Listen "Side Gigs and Lessons Learned"
Episode Synopsis
Friday afternoon story time 🎉🍷🤔One of the most pivotal stages of my early professional (and for the financial and other benefits, personal) life was writing my first maths "textbook", Not a C Minus, at age 18, and establishing my first educational publishing business. It was an unplanned, somewhat chaotic, and wonderfully enjoyable learning experience.In brief, the book became a runaway hit, sold around 6000 physical copies, and spawned my lifelong love of educational and entrepreneurial initiatives, that branched out into more books, online, edutainment, tech topics, for all age ranges from pre-school kids to older adults.At the time it was an incredible, almost entirely on-the-fly learning and "flying by the seat of my pants" experience - including learning how to:🖨️ Create print-ready complex technical manuscripts (in Microsoft Word, you LaTeX snobs 🤣)📚 Work with and negotiate with commercial printers🚢 Including eventually doing overseas print productions and learning things you'd never normally learn, like that you need to insure marine freight at 110%📞 Cold calling and approaching vendors like bookstores, negotiating terms, and keeping them in stock📝 Write press releases and later, copywrite for ads💰 Budgeting, tax reporting, and later starting a Pty Ltd company🌐 Early online sales and marketing: a website, sales fulfilment, optimising freight and parcel deliveryand so much more.This whole experience profoundly shaped my life, and I thought I'd relate the story here and the key lessons I learned, trying very hard to not fall into the trap of only analysing it in hindsight, but remembering back to what was known, felt and thought *at the time* as an 18 year old!I hope you find it interesting! And have a good weekend.YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Hha1_jYAKWk#sidegigs #entrepreneur #business #income #education #stem #math #mathematics #students #school #company #entrepreneurial
More episodes of the podcast Hacking Academia
Separating Process from Outcome
16/08/2025
Adapting to Changed Circumstances
07/06/2025
Fakes Frauds and Fallacies
30/05/2025
Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Context-Framing Questions for Industry and Government Meetings
21/05/2025
"I don't have time"
13/05/2025
Talent Strategy Recruiting and Retention
02/05/2025
Tearing Your Hair Out in Meetings
29/04/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.