As a joke, I set my Facebook status to "Alan Lynn is going to start a pancakes by mail service." but after thinking about it, I thought it would be funnier if I actually did it.
I asked my friend Kevin Chang if he wanted some pancakes by mail. It took a little while to convince him, but we eventually worked out a deal. Kevin wanted me to ship it in a box to make sure the pancakes arrived in one piece, but I insisted it be shipped in an envelope. Our compromise was as follows:
When the pancakes arrive, Kevin rates their integrity on a scale of 0 to 10. If his rating is below a 5, then he doesn't pay anything for the pancakes. Otherwise, he pays for ingredients + shipping.
I recently discovered the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a place where you can pay anonymous people to do small tasks, or work on said tasks yourself. Amazon calls it "artificial artificial intelligence". It's mostly filled with small work-like tasks such as tagging an image or selecting pictures of wire strippers (which despite the warning, did not contain adult content).
After contemplating whether I was making enough money to power my laptop, it was clear that the other side of the table was where the fun was. I deposited the $1.29 I had made and got to work making my own task.
For the reward of 5 cents, I prompted 10 users with the following:
Today I was going through the pages on my websites, giving them titles. It took me a while to come up with something for my blog, but I've got it: Alan Lynn's Craplog, or The Plog for short.
If you don't know anything about me, I'll give you brief history. At the age of 21 I gave college the finger, getting a job the other finger, and have been sitting in an attic looking at my computer screen ever since.
Trying to work for yourself is difficult. You need to figure out a way to get somebody else to give you money. But I don't think that's the hardest part. The hardest part is getting yourself to do something other than loiter around the internet all day. Repeat for a day, a week, a month, a year. I don't know if I've made it past the day phase.
The key here is motivation, the most elusive noun in the English language. Suffice to say, I don't have it. The closest I have to motivation is the thrill of starting something new. Of course, all that's gotten me is a myriad of unfinished projects. I've tried setting goals: eventually I stop setting them or stop reaching them. I've tried working with other people: as soon as one person gets demotivated, so do the others. I've tried getting other people to keep tabs on my progress: they stop paying attention faster than I stop working.