But I am quite driven to turn my next app/business ideas into reality : http://50pop.com/code
Definitely not trying to "top" CD Baby. Just following what fascinates me. Just not quite as intensely as when I was so driven to be a rock star. ☺
For example, I'm tempted to give this bit of advice:
Think small. Don't think about getting rich. Just think what you can do for someone right now that they'll be happy to pay you for. Then when you've found it, think of how to do it for as many people as possible.
... but is that actually good advice? Or do I just think that's the strategy that made me rich, when actually it's something else entirely, and I somehow got successful despite my stupid approach?
That said, here's something that I know is quite solid:
The biggest change in my attitude towards money came from my girlfriend's hippie parents. She grew up on a commune in Vermont. No TV, no nothing. Her parents just did random odd jobs - like photography and sewing - but kept their cost of living so low that it was enough to sustain them to this day. Then they put their daughter through fancy ivy-league universities on scholarships and such.
By lowering your cost of living so low that you can do just a few hours of work per month to pay your expenses, then it frees you up to turn your attention to doing things that make you happy, or perhaps building things that will make you much more money in the long run. Things that most people don't have the time to do because they're too busy on the rat-race, doing some job they hate, because they need to support their expensive cost of living.
Point being: once you realize how cheaply you can live, you get a real secure feeling of financial abundance.
Then keep improving your hustle, and doing whatever it takes to make money doing what you love, and the security/abundance mixes with fun, for a damn good combination.
(I hope this helps.)
I like that you have everything planned out to be multi-lingual from the start on your projects. I remember reading your uses.this interview a while back and you talked about using wendlin/learning chinese. Are you still doing that, if so, how's that going?
It looks like they also sell a book, but it was published July 2010, so I'm not sure how much has changed since.
Nginx: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main
JavaScript: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Professional-JavaScri... and http://eloquentjavascript.net/
jQuery: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/jquery2/ and http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfjquery/
Backbone: https://peepcode.com/products/backbone-js and http://backbonetutorials.com/ ... but I've barely started.
And yeah I'm still learning Chinese, but I've scaled it back, because I realized that the programming is more important to me now, and I wasn't getting all the programming done that I wanted to because I was taking 2 hours a day on my Chinese.