All language subtitles for 03-How I Went From Minimum Wage To Making $40 Per Hr From Home In Under 9 Months-English

At the age of 18, I was completely neck deep in the system.

I was studying computer science at my local community college back in Arizona.

Not an Ivy League school, not even a university, but a community college.

That way I could save money and transfer to an actual university like ASU later.

At this community college, I worked on the side as a tutor making minimum wage.

I say tutor, but it was really more like a glorified tech support position

next to the library where all the public computers were,

where I would help students print papers and teach students how to use Excel.

It was pretty awful.

I was doing that part-time making minimum wage,

and before that I was a taekwondo instructor for many years

where I was making below minimum wage.

I got paid a salary, but once you divided it by the numbers I actually worked,

it came out to less than minimum wage, and I was doing that for years.

The rest of my family was equally humble.

We had immigrated from Vietnam to California when I was two,

and we had to move to Arizona after the 2008 financial crisis

because my dad got laid off and we could no longer afford to live in California.

So here I was, 18 years old, no rich parents, no connections,

working the soulless draining job, and I knew that I needed something better.

But I didn't know what back then.

I had no skills, I only knew the bare-bones basics of coding back then

that you learn in class,

and I definitely didn't know anything about remote jobs back then.

Even if I did, I was only like two semesters into computer science.

There was no way I would have thought to try to apply for a remote job,

and besides that, I was completely bought into the system at the time.

I had this grand vision that I was going to finish my bachelor's degree,

maybe even go for my master's degree.

I remember even contemplating spending six to eight years of my life to get a PhD

because I wanted to become an AI researcher.

That was how deep in academia I was.

I was going to make my Asian parents proud.

I was going to get some kind of in-person coding job.

I remember even telling some of my classmates

that I could imagine studying computer science for the rest of my life

as a professional researcher,

which meant that I was the nerd in the class.

I was the one in computer science class answering all the questions,

doing all the homework,

doing more than I need to just because I thought it was fun.

I went above and beyond in all the class assignments.

I actually read the textbook at home,

and because of that enthusiasm and just how much I loved computer science,

everyone knew me in that class.

Out of the 30 or so students, I was definitely one of the best students.

And when you're like that,

when you come off as ambitious and passionate and enthusiastic,

you tend to make friends with the other best students in class.

Your instructors like you, your professors like you,

you build a relationship with them,

they offer you opportunities first before anyone else,

and halfway through the semester,

one of those opportunities came my way.

I would later learn that one of the classmates I became friends with

worked at his dad's little software company.

And this company wasn't some giant corporation

with a corporate headquarters or anything.

It was a little humble operation that his father ran out of their home

in the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

His son was helping his dad out with some small coding and quality testing tests,

and it turns out that at that time,

his dad was looking to bring on another junior developer

to help them out with the company.

His dad figured that since he didn't want to pay

some computer science graduate a six-figure salary

just to help them out here and there,

he wanted his son to pick someone out of his computer science class

that he thought would be a good fit to work for their company.

And when you're in a position like my friend was,

you work for your dad,

your dad is looking for someone to bring on,

and it's your responsibility to pick someone really good to impress your dad,

and you will be working with this person one-on-one for a while,

who are you going to pick?

Are you going to pick the lazy kid in class

that always has to copy your homework and always sleeps in class?

Or are you going to pick one of the best students in class

that's always enthusiastic,

that already over-delivers on everything,

that would genuinely love a development job?

And on top of that,

you're already friends with the student,

you already know him,

you already like him,

you already trust him,

the no like and trust factor or KOT factor that we'll cover later.

Who would you pick?

That person or the average kid in class?

Of course, you would pick the best student every single time,

which is why my friend offered me the job first before anyone else.

And that's the first takeaway you want to get from the story.

No matter where you are in life,

if you're a broke college student like I was,

if you're working a dead-end job,

you always want to come off as enthusiastic, as ambitious,

and as the Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort would say,

you want to come off sharp as a tack.

Humans naturally gravitate towards people like this.

Opportunities naturally gravitate towards people like this.

And opportunities definitely don't gravitate towards people who come off lazy

or who have a negative attitude.

So when this opportunity came to me,

when I got this job offer,

I was pretty surprised.

I wasn't expecting to get anything out of this relationship.

He was just a nice classmate that I liked hanging out with.

But regardless, I submitted my resume,

they liked it,

they wanted to schedule an interview with me,

and I vaguely remember it was like a Wednesday or something

after I had finished school that day.

I drove to their place,

and being that it was Wednesday right after school,

I was super tired and sleepy.

And once I got there, I was really uncomfortable.

I was giving a lot of short answers because of how nervous I was.

I even dozed off at one point because of how tired I was.

And I'm sure they noticed because it was pretty obvious.

But somehow, I came out of that interview with a new job.

It was like they kind of just gave it to me.

Like they kind of already knew that they were going to hire me

before I even got there.

They just wanted to meet me first.

I think I started out at around $12 an hour,

and then they raised me to $15 an hour around a month later.

But the coolest part for me was that it was remote.

I didn't expect it to be remote.

Again, I wasn't even aware of remote jobs at the time.

And I definitely didn't think that I was good enough to get one.

But here I was getting my first take of the work from home life at only 18 years old.

And this basic part-time remote job was like a gateway drug.

A gateway drug into the world of remote jobs.

I didn't have to commute.

I was in control of how many hours I put in at the time.

And I could put in the hours whenever I wanted to.

All at such a young age.

And the job itself turned out to be perfect for where I was at.

It was just the right amount of difficulty for me at the time.

So I was able to get my feet wet with some real life coding experience

instead of just basic theoretical stuff in class.

The projects were pretty simple, but still pretty challenging for me at the same time.

And after a few months down the road, I was really loving working remotely.

And it was something I could see myself doing for the long term.

Sure, I was only making $15 an hour.

But that was already around 50% more than what I was making at my tutoring job.

But perhaps the coolest part was that I didn't quit my tutoring job at that time.

No, I started double dipping.

So once I landed that remote job, I thought, why would I quit my tutoring job right now?

The tutoring job was mind numbingly easy.

Most of the day we would literally sit there doing nothing.

We would usually spend that time watching YouTube videos or doing homework.

But now I could use that downtime to work my remote job while I worked my office job.

My tutoring job paid me $10 an hour and my remote job paid me $15 an hour.

So while I was doing both, I was making a pretty insane $25 an hour at only 18 years old,

which is really close to what the average college graduate makes after they get a degree.

I felt so cool.

I felt like I tricked the system that I found some loophole that no one else knew about.

And years later, I would come to find out that there's actually a whole movement around

working multiple remote jobs.

It's called overemployment, where you typically have one main remote job,

and then you tack on more remote jobs on top of that at the same time that are all low efforts.

That way you end up making the income of a successful entrepreneur,

but with the safety and stability of a remote job.

The best of both worlds.

Like this guy who's working not two, not three, but five different jobs all at the same time.

How much is he expected to make when he posted this?

$1.2 million, over a million dollars.

Most entrepreneurs would beg to be making $1.2 million in profits.

And this guy is just chilling, working the equivalent of just one remote job.

Even though I have four active jobs right now, this was before he started his fifth job,

I still play video games four to five hours a day.

I have plenty of time.

Overemployment and another variation of this is what happens when you take everything we're

going to teach you in this course to the nth degree.

And we're going to have an entire bonus section dedicated to getting overemployed

later in this masterclass, so you don't have to worry about it.

But let's be real.

Just one solid remote job is more than enough to change your circumstances forever.

So back to the story.

By this point, I am sold on remote jobs.

This is the way to live.

But as a few months goes by, I start getting a little bit too comfortable with my remote job.

It wasn't challenging me enough anymore.

It was too easy.

There wasn't enough work.

And now that I knew this world was possible without a degree, without experience, I decided

that it was time to step it up a notch.

And it was around this time that I stumbled upon something that would rock my entire world.

At this time, I had stumbled upon a book that exposed me to entrepreneurship and it

turned my world upside down.

I started the audiobook and I was so hooked that I finished the entire thing within a

day.

And from that moment on, I was hooked on this new drug called entrepreneurship.

It opened my eyes to a world that I had never seen before.

I felt so angry, so resentful against my parents, against society for not showing me that there

was this other path.

And within 24 hours, I went from a dedicated college student, one of the best students at

my community college, to absolutely despising college and everything it represented.

I was checked out.

And from there, I just went ham trying to build a bunch of different businesses.

I tried creating a graphic design agency.

I tried swing trading and day trading stocks.

I tried creating a web design agency.

Then I bought a course on how to code a software as a service app from scratch and thought,

man, this is going to be it.

This is going to be how I make my millions.

I was going to build a SaaS app.

It was going to blow up.

I was going to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month in recurring revenue.

Life was going to be good.

So I went all in.

I spent months coding this app called Beautiful Stocks, which would allow stock traders to

pay a monthly subscription to be able to set custom alerts for when certain things happen

in a stock's price.

I coded the front end back and I integrated the payment processor.

It was a lot of work.

And after months and months of coding and debugging, I ended up with a buggy SaaS app

that barely worked, only to realize that I had no marketing plan, no plan to get customers.

And best of all, I had zero customers.

So in that sense, it was a failure.

But now I had this impressive looking web app under my belt.

I had learned the basics of full stack web development on my own because we definitely

didn't learn any of this in my college classes.

So I would go on to leverage this, we'll call it work experience that I made up of

the nerve to land my next remote job.

And this time it would be far more than the $15 or even $25 an hour I was making working

those two jobs.

Fast forward a few more months.

It's been around eight to nine months since I landed that first remote job.

And at that time, my family was planning on moving to Houston.

I was just about to wrap up my second year of community college.

But remember, I was completely checked out at this time.

I had no intentions of transferring to a university.

So the clock was ticking.

If I didn't have anything to show to my Asian parents, they were not going to let me drop

out.

So the race was on.

I still felt like a complete beginner at coding, but I also knew that I had built up my skills

to the point where I could definitely earn at least a little bit more than $15 an hour.

I had already gotten a taste of the remote life, so I really didn't want to settle for

anything less.

So I started actively looking for another remote job.

Even though I still felt super unconfident, I thought, hey, what's the worst thing that

could happen?

My job applications get ignored.

So what?

If that's the worst that can happen, why not try to apply for 200, maybe 300 positions?

So that is what I did.

I set aside a few hours and I just mass applied to around 200 to 300 job listings.

And guess what I listed as my experience on my resume?

My super beginner coding job, which still looked great on paper.

And this fancy web app that I built that I'm also the founder of, along with a few other

marketing tactics I learned along the way.

Don't worry, I'm going to give you access to this exact resume for you to model later

on in the course.

And I basically expected nothing out of this job search.

But lo and behold, a few days later, I got a reply back from a company in Houston.

Hmm.

That's pretty convenient.

We're already going to move to Houston.

And they gave me a few coding test questions to answer over email as a screening process.

And the questions were pretty hard.

So hard that I just left two of the questions blank.

I literally said, quote, for numbers two and three rather than provide a bunch of fluff.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm experienced in Unix, Linux security or Postgres.

But like every other topic I've learned on my own, I am totally interested and fully

capable of learning more.

Heart, end quote.

I wrote that out and clicked send.

Whoo.

Well, that didn't feel good.

But then boom, somehow I got an email back to schedule a call to do a live coding test

with one of their managers.

Wow.

I can't believe this works.

So I did the coding test over Google Hangouts and pretty much everything that could have

went wrong, went wrong.

I came off like a complete idiot.

I was so nervous.

I was shaking.

My computer crashed twice during the interview and I just completely bombed it.

I was so mad at myself.

And I was just sitting there for a day or two, just praying for a reply.

I was looking at the company's website and it looked perfect for me.

It was a small boutique design firm that made these beautiful, fancy websites.

Exactly what I was looking for.

And it was in Houston.

Me and my family were already planning on going to Houston in like a week to look at

houses.

I knew I had screwed up big time, but I also knew that I couldn't let this opportunity

pass by without at least trying to get a second chance.

So I emailed the guy again to apologize, to say that my computer crashed, that the coding

test wasn't a good representation of what I could do for the company.

And I asked for a second chance, this time in person in Houston during my trip with

the family.

Maybe he respected how persistent I was, but somehow the guy said yes.

So I flew out to Houston with my parents, did the interview with my future manager.

It was way easier than the online interview.

And again, just like the $15 per hour job, he kind of just gave me the job.

Like he was already going to hire me before I even got to the interview.

And what I've realized looking back, especially now that I'm an employer is that hiring people

is a really big pain for employers, which is why they're rooting for you to win.

They want you to win.

They're begging you to be the last candidate they have to interview, which is why landing

a great remote job doesn't have to be this grueling, intense interview process that

you hear about.

It can be rather easy if you find the right opportunity and present yourself well.

And at the end of my interview, my manager said, can you send me your rate?

And in my head, I was like my rates, like how much I want to get paid.

I don't know how much I want to get paid, but on the outside, I stayed cool and collected

and said, yes, I will email you my hourly rates with as straight of a face as I can

maintain.

Ooh, wow.

I cannot believe that just happened.

Walking out of the office was a high, like I had never felt before, but little did I

know it was about to get even better.

I got back to my hotel and I had to send him my rate.

I had no idea what my rate was.

$20 an hour?

Oh no, $25 would be a dream.

What if they paid me $30 an hour?

That would literally be double my income right now.

That would be insane.

So here's what I did.

I looked up the average web developer salary in Houston at the time and found out it was

around $80,000.

Whoa, that's a lot.

So I did the math.

The average number of work hours in a year is 2080 hours.

Divide $80,000 a year by 2080 hours and you get around $38 an hour.

Ooh, now that was out of my comfort zone.

I must've spent I don't know how many hours contemplating what number I should send them.

I don't want to lowball myself in case they counter with an even lower rate, but I also

don't want to come off as this arrogant beginner demanding $40 an hour.

Who does that?

But in the end, I thought, you know what?

If I told them my rate is $40 an hour, they'll probably counter with like $30 an hour and

I would be perfectly happy with that.

So I held my breath and sent him this exact email.

Hi, name.

The market rate for web dev is around $35 to $45 an hour.

I'm excited to join the team and I'd be willing to sign for $40 an hour starting off.

If that works for you, please let me know what the timetable looks like to get everything

handled like the W9.

Thanks.

There's no way this is going to work, Jake.

He's going to laugh at you and not hire you for sending him such a disrespectful offer.

Why did you do this?

But magically, five days later, he responded.

And just like that, I was making $40 an hour or $80,000 a year as a web developer at 19

years old with no degree and practically zero experience.

During my onboarding, I purposely pushed him to let me work completely remotely and

bless this guy's soul, he did.

So not only was I making $80,000 a year at 19 with no degree and practically zero experience,

but it was also from home.

And here's one of my actual paychecks from it.

And let me tell you, it was everything I dreamed it was going to be.

I would get assigned to a project and literally all they cared about was if it got done well

and on time or not.

Everything else, when I worked, where I worked, how long I worked, how I worked, it was all

up to me.

I was able to sleep in, work during the evenings instead of starting in the morning.

I was able to stack a bunch of cash at such a young age.

And I was even able to work while I was on vacation with my parents.

But most importantly, looking back, if I never took that leap, if I never landed these

remote jobs, if I never got the capital these jobs provided, if I never got the skills and

experience these jobs gave me, I would have had to continue to university.

I would have had to shackle myself in debt like society wants you to.

And I probably would have been influenced to get a regular job after graduating like

everyone else.

So who knows how many unfulfilling years I shaved off my life by going remote.

There's a real chance that I would not be here talking to you guys today if it wasn't

for just how powerful remote jobs are.

Because without this remote job and all the time I saved, I would have never had the energy

and the hours to pursue what I really wanted to do, YouTube.

I was able to build my channel on the side while still making great money.

And as they say, the rest is history.

But maybe for you, you don't want to use a remote job to start YouTube.

Maybe for you, you want to leverage a remote job to become a digital nomad traveling the

world.

I lived a digital nomad life for a year and loved it.

You should definitely try it if you're interested.

I'm actually in Vietnam right now on a trip as I write this.

Maybe instead of becoming a digital nomad, you want to be able to spend more time with

your parents before they die.

Maybe you want to use it to fund your music career.

However you want to live your life, a remote job can let you escape the system and get

there way faster.

I didn't share this story to get admiration from you.

I shared it to show you what is possible.

Society wants you to slave away.

They want you to take on student loans.

They want you to be a productive member of society.

And in this course, we're going to give you everything you need to break away forever.

This is a great time to get into this because remote jobs are now more widely accepted than

ever.

So welcome to Evil Business University's Exploit the System.

The best masterclass out there on how to work from home.

Stay dangerous and let the journey begin.