as I can continue to live in my parents’ house rent-free.
What made you decide you’re okay with living with your parents for the rest of your life? Did you really give up hope or something?
Well, for one, I like the house I live in, and, for the most part, my parents let me do what I want. I just don’t feel any particular need or desire to move out and, financially at least, I’m getting a great deal. Moving out would drive up my expenses enormously, because I’d no longer be able to use my parents’ stuff, including their HDTV, their internet connection, and all those other things. (Incidentally, I have a first cousin once removed who never moved out of his parents’ house. Unlike me, though, he does have a job.)
As for giving up hope, well, yeah, I basically gave up hope way back in 1997. I have a lot of trouble trying to imagine the kind of activity that I would find fulfilling and could realistically expect to get paid for. For the most part, I just try to get through life one day at a time, doing my best to anesthetize myself and not think about the future.
Crono, that’s a horrible, horrible state to be in, and in asking for advice, you’re asking completely the wrong question. For your own sanity, you need to find something you enjoy doing, not just something that can soften the pain for one more day.
I’ve been in your position before. In some respects, I still am. I thought I couldn’t get a job and any job I’d get I’d be unable to handle. I had no connections, but finally was able to find one in my field.
Maybe a standard day job isn’t right for you, but you need to look for something more ambitious than living with your parents, even if you enjoy the amenities. There are many things you can try. Just keep churning through them, or resign yourself to worsening sadness.
If you think you can do well at Intrade, I’ll loan you the money if you can put up your karma as collateral.
Well… I think I like playing Magic, or, at least, I like winning at Magic. (When I lose a lot, I have a tendency to take it pretty hard.) For some reason, video games start to become a lot less appealing when I don’t have some homework to put off. But, yeah, to paraphrase something I once heard about drug addiction, I don’t play video games to games to feel good, I play them in order to feel normal.
Let me put it this way:
If I won a huge lottery jackpot tomorrow and could easily afford to maintain my current lifestyle with no effort, independent of my parents’ financial support, I still probably wouldn’t move out, because I like living with my parents. What bothers me is that I’m dependent on them for financial support, so whenever they ask me to do something, there’s always an undercurrent of “if you make us angry enough, you’ll be out on the streets.” (It still beats working, though.)
There’s only one thing that I want that I can’t get by living at home, and that’s a cat. It might be a bit silly, but I feel as though if I had a cat, I wouldn’t have to be lonely or sad any more.
That sounds flagrantly inappropriate. If you are confident that CronoDAS trying his hand at Intrade would be a good risk, why don’t you just loan him the money and ask for interest or some percentage of what he makes? If you aren’t confident that he’d do well enough to pay you back, isn’t this just outright karma purchase?
Just a hedge against any akrasia that might pop up.
Replace “do well enough” with “make any effort at all”, then.
“make any effort at all” =/= “no akrasia”
If you expect that he’d make some effort, and be defeated by akrasia, then clearly, you are not confident that he would do well.
My point isn’t that, however. My point is that karma is inappropriate collateral, even if there were some easy way to move it from one person to another.
“Even if”? Are you serious?
The only thing inhibiting such a transfer is the very fact that those who consider it innapropriate would prevent it politically. Even then, if someone wants to and is uninterested in said social judgements beyond their political implications then it would not exactly be hard to make the transfer subtly.
I wouldn’t think that I know more than anybody else about most of the topics on Intrade, although betting against cold fusion seems like a good idea.
Find odd programming jobs to do at home, like making websites for people or whatever. Get them at RentACoder or from people you know.
Well, you really, really need to change your entire outlook and work on the laziness.
But if you’re not going to do that: Have you tried betting in prediction markets like Intrade? If you’re good at noticing things that are “obviously” going to happen but aren’t correctly priced, or have enough money to afford to be right on average, that could work. It does require an initial investment though.
I’ve been on it since August and have played conservatively so I’ve only made about a 5% return. (Made small amounts on the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies.)
Intrade is an interesting suggestion, but I don’t think he could make enough on it. He wants 8000 USD a year, and even if we assume he can get 10%, he’ll still need 80k invested.
I don’t think he has 80k to spare, and I have to wonder—is 10% feasible in the long run? I could see getting it in an election year easily, because the markets are so volatile and heavily traded, but what about off-years?
Agreed. We should always be skeptical of an individual’s ability to beat the market.
Well, I should clarify that I think a smart bias-educated person can beat the prediction markets fairly easily—I doubled my (small) investment in the IEM just by exploiting some obvious biases in the last presidential election, and I know I’m not the smartest bear around. My doubt is whether he can beat the market enough: any sum of money CronoDAS has is likely small enough he would need really absurd returns.
Are there differences between prediction and markets that make it easier for a “smart bias-educated person” to win fairly easily?
If you think its fairly easy, then I’d be curious to know whether you’re putting your money where your mouth is… how much have you invested?
Besides what Nick said, people seem to treat prediction markets more as entertainment than seriously. For example, Ron Paul or Al Gore should never have broken 1%, and Hillary shares were high long after it became obvious she wasn’t going to make the nomination. These were all pretty clear to anyone suspicious of fanciful wouldn’t-it-be-fun? scenarios and being biased towards what one would like to happen.
I started in the IEM with ~$20, and even after taking some heavy losses in 2004 and whatever fee the IEM charged ($5?), I still cashed out $38 in 2008. If you’re interested in more details, see my http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets
I appreciate your careful documentation. And I thought these words of yours were wise: “I often use them [prediction markets] to sanity-check myself by asking ‘If I disagree, what special knowledge do I have?’ Often I have none.”
Words are vague, lets use numbers. Say you were forced to invest $1000 in the prediction markets over the next year. What probability would you assign various outcomes: e.g. [-100%,-50%], [-50%,-25%] [-25%,-10%], [-10%,0] [0,10%], [10%,25%] [25%, 50%], [50%,100%], [100%, 200%], and [200%, 1000000%]
One must be wary of faux precision. But I think I would put the odds of >100% or <-40% at under 30%; I’d assign another 10 or 20% to a gain between 30% and 100%, and leave the rest to the range of small losses/gains.
The ten categories I suggested may be a bit excessive, but it would be much easier to judge if you were a little more precise. You acknowledge a non-trivial chance of losing a non-trivial amount of money. The confusion is that I thought your previous statement that a “smart bias-educated person can beat the prediction markets fairly easily” would preclude this.
There are arbitrage opportunities, but they’re not what I’m thinking of.
An analogy: knowing about biases and how to play optimally is important to play poker at any high level; but that still doesn’t mean you’re going to win every hand. I might correctly call an election for Obama, but that’s not going to help me as a trader if he abruptly dies of a heart-attack or Sarah Palin stages a coup with a crack unit of Alaskan hunters—I’ll still lose my money. I don’t see any contradiction here.
Yes. Prediction markets are far smaller, and have far less intelligence devoted to exploiting away their irrationalities.
Efficiency.
my question was about how much more efficient the stock market is, and why.
My answer to whether there are differences between prediction [markets] and markets was no, except in as much as prediction markets that are currently active are far larger (noise cancellation), more heavily traded (more information from more experts is represented already), and have had longer for biasses to be exploited and so corrected for.
Efficiency.
Try babysitting.
Well, if we really wanted to other-optimize we’d try to change your outlook on life, but I’m sure you get a lot of such advice already.
One thing you could try is making websites to sell advertising and maybe amazon clickthroughs. You would have to learn some new skills and have a little bit of discipline (and have some ideas about what might be popular). You could always start with the games you are interested in.
There’s plenty of information out there about doing this. It will take a while to build up the income, and you may not be motivated enough to learn what you need to do to succeed.
Do you program for fun?
No.
Unless that changes then, I wouldn’t particularly recommend programming as a job. I quite like my programming job but that’s because I like programming and I don’t work in a dilbert cartoon.
You might want to look into setting up a business in Second Life. If you learn the programming language it uses, you can find work fairly easily writing custom code for people, and/or make various things to sell, and it’s all on your terms.
If you’re interested, and want help getting started, my screen name there is Adelene Dawner.
An e-bay business? When you feel like making money, you can post some things for sale, and as soon as the bid is over and you ship the item your obligation is done. It would require some research to find what makes enough money and what you wouldn’t mind making or finding. I know you can make money selling all kinds of personalized niche items. The materials needed to get started and try it out could also be quite modest. (To make 8K/year, you’d have to sell ~30 items a week, assuming a profit of $5 per item.)
If you have any crafting skills, or if you can make food of some kind that’s fairly portable and doesn’t need refrigeration, and you have access to someplace where you can park with your wares and bother passerby, that might work. I once made about $30 sitting in a hallway at school for an afternoon selling muffins for a buck fifty each (I was on a muffin-baking spree, and my freezer was getting full), and my town has a fair number of street vendors in nice weather (I have bought things from them before). If the only problem with cashiering was that you weren’t supposed to read, this doesn’t seem like it would present any problems for you, since, who’s going to stop you?
Some places might require you to have a permit; I’m pretty sure the street vendors have to get one every morning from town hall. Nobody bothered me when I sold muffins and I didn’t have any kind of permission, though.
Wow! $30? For only an afternoon plus baking time?
quits day job
ETA: Okay, that was too snarky, even for me. Crono only wants to make $8000/year, and that’s good enough for that goal. So, good suggestion.
Well, an afternoon, plus baking time for six basic muffins and variations, plus cooking time for the applesauce that went into one batch of muffins, plus the cost of all the ingredients, plus the time it took to write up little flavor labels for each muffin and individually wrap them in saran wrap… And transit time by bus to and from school… I baked the muffins for fun, though, and only decided to sell them when I did not have room to store them and wasn’t eating them fast enough.
I mean, I’m not knocking it as a way to spend time, or I wouldn’t have suggested it, but I’m not still doing it. I got thirty bucks, spent it on a used camera and a necklace, and called it good. And I had my laptop open the entire time and did exciting things like read Less Wrong, which is more or less what I would have been doing if I’d stayed home to goof off instead of selling muffins.
Along the same vein, Etsy is a place to do that online (not so much with the food though)
What are your thoughts on the recent “Etsy considered harmful” article?
It doesn’t seem like she has a good grasp on what people are doing with Etsy and what it’s about. If you want to make a ‘profitable’ business, you’re already looking in the wrong place on Etsy. But if your time isn’t worth much and you want to sell some crafts, it seems to work fine.
No detailed suggestions, but one thing that comes out very strongly from what you wrote is that you don’t want a job and a job doesn’t want you.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Steve Pavlina wrote about why getting a job is a really bad idea; as for what to do instead, to make your way in the world, some of his other stuff may be of interest. (His other stuff also includes some things I think are woo, so don’t take this as a pointer to a pure fount of wisdom.)
I second the suggestions made by others to look for freelance computing work. It sounds ideal for your situation, if you can learn to take orders from yourself, which it sounds like you won’t from other people.
del
I’m only passingly familiar with Pavlina. Would you say the same thing about the advice of Tim Ferris?
del
Ok, someone tell me what the fuck this woo shit is!
Edit: Ok, pardon my language. That rules out my two first hypotheses. Anyone?
woo
Nice. Now I have a swear word that means something actually bad as opposed to taboo for doing in public.
I always thought “taboo for doing in public” was what the swear word meant.
A retail job other than the supermarket might be interesting. Alternately, take a notepad instead of a novel and doodle/write instead of read when there are no customers.
I don’t know if your BS in comp engineering includes other aspects of computer work than programming, and I don’t know if people hire for Configuration management/process control or reliability testing right away. If the answer is yes to both, then those jobs are much more structured than “make the computer do this ’kay by.” I’ve never had a programming job where I didn’t have to report to CM/process often enough that I felt I could get away with slacking. Lots of itty bitty crunch times.
Freelance programming possibly?
Also if you attend a lot of big magic tournaments it is pretty easy to make some money with smart trading and selling on ebay. Just pay attention to ebay values for cards. Also keep track of differing values of cards in different geographic areas.
You can easily do that with a business, if you set it up correctly, and you are willing to spend money to make money. More to the point, though, you’d need to actually want to have a business, a bit more badly than you appear to want a job. ;-)
I’ve always heard that having a successful business is usually an awful lot of work, even more than being an employee. At least, that’s what my father says, and he’s almost always right.
Setting one up is. Having one is not necessarily the case.
So why aren’t you asking his advice. ;-)
I said almost, didn’t I?
It’s a bit of a cliche for children of a certain age to say that their parents don’t understand them when, in fact, they understand them perfectly well, but my father has admitted to me that he doesn’t understand my feelings and behavior, so I’m not going to him for advice on how to live my life.
And you expect complete strangers to do better? I’m not sure that’s rational.
Conversely, if you’ve adequately constrained the problem for us, surely you can adequately constrain it for him?
That’s… a pretty good point, actually.
At least there’s more of you, though; you might suggest something I haven’t thought about before.
Perhaps it is possible that your parent(s) “doesn’t understand you” but still internally expects to, and so does worse than someone who doesn’t know you or knows you from recent experience.