The $200 PayPal Notification That Rewired My Brain
why your first dollar online hits like a drug you can never quit...
You won’t believe it’s real until you see it on your lock screen.
Up until that moment… you thought it wasn’t possible…
You thought that all these people online were just bullshitting and faking it.
But once you see that first PayPal notification on your iPhone lock screen…
You might not realize it yet… but you just took a hit of a drug that will literally change the trajectory of your life…
What drug?
FREEDOM
FINANCIAL FREEDOM
GEOGRAPHICAL FREEDOM
TIME FREEDOM
ALL IN ONE!
I didn’t know it at the time, but 9 years later (2017), after my first online sale of $200 for a “Calvin Harris Type Beat”—which ironically enough was called “Freedom Finders” that I marketed on my YouTube channel—I knew… I could never go back… never go back to my old way of thinking.
Some random stranger on the internet just paid me for my creativity… paid me for a problem they wanted to solve. They wanted a specific sound for their upcoming album… they couldn’t find it… but once they stumbled across my YouTube channel… they found what they were looking for and bought a lease to one of my beats…
The rest… as they say… is history.
Money Isn't Everything... until you don’t have any.
Everyone is looking for the antidote to their suffering. And I think most people’s suffering is baseline and comes from financial problems and poor health. Today, I will focus only on finances since health is a whole other can of worms I don’t want to get into right now, but I do intend to write on that topic in a different article.
Most people are living paycheque-to-paycheque and geographically tied to a job that they might not find outside of the “big city.”
They think that the solution to their problems will come from hopefully working their way up the corporate ladder, get more seniority and try to earn a better salary that can hopefully outpace this insane inflation…
Then there’s another whole subset of people who have already opted out of the “rat race” and think that sitting down and meditating or manifesting themselves into happiness—or at least less suffering—is the solution.
I have yet to meet one of those people who I didn’t think was completely full of shit and actually miserable deep down. These are the kinds of people that sit around in random parks on a Tuesday afternoon listening to “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle… but… you look deeply enough at their lives… and they literally can’t go one day without sedating themselves with some substance like magic mushrooms or weed…
And I know… money isn’t everything in the world… but it is when you don’t have any of it.
I remember being SO DAMN BROKE in my early 20s as I was trying to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do with my life.
I didn’t have the grades to get into a good school, and I definitely didn’t have the interest to get into some STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) field… I knew… I was meant to be a creative… but how could I show the world I had any value, and how could I survive off of my creativity?…
Every year that went by felt more bleak as I was trying to find the answer to this problem.
I would see my friends who I went to high school with get into good universities… then starter entry-level positions… then work their way up to higher positions with better salaries… then buying their first house… then beginning to have children… all while… I felt stagnant… and actually worse than stagnant… it felt like I was getting further and further behind as I aged and people started to look at me like, bro… what are you doing? How are you still in the same place you were at 18 when you’re now 25?…
It was cool being a complete brokey at 18 living in a shitty basement apartment when you are so young and everyone is looking at you like “ahhh he’s a young and ambitious man, he’s got time…”
At 25, almost turning 26, people are now looking at you like… “wow… where did it all go wrong?”
But… they didn’t see all the gruelling hours…
The tens of thousands of hours that were going into developing my skill as a music producer, trying to figure it out… hoping the world would recognize my genius and that it would all work out in the end…
Working countless side-gig jobs (dish washing, cook, serving, bartending, security, construction, valet, D2D & B2B sales, retail, even selling my body for science experiments… yeah, true story) while trying to financially back this passion project to finally get some traction and hopefully get to the point where I could do this full time.
The Shift: From “Artist” to Business Owner
The solution to this stagnation and deep despair came to me when I stopped trying to be an “artist” and started to think like a “business.”
How do I monetize this skill that I’ve developed and dedicated the last six years of my life to?
Around that time, somebody just put me on to selling beats online…
Up until that point, I still only had ambitions of being a headlining DJ/Music Producer and making my money through DJ gigs and streams.
I thought my life was tied to Toronto, Canada, and that I had to stay in the city to get into the best venues and to get connections in the city to hopefully “make it.”
I had also just started engineering at this tiny studio called RPM Studio in Scarborough and could officially say that I was finally making some money off my music production skill and making a little dent and finding some success in the industry.
However, I was making SHIT money—only charging $25 CAD an hour (half of that going to the studio owners for letting me use the studio space)—so I was making less than minimum wage, offering my producing and mixing skills to help local rappers in the city. I noticed these rappers coming to the studio with these simple hip-hop beats that they bought online…
One of my clients showed me it was possible to make some sales online from beats…
I thought, fuck it… why not give it a go.
The beats he showed me were so simple (in comparison to my overly produced EDM music I was making at that time)—I thought… oh, I could do that…
Wow… people are willing to buy this simple hip-hop beat that I could re-create in 20 minutes?…
And so I went for it…
And at first… I had no clue what the market wanted, and so I would upload these EDM/Flume trip-hop inspired beats that no artist could possibly ever rap or sing to…
Sure… they were technically “impressive,” but being an impressive producer doesn’t pay the bills…
However, once I let go of my ego and I tweaked my sound until I found the right balance of simple yet interesting enough to not be so repetitive, that’s when I finally caught a glimpse of what the future could actually look like. I also realized… I didn’t have to make “Hip-Hop Beats” and that there was already a growing community of artists looking for R&B and Pop sounding beats—which at the time I really enjoyed producing… Then that is when everything changed.
The $200 Notification That Changed My Life
I’ll never forget the feeling. I was in my mom’s dark and dingy basement getting a haircut from one of my boys (to save money, of course). We were preparing to go out and see some friends for my birthday… and as I get off the uncomfortable wooden chair that I had been sitting in for the past hour from getting a patchy fade, I hear a weird notification ding that I’ve never heard before on my phone… I look at my lock screen and I see a PayPal notification for $200… I thought, wtf… did someone give me this for my birthday? Who in my friends or family even knows about my recently registered business and PayPal business account that I just opened up a few weeks ago?… I look inside and I see it… “$200 for the Unlimited Lease for Freedom Finders”… from some dude or chick in South Korea who I didn’t even know how to say, pronounce, or even spell his or her name…
…
My heart sank…
I got this deep sinking feeling that I could only describe as a combination of blood rushing to the head as I felt this wave of pure euphoria and optimism… but also… CONFIDENCE.
Up until that point in time, I thought… I wasn’t good enough.
No one would ever buy my beats.
No one would ever invest in one of my $29–$100 leases… let alone a $200 lease for an instrumental I produced.
I would never be able to do this full time, and I would have to be stuck in Toronto doing these shitty low-paying recording sessions with artists working on music I didn’t like…
I didn’t realize it then, but that one sale gave me the FIRE to go all in and eventually make this a legit business that gave me the freedom to leave Canada back in 2020 and live abroad for almost seven years now and be financially free.
What That First Sale Actually Means
Making your first dollar online is no small feat.
You were able to bring a product to the market that was good enough to stand out in the sea of noise and actually get someone to invest their hard-earned dollar into YOU and YOUR PRODUCT.
It may not be a beat or instrumental lease like me, but it could be something else like web design, copywriting, coaching, a digital product, or any type of freelancing service. Either way… you have separated yourself from the masses… you are now a PRODUCER and slowly moving away from being a CONSUMER.
Your ideas have been tested against millions of others who are competing for the same space and market share… and you won… even if it is this little battle…
The INSANE CONFIDENCE you will get from this will literally change your brain chemistry.
I hope you don’t forget this win or that feeling, as it will be there to provide fuel for the inevitable dark days that will come when you go a few days without making any sales… maybe even weeks… as you slowly turn this pursuit into your full-time gig…
Having the ability to make an income that is not geographically tied to any country can then give you the opportunity to leave your city—which probably has an insane high cost of living—to then move to a country where your monthly living expenses can get cut in half, or even be a quarter of what you are used to paying (like me living in Toronto, ON, and then moving to live in Quito, Ecuador & Medellin, Colombia). You are able to save so much money… and with that… save your time. Time to think about what you value most in life…
Maybe what you value most is family, and with this big change you realize… nope… I gotta live close to home so I can be around my family more… I can’t do this nomadic thing… and so then you move back home…
Cool… well, at least now you know.
Or maybe it’s sovereignty and freedom… and this was really the only path to take.
At least you tried…
Even if you don’t decide to turn your passion into your full-time income—which I’ve actually written about extensively in a different article where I say it is overrated and you would be better off preserving your art and not “whoring it out” and instead, finding something else that even remotely interests you and seeing if you can make a dent in that—I still think it is a worthwhile pursuit that everyone should at least try once in their lives.
Even if you manage to make some sales but later on you realize this just isn’t for you, you at least developed skills along the way as well as an irreplaceable confidence in yourself, proving to yourself that you are capable of anything if you just put your mind and energy into it.
And that level of confidence… is quite literally life changing.
