POSTS
Making a living without selling your soul
The main point after coming back from Mongolia in 2010 was figuring out how to make a living and create a lifestyle that offered some of the trappings that I had experienced on the bike tour such as having tonnes of time, meeting a lot of people and having a rich experience:
‘Living without dead time’.
I remember sitting in the Trans Siberian train on the way back sketching in my notebook about buying some land, a motorbike and a dog and putting up a yurt to live in.
Making a living as an adventurer
I protested a great deal to my adventurous peers via my blogs back in 2009 / 10 that turning adventure into a product was a bad idea. However, now it seems almost acceptable to call yourself a professional adventurer. This means making speeches which promotes your books and films and having sponsors give you kit. For some of my friends and acquaintances I’ve met through having adventures and exploring they have had a lot more success than me spinning a yarn and making money out of their adventures.
Going on a trip for the sake of creating a product about it can have a surreal effect on the process. This is something I discovered while filming on Ride Earth. You have the experience, then you have to pull out the camera and redo the experience for the camera. Or you have the camera out all the time and that is your experience. However, if you can stomach it making adventure films is probably the best way to make a living out of adventures.
Growing up with Computers
I have always been interested in computers. When was younger I played computer games. I was obsessed with a painting programme called Deluxe Paint on the Amiga 500+ that my parents had bought me. The fact that you could create images was an amazing experience. I made my first a website at the age of 15 to compete with my geek friends. Later, I got a couple of gigs from local people making posters for events. When I took work experience at an estate agent I enjoyed visiting properties but I also really enjoyed working on the computer doing graphic design for marketing. I had an expertise that came easily. I didn’t study computer science at University. I studied environmental science and economics but I had this nagging feeling that I wasn’t using my obsession for computers as much as I should be. I spent time making electronic music when I should have been doing my coursework. It wasn’t that environmental issues weren’t important to me; I just found computers creativity more enticing.
Escaping Screens for the Sake of Adventure
When I left university I decided to set up a company selling T-shirts and doing graphics and web design. I became bored working alone and not being outside enough so I got a job as a mountain bike guide in Croatia. When the season finished I was jobless and got a job in marketing for a network company. I started to learn programming through some exploratory projects there. The office life wasn’t hitting the spot so in my spare time I planned a bicycle tour called Ride Earth. This journey me six months on the road to Georgia in Eastern Europe and I ran out of money so I got some work making websites and doing photography. I got money enough to keep travelling to India and then ran out of money again so I went back to Georgia.
Design
I got a laptop and taught myself as much as I could about programming, websites and wrote up my travel journal into a book. I felt like I was never going to rise above the huge amount of competition that was out there without a proper academic background in design so I signed up for a Masters degree in London. This was probably a bit of an over commitment but nevertheless it was a thrill to be moving to a great capital city and start a new chapter. My Masters was called ‘Design Critical Practice’. I’ve not directly been able to employ much of what I learnt but it has made me better at making things overall and made with self aware of ‘craftsmanship’. When studying I met a lot of people with different ideas about work and lifestyle. My dreams about travelling and living nomadically while making a living were still there but my education and people I met were also challenging those ideas. I could see other lifestyles that brought excitement and adventure that didn’t involve pedalling around countries.
Start Ups
This was in 2012 and around this time start-up tech businesses came into my awareness. I wanted to create some way of making money to give me freedom while not having of any of the overheads of normal business. One of them that I knew of was the alternative recruiter ‘Escape the City’. My final project was a task-sharing app ‘start-up’. My technical abilities in programming had still not risen to the level where I could be creative with my ideas developing an app myself and hit a technical brick wall. I got some interesting experience at this time working with a collective of other designers on new brands with an agency called Stromatolite. I was able to hone my coding skills to the level where I was able to get job with the skills. Getting the job was also a bit of a reaction to working in a collective, which I found to be somewhat insecure and raised questions about emerging mode of working in the tech space. I scoured job apps and got offered a job at MTV in Camden. It felt weird to accept it but as one of my lecturers told me ‘Some things have to be learnt tacitly’.
Incorporated
The benefits of working at a large corporation are up that you feel secure because you have some money coming in that covers the rent, food and the basics. Each day all of your time is taken up being in the office doing tasks that you are given. The MTV offices in Camden were a decent office space. I had a safe place to go every day in London (quite important), free drinks and learning from a group of clever people.It was a frustrating role because I had gone from working in a more design-focused role to this where I was purely technical developer. I had to do what I was told and the freedom was now only in the code that I wrote. I could see a great deal of inefficiencies in the way that the company operated but it was way above my station and I didn’t feel encouraged to share my grievances until I quit.
Looking for a Network
I still needed to build this community of people who I could work with in order to achieve the original goal of making a living in order to get freedom. The travel motivation had mutated into something else (this was probably now in need of some introspection too). When an opportunity came up to help out a residency in Spain with their projects I saw it as the chance to develop the network I needed. I went there in 2013 and worked with the owner of the art residency, resident designer and project manager to create a new vision for the future for the projects. This entailed splitting their existing offer into two – commercial luxury holidays and an art organisation which explored environmental issues and land restoration.
Microbusiness
In my spare time while working for MTV I rekindled a project to offer mountain bike tours in Georgia. This idea had fallen by the wayside back in 2009 because there had just been a war in Georgia and it was not a very popular destination for tourists. 2014 was the first year that we would offer a full season of tours. I went to visit the art residency in Spain. I did a hike down a watercourse as an art project (http://bajada.andrewwelch.info) and worked on the websites. I met a lot of artists and interesting people. The artist lifestyle was something that looked appealing because at least on the surface it you had creative freedom. Funding came from applications, creative business or job on the side.
Coding
When I did my research on making a living based on my creative practices in 2009. I came up with some different options: website design, speaking, graphics, photography, writing, coding, filmmaking, teaching. These are all creative practices that theoretically you could make a living from via the Internet. Since then I’ve tried/trying all of them but I’ve only made any proper money out of coding. Coding or programming is a technical skill that requires a certain kind of mind that is able to think in a mechanical and logical way and find and follow patterns. It tends to suit people who are more introverted and don’t mind sitting for long periods without talking to anyone as it requires quite a deep level of focus. However, that does not mean that it is limited to people like this I have experienced some incredibly frustrating moments learning programming to the point where I’ve been pulling my hair out. However, I’ve also experienced some extremely satisfying moments where I’ve managed to overcome a difficult problem. Being able to code is a very useful skill to have because it is becoming ubiquitous. They are even teaching it in schools. Coding is a means to an end although you could do an art project about code for code’s sake. Code in its purest form is just a set of rules, which tells a machine do something.
With a website you are telling a web server to return pages so that someone on the Internet can read them. Websites are split between marketing sites, which are just like online brochures, e-commerce sites and web apps. A web app such as Google maps allows you to find places and create directions. Marketing websites are aimed at selling something and that is their main role. E-Commerce sites are virtual storefronts. Web apps have a specific purpose in themselves. There is a huge amount of competition for creating marketing websites because they aren’t that complicated. You can make an extremely beautiful marketing website that works really well but in that case is the design which has the real beauty. The website just needs to work.
More recently you have front-end developers who build interfaces. A front-end developer is more like a designer. Imagine that you have a stereo system. The front-end developer designs how the knobs and buttons work. The designer designs how it looks. The developer creates all the stuff inside that makes it actually work. I could also add a UX designer who would decide the overall experience of the user. Back-end development deals with getting data from databases is becoming closer to front-end development because data sources and data access are being designed in such a way that they have sophisticated interfaces that encapsulate away a lot of the heavy technical stuff. The point of this is to increase productivity for developers to reduce costs and time.
Coding is screen-based, time consuming work. There is every single kind of work available out there ranging from the most menial to the incredibly impactful and sophisticated. However, as I found when recently after meeting a tech entrepreneur who had worked in Silicon Valley he told me the level of complexity is not that different across the range. So if you are going to try and make a living from coding then try to do work at the meaningful, sophisticated end of the spectrum.
Which Model?
The perceived accessibility that is offered by digital technologies and the Internet is counterbalanced by the technical legwork that has to be done. It can’t be avoided and it either takes a lot of time or money. If it is going to take a lot of time then the (good) idea must not be obvious because if it is someone else with a lot of money is going to come in and do it a lot faster than you. The best option may be that of the Long Tail Model which is to find a small niche of followers who passionately support you in something and will buy what you make. There is no easy way to make a living through the Internet.
The flip side is to switch off the Internet and get ‘in the world’ jobs instead. On the side develop your thousand true followers niche and learn to love it. The last couple of years I worked part time as a landscape gardener. I loved it but it earned so little money that it would never allow me to do anything else. If you join a start-up or a huge company you have to accept that your freedom will be limited but at least you will get paid and it will be a learning experience. You may learn to love it.
Time is the greatest value and Know thyself