What do I have to Lose? - The Diary of a Nerdy Entrepreneur

It's been about 2 years since I last produced any online content. Two years ago I was all fired up about uploading content for my Youtube channels Paul Programming and Learn Math Tutorials and finding ways to provide educational content online. I remember enjoying the newness and the excitement of the Steemit platform. I wrote a few successful blog posts on Steemit, mainly Learn How to Create Your Own Webpage and Learn How to Run a C++ Program Using Only Your Browser. I was excited and ready to continue providing more educational content for all to enjoy and learn from, but then life just kind of happend... and here I am roughly 2 years later... sitting here, wondering how it all got away from me.

During my college years it was so easy to just find some time in-between homework assignments to produce a YouTube video or two. I enjoyed that time. It soothed me. There was something about starting from nothing. A blank slate. Just a YouTube channel without any content. So I began uploading video after video, wondering if anyone would even want to watch them or if I was just doing it for my own amusement. I enjoyed being a tutor, and the prospect of sharing my knowledge with the world was a very curious thing to me.

YouTube was fairly new at the time. I used YouTube during college to watch a few tutorials here and there when I needed help understanding a concept that I was not fully grasping. It didn't take me long to realize that there was room for improvement. Oftentimes when watching a video tutorial I would think to myself, "I could teach this better", so I figured, why not. What do I have to lose? The worst thing that could happen is that people would dislike my content and then I would probably find another way to spend my time pursuing my passions. However it turned out that people like my YouTube videos, and it turned out that people enjoyed the few blog posts that I put on Steemit a couple years ago as well.

I enjoyed the time I spent teaching and sharing what I knew. I also enjoyed all the positive feedback that I got on the content that I created. I spent quite a bit of time before graduating college thinking to myself how nice it would be to have time away from classes and homework and how I would spend my evenings continuing to teach and share what I knew with the world via videos, books, and blog posts. I was excited upon graduation a few years ago that this would be my reality.

I landed a stable job as a Software Engineer straight out of college. I envisioned working as an engineer during the days, and spending a night or two a week making videos, writing blog posts, making books, and other endeavors that I was passionate about. Yet, somehow life seems less free to me. Somehow the burdensome schedule of college seemed to have afforded me more opportunities to create my dreams than I have in my current situation....

How can this be? Is it true? Do I have less opportunity now? Does working 40 hours a week somehow take the drive away?

I think about starting up again. "Just make a video", I tell myself. "Finish writing that book that you have half written a couple years ago".

So here I am, once again, writing a blog post on Steemit. I am doing this because I have a desire to teach. I have a desire to share. I have a desire to start again. So I offer this post to the world. Will it help anyone? I have no idea... but it may just help me get my feet wet again and do this thing that I am so passionate about...

What do I have to lose?

• Paul