Making money online is easy. Making enough money online to quit your job and play video games all day is quite the opposite!

The most important thing to understand, that nobody tells you, is that you still have to work.

That’s not to say you can’t quit your job. You could even play video games for money daily. You still have to work.

Allow me to explain. The life experience is mostly automated, with specific outputs tied to specific inputs. There’s other factors, of course (and ways to get around them), but generally speaking if you want A, you need to first give B. There’s no practical manual (yet) for this, so stay focused on the money part.

This morning you woke up with no money in your hand. In order to wake up tomorrow with a money in your hand, you need to work today. What does that work look like? A basic formula to express the amount of effort given over a period of time! Work = Effort/Time.

“But Rocky!”, you say, “Where is this going?”.

Here. It was going here. Now we’re done. There’s literally no point in continuing without first coming to complete and total acceptance that we have to work, regardless of what that physically looks like.

This is an achievable goal. The biggest problem with this one is that perhaps you’re sitting on your fat ass all day long. For many of us, that’s literally every job. For others of us, we’ve never worked a job that involved sitting. Even if you’re used to this, things get different when your office is now located inside your home. Taking 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes and doing some stretches, push-ups, etc is hard enough when you’re somewhere you don’t want to be.

On the other end of the spectrum, us blue collar folk are going to love the first day. By the end of the second day, your back is going to be in a great deal of pain. Maybe trade day for week, depending on your personal flow. Regardless, you aren’t ready for it. It’s not like throwing your back out handling materials. Instead you’ll just deal with it and it’ll get noticeably worse each day.

Eventually you figure it out, or you go back to work.

This isn’t going anywhere, either. We just need to express on ourselves the serious difficulties that exist sitting at our home computers all day. Computers. With an S. You’ll need at least two, I recommend three. They don’t have to be $5000 gaming rigs (maybe one can be).

I’m big on having a separate computer for work. Not just for the tax write-off. (I’d write off the personal computer, too. Unless you legit aren’t utilizing it). Keeping yourself mentally sorted is a lot easier with a second console to work with. Additionally you can now run long processes such as video editing without having to sacrifice the use of a computer.

Legitimate remote work aside., including third- party contractors such as Upwork and Fiverr, there’s vast and limitless ways to make money online.

Not really. Mostly you have to sell stuff somehow, or grow an audience. Ideally you’re doing both. But what if you…don’t want to talk to people? It’s possible, you’ll just need to work harder. That might not be a bad thing, though.

Let’s say you’re going for the video game dream. The easy part here is that your options are limited, as you’ll inevitably be recording yourself playing games. There’s branches to explore, but that’s the gist. You’ll also need to work out how to monetize your activities. YouTube may or may not be a great way to go.

The allure of YouTube is how “easy” it is to grow and get followers and ad revenue. What nobody is telling you is that certain categories of videos cost advertisers way, way, more to run ads on. There’s also the “rules of the game” that full-time YouTubers adhere to religiously because they think that it works. It does, just…not how they think. Mostly it works great for YouTube.

Now when you’ve got financial experts and law professors making content that is both informative and engaging (think Mark J. Kohler), then 10,000 views on a video is a paycheck. If you’re doing cat vids, or just following the format and copycatting the news, then you need 10 videos doing 10k or better for a paycheck.

(The above example is most certainly not accurate. Just making a comparison without taking measurements.)

Sans YouTube, you’ll still be most likely making videos. Whether you’re doing ads for affiliate marketing, or ads for your own crafts on Etsy, or uploading gameplay videos - you’ll be making videos.

You could be a remote notary public. In this case you most likely need to record the sessions. You’ll also find yourself wanting quality video footage with proper lighting, even if at first you think you don’t care.

Not gonna lie, this already sounds like more work than I want to do. Writing this is more work than I want to do, and it’s literally work I’m supposed to be doing. For absolutely nothing.

Oh yeah, no one ever tells you that you’re going to be super broke for a long time while you figure out how to squeeze a paycheck out of thin air.

Rental properties or the stock market can help out here. Of course, you either need to already have those investments set up, or you need to have time managing your portfolio, which in itself can become a day job.

Literally, you can be a professional trader and your trades will be counted as ordinary income, not capital gains. This is important if you don’t have a real job, or don’t make enough to form an S-Corp to give yourself a paycheck.

Why is this? You need $10,000 of earned income for….something. Alright, had a train of thought de-rail and some follow-up internet searching hasn’t helped much. It might just be eligibility for a tax credit or something, but I’m fairly certain we need to show $10,000 earned income annually for something.

You know what? Who cares? It’s a great idea regardless to have a W-2. Banks love W-2’s, even if they know you and you’ve been in business for 30 years. Verifiable income from an employer is worth more than the dollar amount. (That employer can be you, but if you’re on that level then you aren’t looking up amateur investment and life advice!).

Alright I’m bored. You probably are, too. Fortunately I can elect to do other things that count as work.

TLDR
Making money online can be done, but you’re still going to work 40+ hours a week doing it.