Follow Your Passion

byskalapy

142 followers

Updated 6 years ago

Good morning Wealthy Affiliate Friends,

My name is Jimmie and I’m a relatively new member.

As I near retirement from the military, I am thinking more and more about how I’m going to earn a living when I get out. This is a scary proposition after 23 years. I am basically institutionalized like the old guy from Shawshank Redemption.

A lot of my retired friends have seen their post military employment as an extension of their former careers. Some continue to work for the military as civilians or contract for some other government agency.

Others have started up tactical equipment, training or consulting businesses.

None of this appeals to me at all. When I get out, I want to put all of that behind me.

One thing that I realized over the past few years is that I had to identify a passion and purpose. If I didn’t, the second have of my life would be very unfulfilling.

My passion used to be training and preparing for combat. I immersed myself in this for 20 plus years until I was told that I was done with that and that I would need to take an administrative position.

This transition literally happened over night. One day I was on combat deployment, flew home and the next day I was sitting at my desk. Talk about culture shock. I had never even learned how to type.

Luckily, I had transitioned from handling a Military Working Dog (MWD) to managing a MWD program. During this time I realized that my new passion had been there all along; dogs.

I’ve always loved dogs and I love working with them in the military so why not try and make a living involving my passion?

I’m still in the military and I recently moved from my managerial job to K9 R&D. I have a lot more time on my hands now. I was sitting there drinking beer and playing video games about a week ago when I realized that I had better start making better use of my spare time. I wouldn’t mind a little more disposable income for my family...

I’m fully employed. I can’t just start up a business and still fulfill my military obligations. What to do? Maybe start a business on line?

At this point I started punching in all the “make money online or at home” keywords. I went down a couple of scam rabbit holes until I hit “the catch” or it started to seem too good to be true.

After a little more research, I happened upon Littlemama’s page and it brought me here. So far WA seems legitimate. I actually learned how to create a website and started creating content for free.

Yes, I paid the premium fee to continue training and get help buying a domain but, so far, it’s been worth it to me. At the end of the day, WA is a business and they have to make money right?

I see this as education and now that I’m at an age where I can appreciate it, I’m learning and retaining more than I ever did in school. Hmmm, I wonder if my GI bill would pay for this.

I don’t know if I’ll ever make any money with my blog but I do know that I am getting a head start in my niche before retirement. I’m also enjoying myself and feel a renewed sense of purpose every day trying to help people with their dogs.

Like I said, I’m new here so I don’t have a ton of advice to offer:

1. Identify a passion now. If you can make a living with it, great. If not, don’t abandon it as it will still give you a purpose which is supremely important. My only other passion is playing hockey but I’ll never make a dime doing that. I lose money lol.
2. Follow all of the training. Don’t get ahead fiddling around on your domain. I did this and then had to backtrack and fix things that I had screwed up. This wasted my time.
3. You can quit tomorrow. Give it another day...

Thanks and best of luck, Jimmie