Dropping Adsense - Saying Goodbye to $100K Per Year in Easy Income
stevepavlina.com
stevepavlina.com
"After being arrested for grand theft in Sacramento, CA and given 60 hours of community service, Steve claims that this was the impetus he needed to turn his life around. He claims to have earned two college degrees in three semesters from California State University, Northridge - he says that he partly achieved this by attending a college that was generous in awarding advanced placement credits for courses he had taken in high school, thus reducing his required course."
The citation links to his article where he claims he did 30-40 units per semester and no summer school. I don't know, that sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe he earned 2 degrees in 3 semester on technical subjets of mathematics and comp sci.
Casting aspersions on his character? Why? It's very hard for me to believe people can know enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Physics, but they do.
See: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstac... for how he did it.
There are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there that are going to sucker you in with their smooth words. Hey, if he writes about things and it helps you, that's great. Still doesn't convince me he graduated with 2 degrees in 3 semesters. It does convince me he knows how to make some money, though.
Even if you had nothing better to do in your life at that time, taking on 30-40 units is beyond a full time job. You'd litterally be looking at something like 60-80 hours of work a week. That's unreasonable by any standard. It's just like some other articles posted on here saying, working super long hours and little sleep isn't something that is productive or something worth bragging about.
Also, after reading through some of his articles he doesn't sound like a very logical person. I won't argue with results, but some things said on their don't exactly vibe with reason imo.
Math and computer science (or math and physics, in my case) have a lot of overlap. Intro courses (Calc 1-4, Physics 1-2, Chem 1-2, English 1-2, etc) are identical. Do a couple of course substitutions (Functional Analysis and Complex Variables == Math Methods for Physics Pt 1&2), and the work might only be 25% more. For me, 1 degree was 120 credits, 2 degrees was 150.
Another trick is to jump right into advanced courses. Quantum mechanics + organic chemistry (8 credits) is a lot of work. Quantum mechanics + organic chemistry + Chem 101 + Intro to Probability (16 credits) not double the work. In QM you derive energy levels for the Bohr atom, in Chem 101 you memorize them. 40 credits probably means 12 credits worth of difficult classes, and a bunch more where he shows up for tests and maybe crams for an hour beforehand.
- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...
- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-attracti...
But lately his stuff seems too "out there"--even for me. I fully respect what he does, but his way of life seems too extreme for me.
But even if you do, it doesn't seem possible for a human to work 100% of the time. Each time I've tried, I simply end up wasting time rather than using it -- e.g. I'll stare at my computer screen for awhile thinking, try some minor change that doesn't work, then repeat the cycle over for a couple hours. And the next day, my work has often proved to be shoddy at best when I was forcing myself to work.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of experiences that went like: There's a bug to fix. Can't seem to fix it. Go to bed. Wake up refreshed. Spot the bug in ten minutes.
That seems pretty valuable as a time saver, so it doesn't seem wise to sacrifice your "unwind" time lightly.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound like I'm coming down on you. I'm merely trying to point out that, in the end, polyphasic sleep seems like a form of masochism -- and perhaps that's why Steve himself stopped doing it.
I tend to trust the scientists who have compiled statistics by watching thousands of people sleep under various conditions. And they say that polyphasic sleep is a crock.
Why, then, does this polyphasic thing seem to work for some people? Let me suggest some hypotheses:
* Many people are raised on lack of sleep: Early rising for school, late nights, packed schedules. One can be sleep-deprived for so long that one really has no idea what being fully awake feels like. They say that it can take a month or more of active oversleeping to work your way out of sleep debt. (I'm not sure I have ever been truly out of sleep debt. Just because I know this stuff doesn't mean I'm always good at living by it. ;)
* Chronic sleep deprivation manifests as chronic sleepiness. If you can lie down at any hour of the day and fall asleep within a few minutes, you're sleep-deprived. But it is perhaps more psychologically satisfying to allow yourself to take those periodic naps that your sleepy self craves than to drive yourself through that sleepiness with coffee and determination. Compared to merely being sleep-deprived, being sleep-deprived polyphasically might feel really good.
* Polyphasic sleep is a ritual that requires discipline. The advantage of adopting such a ritual is that it forces you to change your life around (lose your strict 9-to-5 job, stop commuting two hours each way) and encourages you to do things you enjoy (e.g. have a social life). Dare I suggest that it is these side effects, rather than the polyphasic sleep, that make people happy? Dare I go on to suggest that it's better to adopt a different disciplined ritual -- based on, e.g., exercise, diet, or meditation -- that actually lets you get some sleep?
* It may be that a few people really do work better when they sleep polyphasically, or that a few people have associated health or social problems that tend to benefit from a polyphasic schedule. Something tells me, however, that many of these people have not really taken the scientific approach, by adopting the no-sleep-debt schedule for a few months and seeing what the difference is.
has anyone ever played the game (Dweep) he supposedly made all his money off of?
Maybe I'm in the wrong field...
If you are writing constant posts on personal finances: remortgag, consolidating, getting a financial advisor etc. & the ads that get posted are reasonably relevant (very dependant on the industry) & the readers are 'get a cup o coffee & read' type (digg/stumble/slashdot are reportadly click happy 15 second visitors), then you can get a good amount.
Its important to think about this from the advertisers perspective. The industries where click costs are high are where a large number of clicks can become substantial sales. Services are a biggie: everywhere from mortgage consultants to plumbers.
He's the #1 search result for "personal development", which averages 90,500 searches per month from Google. Assuming he receives 60% of those visits, that's 54,300 visits per month. Since it's search traffic, which would be people willing to click and look for info, he might get a CTR of 2%, which is 1,086 clicks per month. The estimated CPC for that term is $1.92, so that is $2,085 per month, or $25,021 per year.
Since that's a rough estimate of $25k/year for one search term, I think $100,000 per year is reasonable.
I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around 50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much. The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.
Having said that, Slashdot readers are more likely than average to use ad-blocking software.
It wasn't quite enough, though, to silence the part of me that was responding "you elitist prick" when reading things like "Given the choice between having an extra $100K per year of free money vs. becoming the kind of person who can kill off that much income without fear or worry...".
Many people have lost their livelihood by losing a small portion of this amount of "free money" and are facing dire economic circumstances in their lives. This blog post may just be 6 months too late considering the current world economic status.
Steve usually blogs "way out there" and I suppose that sometimes when you reach hard, you miss the mark. I hope he keeps going, I just thought this one was a miss.
Asshat.
It's a bit like telling someone who's trying to stop being a prostitute: "Keep whoring, donate the proceeds to charity."
You're the asshat, my friend.
It's nice that he makes so much money that he can afford to have principles. :P