Steve Pavlina completed one year of daily blog posts during 2020. I used to read a lot of his posts, bought his book and even signed up for a couple of his courses. His site was the first personal development blog I found, back in 2008 during a particularly boring day at work and I happened to search for “How to live without a job” (Spoiler alert, 10 years later I pretty much achieved that)

With the Lockdown in the UK looking like it’s not going anywhere, I thought I could do with a new challenge that I can do from home and I was always meaning to get round to actually updating my blog, so by committing to a challenge like this I think it will fit in with my lifestyle now. Who knows, I might even make some content that someone else in the world might actually find useful?! Or slightly amusing at the very least.

As for a very quick recap of my life ‘recently’, my job finished up in London finished up in October 2018 (company went bust.) The plan was to take 6 months out for doing my own projects for a while, before getting another job, but I realised I actually liked not working, and my rental flat in my hometown was actually paying my living costs, so I thought I would try to live the FIRE lifestyle I had been reading about. I moved out of London in November and then went to Kyoto, Japan for 3 months. During this time I worked with my friend doing app and website development in exchange for free accommodation while I explored Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka) and also went back to Tokyo for a couple of weeks. I returned to my hometown in February, just in time for the UK Lockdown and I’ve been here since then. Going out for my ‘allowed’ exercise and food shopping. From what was supposed to be ‘no more than 3 weeks’ has now turned into a full year and no signs of ending!

I must admit I reckon I’m in a significantly more privileged position than many others, whereby I’m staying at my Dad’s house rent-free (My costs extend to buying and making food for us, and cleaning the house) Have decent internet, my own room, Playstation, regular income from my flat and still work remotely for my friend in Japan. The FIRE dream looks like it might actually be taking shape! Absolutely not how I envisioned it, but the dream of waking up each day whenever I want to, doing what I want in my own time, and have my health.

So here’s what I’d like to do. Every day a year, a new blog post. I have no idea what I can write in a whole year, especially when I don’t get to go out and travel, but I’m sure that’s part of the challenge, to find something worth writing about?

In addition, I’d like to have a daily recommendation for a mobile app and a youtube channel. 

I spent most of my last year doing nothing but messing about on my mobile phone and watching youtube!

I’ve also got a youtube channel with 30 whole subscribers! These days it looks like making vlogs has more visibility than blogs (Its more a social platform) so maybe I should make a blog video every day too.

The main content I put so far has been holiday videos, and I really suspect that I’m the only one who watches the videos. But I do actually find the video creation process enjoyable and rewarding.

Also, I’m still working on keeping my own mobile apps up to date. I’m aware of just how much effort goes into these ‘free apps’ so I’d like to spend some time to appreciate the work that other people have done.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be running out of recommendations after a week, but that’ll give me incentive to spend time and ‘expand my horizons’ to find more interesting content. You never know, if anyone besides me reads this, they might even get a new suggestion and find something new!

Youtube recommendation:

My own channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlh23qNe8V0KAme0Htz2Og/videos

Why not be shameless from the very outset. I have a youtube channel. LAIK AND SUBSCRAIB! Mostly it’s little holiday videos I made during trips in Taiwan and Japan. I started it in 2018 for my Dad as a souvenir for our holiday to Japan together. Turns out I actually quite enjoyed making the videos and the post-editing process to make something slightly more watchable. (I used an app on my phone to stitch a whole bunch of small videos together, so you know the keyword here is ‘quality’)

App recommendation:

My own app! Lets Have Coffee. (iOS / web https://letshavecoffee-22e70.web.app/   Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martinogg.coffeepro&hl=en)

I’ve talked about this idea for a few years with friends, and never really made any progress on it until the end of last year when I finally got the finger out to start up. It’s a platonic online meetup app. The premise is that users search for others based on Hobbies and Interests. My initial idea was that you could search for people based on location and then use the app to meet in real life to chat about an indicated Hobby or Interest (hence the name Lets Have Coffee) However as Lockdown means meeting up physically is impossible, this is just an Internet meeting app. I’d like to go in further detail of the development of this app, but I’ll save that for another day.

I noticed it’s been 3 years since my last blog post and I’d like to get back into regular blogging, so I’ll give a quick synopsis of events in my life over that time.

2014
In 2014 I was still working on my own apps, whilst ‘travelling’ which meant spending most of my time in Dundee, Scotland, but with a 5 month trip staying in Tokyo and Taipei. My journey started with return tickets to Tokyo. I stayed there for about a month in a capsule hostel (think hostel, but with capsule style beds. I’m sure it was the future for the 80s) After that I booked return flights to Taipei and stayed there for 3 months with my girlfriend before returning to Tokyo for one more month (a one month rental of a room in a gaijin share house.) Finally I returned home to UK.
All that time I was working on my apps. I was progressing the Study N Walk flashcards apps and working on a new dictionary app called Plants Dictionary.
I continued working at home in UK until the end of December, where up until that point my revenue had been steadily increasing from a few pennies per month (autumn 2013) to 32 pounds in November 2014. However December’s income had reduced to 16 pounds and I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t really in a financial situation to accept that level of income and instability.

2015
The first three months I spent of 2015 I spent in Taipei with my girlfriend again, but looking into finding work in UK. I’d bought the plane tickets months in advance and made plans to see Olivia again.
I had a few Skype calls with recruiters in UK, which ultimately resulted with an interview in London when I came back in April.
This time however, my girlfriend came with me to live in UK. She had a 2 year working holiday visa and was applying for jobs in London as well. We drove down from Dundee to London (about 9 hours driving to our Airbnb in Milton Keynes) and stayed there for 4 days for the interviews in central London. However neither of us got any offers so we were back in Dundee. Olivia found a job as a live-in nanny near Glasgow, and I finally got a job in Dundee as a software engineer in August. Olivia’s job ended and then ultimately got another job in Dundee, so at least there wasn’t the 1.5 hour drive to meet her every week!
During most of 2015 I suffered from a health condition known as Achalasia, a condition which prevented me from eating too much. This required surgery in December. I’ll save this one for another blog post, but suffice to say it wasn’t a pleasant situation. Luckily all went well and I’m back in good health.

2016
2016 rolled round with spending Hogmanay in Amsterdam! I suppose it’s not a big enough deal to write about a long weekend on holiday when I’m writing just one paragraph per year, but it really was an amazing place! Particularly at New Years, with all the fireworks.
Work and life was fairly straight forward for the first half of the year. I paid off the mortgage on my flat in Dundee, Olivia and I got married in July. However there was a significant round of redundancies at my company. Luckily I still had a job in the end but during that time Olivia had a holiday booked in London. During her trip, she interviewed for a job and got it, after just one interview!
I was very surprised she had managed to do get the job offer so quickly, but she was not happy with her current job in Dundee so in combination with my own company’s difficulties at the time, I agreed that it would make sense to try something new.
She moved down and started working in London at the end of September. I gave my notice and drove down at the end of October. We moved into a room in a house near Lewisham, south London. I started working in a software company in mid November.

2017 and now
Unfortunately the company didn’t work out for me. I left at the end of march and decided to take some time out before going back into work. I already had holiday plans in April to go back to Taiwan for a week to meet Olivia’s family. During this time I did a lot of thinking and considered that I’d like to take a bit more time out and try something new. After all, I found myself in a new city, London no less, and there had to be lot of new things to see and do.
By coincidence, my friend back in Dundee was looking to start a small venture to make an app for games companies in Scotland, so I took the free time I finally get round to using the new Android Studio. All my previous android projects used eclipse and unity.
Upon reviewing my older apps, still on the market place, it appeared they were still being downloaded and creating constant, albeit little, revenue.

Currently I feel like it’s time to branch out and do something else for a while. Financially I’m in a reasonably safe place, as I am renting out my flat in Dundee which would theoretically extend my ‘runway’ in London to infinity, if I didn’t have responsibilities like eating out at restaurants and going out to social meetups…

I probably have a lot more to say but for the moment I’ll stop and say that I would like to get back into blogging regularly and I’ll post again soon.