ARE YOU WAITING TO DO SOMETHING AMAZING?

Today it’s my pleasure to welcome Melissa Gorzelanczyk as a guest author here at Life Without Pants. Melissa writes at Amazing Work and Peace & Projects, where she is figuring out life, love and getting (amazing) stuff done. Come over for a visit, lovely.(Totally her word, I couldn’t pull off calling you guys “lovely”…)

If you want some solid advice on how to live life, hook up with a 5^th grade guidance counselor.

I did, along with Little Boy and Mr. Right. I kept track of the main points, feeling a positive, sunshiny feeling spread as we talked. Here’s the gist of the meeting:

• People that do work they love are extremely successful.
• People that do work they love live happy lives.
• Finding and doing work you love is the only option.

Right! I’m on board. So is every 5th grader in the district. Its simple: find something you love to do and make money doing it.

Fast forward to turning 18, entering  the “real world” and earning a big F for failure for taking 5^th grade advice.

In the real world, most people I know don’t love work. They love leaving work. They love the weekend. They love celebrating a hard week at work by spending some of their hard-earned money. They live in a constant state of the Mondays.

I wondered: When is the disconnect? When do you decide to give up on doing work you truly love to simply make money? (Disclaimer: Money is good, money is awesome, I can never have enough, personally. You need money to live, plain and simple. If you think this post is about giving up money to blindly follow a whim – AKA your passion in life – you’re wrong).

BUT REALLY: WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT WORK YOU LOVE?

Take my own work, for instance. I’m finally doing my amazing work for a living. But I’m almost 30 years old. So what have I been doing until now?

Amazing work on the side, you guess? Making money and then switching gears to do what really lights me up, what leaves me shouting, “Yes! This is what I want to share with you!” … All those years …right?

No. That’s what this post is about. For 10 years, I didn’t do much amazing work. I did ok and good work, or I’ll admit, work I hated but pretended to like. I ignored the writer inside, putting her on a shelf for, “Someday, later, when I have time.”

This post is a confession: It was a mistake.

Because unless you’re working for yourself, making craptons of money doing exactly what you want, chances are your day is spent following someone else’s direction. That’s how companies are built. You’re their employee. They own your time.

But what about the other time? That time you spend watching TV, feeding virtual fish on Facebook and hosting whine and wine nights? You own that, you. Own. That. Time.

It was an easy but blindsiding epiphany. I saw: my day job was not always filled with amazing work. Slowly, I changed that. I uncovered the amazing parts and started to do more of those things. I didn’t ask for permission. Then, I took the time I actually owned and filled it with even more amazing work.

And the past 10 years? Well, obviously I didn’t have time to follow my dreams. When I was single, I was too busy. When I was planning a wedding, I was busy. Raising two kids, duh, busy. Name an excuse, insert here.

But redemption, I finally wondered: “Yeah, why DON’T you start a blog?”

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Let me turn the tables: What’s your answer? Why haven’t you started that thing you want to do? If you’re waiting for permission to go, you have it, go! Don’t wait any longer … do what you really want to do. Don’t wait for a time when you’re not busy (doesn’t exist) or an investor or an agent. Go. Don’t quit your day job. Just take a peek at the next chapter in life. Get out of the prologue.

Today is the best day to take off your pants.

Today is the best day to do something amazing. What will you do?

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Gumroad is the brainchild of Sahil Lavingia, a 19 year old college dropout, who has worked on some amazingly creative projects in the past. With Gumroad he envisages a simple solution to sell all virtual goods by just sharing a link. The process is simple: Upload your product / point to the location where you have a product online, enter your PayPal account information , decide on a price that you want to charge for your product and Gumroad provides you a link that you can share anywhere, clicking on which enables a buyer to purchase your product using their credit card.

There is no monthly fee, no bandwidth charges and no limit on the number of products, size of the product, but they retain 5%+ $0.3 of each transaction. You are paid into your PayPal account at the end of every month.

Previously  Sahil has been a co-founder of Pinterest, developed the Turntable app for the iPhone etc. To get more information on all the projects that Sahil has worked on, you can visit his personal website. Checkout Sahil's interview below:

Sahil, please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us something about Gumroad.

Hi, my name's Sahil. I am a designer and coder working on a project called Gumroad. The goal is to democratize the ability to sell stuff online. We do this by making selling stuff as easy as sharing stuff.


What is the concept behind Gumroad and what inspired you to create this application?

You can think of it like bit.ly but for paid things. There is all this amazing content all over the web and on everyone's computer, but it is incredibly hard to sell any of it. Gumroad works by allowing any piece of content to be 'wrapped' in a Gumroad link that allows you to charge a price for it. I was inspired to create it because I wanted to sell an icon I designed to my Twitter followers, and there was no easy and simple way to do it. I thought there should be, so I built Gumroad.


Is there a limit on the number of products/size of a file that user’s can sell using Gumroad?

No, we think that as long as you have things to sell, you should be able to sell them.


As a Start-Up what was the biggest difficulty you faced from the point that you conceived this idea to having it fully functional?

Luckily there haven't been many problems. People have been enthusiastic (so far) about the problem and the solution we're providing. Though I am sure problems will arise as we start to grow.


What differentiates Gumroad from so many other shopping cart providers? How do you plan to promote your application?

We don't think of ourselves as a shopping cart. We think that you have a lot of content, and the ability to talk to a lot of the people that already want that content. All they want is a way to pay you for it. There's no need for a storefront, or a shopping cart. I just want the online equivalent of handing you a dollar in person!



I saw that you have the option to add your PayPal account information into an account. So is having a PayPal account mandatory to sell with Gumroad?  If not how is the money transferred into a user’s account?

For now, yes. We will support other options to get paid out in the near future.


Apart from working on creating applications like Gumroad, what else do you enjoy doing in your free time? What is that one book/movie/song/blog that you find yourself going back to for inspiration?

I have recently gotten into reading. You learn a lot from other people's words and lives and perspectives. It helps keep me open-minded, I think. There isn't one specific thing, I enjoy new things every day — which is part of the reason I'm building Gumroad: so I can be exposed to more and more great content!


What future enhancements have you planned for your application? Besides Gumroad are you working on any other killer projects?

Gumroad is my sole focus; I think it deserves all of my time. I think there are a lot of things that we can add on to the product in the future, but the priority will be determined by what our users want. That is always the most important thing.


What advice would you like to offer for budding developers and entrepreneurs?  

Build things that you think should exist; that will make the world a better place to live. And give it a fair shot. If it's a really great idea, you'll get shot down a million and one times. Keep at it.

Thank you taking the time for this interview Sahil, we wish you the very best for the future. 


You can also checkout the recent video discussion about Gumroad with Sahil on Techcrunch: