Random advice

Life is not a binary game. You don’t either win or lose, which is a troubling thought when you are on a hot streak and comforting one when you are on a losing streak.

Your biggest win can be followed by your greatest failure, and vice versa, but usually you will go months, or years, between peaks and valleys, where you will neither win or lose, but exist in a nebulous state of worried existence, wondering when the other shoe will drop.

You will give all your effort to some things and fail, and then you will barely try at all and succeed at others.

The more effort you put in, the more chances you have to succeed, but like the lottery, buying tickets just increases the odds. It doesn’t guarantee success.

The more things you try, the more chance you have of cobbling together an interesting skill set that will make you the best in the world at something. Even if that thing is not particularly useful, it will be useful to somebody, and if you are the best in the world at it, somebody will likely pay you for it.

My “stack” of skills is very, very weird; crowdfunding+conventions+giveaways+book marketing+writing+comics+anthologies+editing+lecturing+courses+social media+email marketing+podcast. I am the best in the world at that stack of very weird skills, and yet I have been able to make a $100,000+ career from it specifically because it is so niched down that nobody else cares to do it except for me, which means when somebody seeks that combination of skills out, I am the only name on their list.

Every person thinks they are the protagonist of their own story, but 99.9% of the time you are an NPC in somebody else’s.

This is an assortment of advice with no discernable theme to pull it together. None of this is fair, but it is none the less true.