Let me start out by saying I’m not a writer. But that isn’t going to stop me from trying.

My desire to write a fictional novel started when I was in college. I came up with one idea in 2015 that I thought had some juice and thought about it on and off (mostly off) for years. Fast forward to 2023 and I’ve discovered a personal finance community, the FI community, that really got my gears turning.

Now you might be thinking… wait what? How does personal finance lead to writing fiction?

And you’d be very right. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, a movement about unlocking your freedom through successfully setting yourself up financially and removing your dependence on “the man.” So how did my foray into this very unrelated area turn into taking action on my desire to write a fictional novel and telling strangers on the internet about it along the way?

At the time I’m writing this I’m 28 years old. I have a well-paying job in the tech industry but no, I’m not a software engineer, and I generally like the company and the job and the people I work with. Except that I also hate it. I hate being on someone else’s clock and working on things I may not agree with, or think are a waste of time. I hate the never-ending race that is endless work at a job that’s sort-of-okay. For a while I thought this was rooted in dissatisfaction with the job itself and I started trying to do some research on a new role or even an entirely new field, and all the while I could feel the despair chasm opening wider.

At the same time I was sifting through Spotify looking for new podcasts, as you do, and decided to give some finance-based shows a go thinking that I would improve my investing game, which has historically been pretty sad and limited to my 401k and some random mutual funds in a small brokerage account. I happened upon The Money with Katie Show (quick plug for any ladies out there who have no idea how to take control of their finances) and I was hooked. 

This took me down a FI rabbit hole that I won’t recap for you here, though it may be worth an article at some point, and I realized that my job search was futile because my antsy-ness wasn’t a source of this particular job, but this type of employment in general. I picked up on a couple of ideas that now seem very important to me, my journey to financial independence, and my desire to live a happier life, all of which led me to writing this today.

My Fi Discoveries

1. My happiness is not going to come from a corporate job working for someone else, even something like my current job where I have a great salary, great benefits, work with good people, and like what the company is doing.
2. Despite Number 1 I won’t be leaving my current job in pursuit of greater happiness. Instead I’ll be following some of the basic principles of FI and working on reducing my expenses, paying off the last of my student loans, and saving as much as I can possibly get myself to save so that I can pile it into the stock market and try to build my wealth so that one day I can actually quit.
3. The time I spend outside of work has so much potential to improve my life. My newly budding financial independence journey is really centered around one thing —

Living Intentionally

I’ve been filling my free time with random hobbies. I picked up knitting, embroidery, mountain biking, and more. Fantasy books take up a large part of my content consumption through audio and physical books. All of these random activities have been directionless, and while enjoyable they haven’t been improving my level of contentment in my life because there’s no intention behind any of it. It’s all filler to try to enjoy my personal life so much that I don’t care about job dissatisfaction.

Rather than quit my job, I’ve realized I have so much untapped potential in my free time that I should be leveraging intentionally to improve my headspace, and put to work for my future. Leading to the last big FI idea that left an impression on me: the side hustle.

People are so nonchalant about side hustles. Everything I read says, in a nutshell, “find the thing you love or the thing you’re good at and get creative about turning it into something that can make money.” But after many attempts sifting through Google articles about ways to actually get that inspiration or find what it is you like to do, I was coming up empty and starting to feel like I must be a very one-dimensional person if I can’t think of any basic skills that might be something I could one day build into a marketable venture. I’ve always been a bit of a catch-all — good at everything, not great at anything. I’m a fast learner and pick things up pretty quickly, but I’m not specialized and definitely not interested enough in one thing to focus all of my attention on that.

And Eureka! I finally had a breakthrough. In all of my negative self-talk and attempts at discovering what my skills are, I realized I was putting two very limiting views into place:

1. I have to be great at something to pursue it
2. I have to pick one thing and try to put all of my extra time, money, and energy into it to have any possibility of success

Neither of these things have to be true — why do I have to be great at something to put my effort into it, and why do I have to pick just one thing?

Starting my Project Journey

I DON’T and it’s an incredibly freeing realization. So I’m going to try a lot of things and document the process for you along the way, so you can benefit from my mistakes and research as I take on different projects and try new things. I expect most of them to fail but it’s not going to stop me from doing it, and hopefully others struggling to take action will see that it doesn’t have to be a daunting endeavor to jump into the unknown. 

My first project is going to be writing my first book, the same fictional novel whose idea sprouted from a walk through a Parisian graveyard in 2015 and has haunted me ever since. I’ll document the research I do to try to figure out how Joe Schmoe goes about writing a book, trying to figure out structuring a story, sticking to word count goals, finding an editor, attempting to publish, etc. I expect this to fail MISERABLY and I’m so excited to give it a try. 

Come learn with me, and if you have any project ideas that you don’t want to try out yourself without some proof of someone else flailing hopelessly (and maybe productively, if we’re lucky) through the project, send me your suggestions at [email] and I may just pick that next.