Five years ago, at 30 years old, I hit rock bottom.
I was broke, less than $300 in the bank, $20,000 of debt, unemployed, single, living with parents, and deeply depressed.
My car was constantly breaking down, and everything else in my life was falling into disrepair too.
All my friends stopped talking to me. I’d gone in and out of the mental ward. I was struggling on all levels.
Determined to turn my life around, I created a 5-year plan that helped me build a stable successful life.
Now I have plenty of money, a rewarding career, a great relationship, a house, and a fantastic outlook for the future.
This is a brief overview of what I learned through that transformation.
Rock Bottom
Growing up I was the typical intelligent kid with behavioral problems. I never got good grades or worked hard at much of anything. I always just followed my impulses and desires. I had very little discipline, self-control, or responsibility. Seeing my parents struggle with money made me accept poverty as normal. I entered adulthood working minimum wage jobs. Well below the poverty line.
By age 24 (in 2012), I started learning to code and quickly realized it was the career for me. In the following years I got a few tech jobs, but none that paid much above minimum wage and it was hard to break into the industry. Need experience to get a job, need a job to get experience… the professional chicken-egg conundrum.
By age 27 (in 2015), I was fed up with never making enough money to support myself despite having some marketable skills. One half of my social media feeds showed friends and acquaintances finding great success and starting families. The other half was inundated with content about earning ‘Passive Income’ and starting a business. Little did I know I was slowly getting pulled into the ‘Hustle Culture’ trap.
Queue the classic “Here In My Garage” Tai Lopez video…

As I watched and read more of this Hustle Culture content, the algorithms really honed in on my new interest. Soon, it was the only thing in my social media feeds.
It was all themed on the concept that trading your time for money in a regular job is extremely limiting. It will never propel you to true wealth. Working for yourself is the only way to make decent money. The ultimate goal was to make money while you sleep – Passive Income! The promise of unlimited freedom to be your own boss, set your own hours, and having one set of work making money for you for the rest of your life was alluring.
I was all in.
From 2014 to 2018, I steadily began to work myself ragged trying to start my own business as a freelance programmer. When that didn’t work out, I shifted to dropshipping, retail arbitrage, Forex trading, day trading, hydroponic farming, and many more ventures. Each new endeavor led me to try writing code to incorporate what I was learning into apps and websites. I wanted to keep growing as a programmer, but I felt like I needed to start earning cash fast. It was a lot.
In 2016, a combination of overworking myself, and getting caught in a very toxic relationship, led to a serious mental breakdown. I was hospitalized and medicated, my brain had flipped upside-down and inside-out. After some recovery, I kept going… pushing myself to work even harder. That led to yet another, even more critical, nervous breakdown in 2018.
After being released from the mental ward for the second time in April 2018, I was heavily medicated and unsure if I would ever recover. When the dust cleared, the scene was bleak. I had no money, was unemployed, living at my parents’ house, in debt by over $20,000, my car was in disrepair, and things were getting worse by the day. Everything was at a dead-end.
Something was missing, and I had no idea what. What was I doing wrong? Why did it seem like everyone else could become a self-made millionaire while I was stuck in the mud, spinning my tires, and running out of gas?
Something had to change.
So I shifted gears.
My 5 Year Plan
I needed a fresh start. I was 30 years old with less than nothing. So I sat and really thought about it. I envisioned the life of an average 35-year-old. What does the average 35-year-old have in their life? Then I set simple, achievable goals to work toward that vision from 2018 to 2023. These goals would form the foundation of my five-year plan.
This is what I came up with:
- ๐ต Finances: Pay off my debt and get my finances in good shape.
- ๐ Transportation: Get a reliable car that will last me for the next 10 years.
- ๐ Education: Get a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science to help stabilize my career.
- ๐งโ๐ป Career: Get a tech job making $100k+ per year, with a good work environment.
- ๐ Independent Living: Rent an apartment or house and get out of my parents house for good.
- โญ Bonus: Buy an affordable house that’s in decent shape.
Finances, transportation, education, career, and living space. That’s it. Just the basics.
Even those basics felt out of reach at the time, but I was determined to try.
I knew I might not achieve all those goals no matter how hard I tried, but I made a vow to myself that I’d stay consistent.
Everything I did from then on had to directly contribute toward one of those five main goals or I’d put it aside for later.
From that point on – I began living exclusively for my 35 year old self.
Spoiler Alert: I accomplished 5 out of 6 of my goals. Read to the end to see how it turned out…
…but first, I want to share the valuable lessons I learned that made it all possible.
Life Reset
When I just returned home from the mental ward in 2018, I decided to reset my life.
I quit everything. That’s it. It’s really that simple. I stopped doing everything for a while.
That gave me the extremely valuable ability to really look at everything to get a new perspective.
For the first time I started seeing that life operates in a really simple logical way.
If you learn to think and live within this simple logic, anything is possible.
The whole world exists in a delicate balance of cause and effect.
You have the life you have now (effect) because of the person you’ve been so far (cause).
To get the good life you really want, you have to start being the good person that fits with that life – today.
Like literally today, right now. The sooner the better. Start trying to be that good type of person as soon as possible.
Then keep that up everyday, all the time, from now until that future comes.
The world won’t hand you the life you want on a silver platter. The world doesn’t revolve around you.
You can’t just instantly change everyone and everything so that you can easily get the life you want. The only thing you can really change is yourself. That’s it.
I don’t think it’s good enough to only change the things you do. You have to dig much deeper and actually change who you are at a fundamental core level.
On one hand: Over the years my habits had gotten so out of whack. My dopamine system was so overloaded. My sleep schedule was so off balance. My opinions and attitudes had gotten so mixed up. I’d accumulated so much emotional baggage and unresolved issues. I eventually became so depressed, so anxious, so burned out, so lost.
On the other hand: I wanted this dream life where I become successful and make plenty of money doing what I love to do. A life where most of my problems were resolved. Where I could positively contribute to other’s lives with what I had accomplished. Where I could meet new interesting people, travel the world exploring what’s out there, and be financially secure enough to never worry about my future.
Truthfully, I was trying to fit a warped screwed up peg into a perfectly circle hole. I was trying to get away with being the same old me, with all my bad habits and problems, and somehow attain this whole new successful unrealistic life.
It just didn’t match up. The person I was didn’t match the life I wanted.
So for me. This was the only way. I had to stop doing everything for a while and just reset.
No distractions. No escape. Phone off. TV off. Computer off. Nothing but me and myself.
Go nowhere. Talk to no one. Try to do nothing. Try to think of nothing. That’s it.
Only do what was required to keep myself alive. I mean that literally.
Aside from eating meals and using the restroom, I spent all my time just sitting there. Thinking.
I basically put myself in time-out. I was in detention, staring at the corner, wearing the dunce hat, grounded to my room, on punishment.
That ended all my addictions. Marijuana, Caffeine, Sugar, Video Games, Social Media, Youtube, Netflix, and more.
It stopped all my hobbies. Skateboarding, playing guitar, drawing, writing, coding, studying, reading, and so on.
It dissolved all my daily habits and routines.
The first few days were spent just starting to untangle the traffic jam of desires in my head.
“I want to…” -> “I can’t.”
“but maybe I can just…” -> “Nope.”
“but what if I just…” -> “Nah.”
Over and over and over again.
Then I started trying to meditate to clear my mind completely.
I did this for a few weeks straight.
Gradually I could feel my thoughts moving away from desires, addictions, and distractions. They started gravitating toward more responsible things I could be doing. Cleaning, chores, errands, and other responsibilities. Stuff I would have been doing regularly if I’d kept good habits.
As the hours and days went by, I slowly started getting an incredible clarity on everything.
That’s when I started realizing new things I never considered.
Long-term mindset
My first realization was that I had always thought and planned with a short-term mindset.
I knew that if I wanted to find a way out of the crappy dead-end life I found myself in, I needed to find new ways of thinking. The first piece of this puzzle was changing the way I approached planning and follow through in the things I did.
I used to start working on an idea, but when it didn’t show results quickly, I assumed it was a failure and moved on to something else. The truth is, this habit stemmed from years being of impulsive and undisciplined.
The beginning of anything is just more “fun”. Discovering it is gratifying. Starting the first few steps are interesting. Hyping yourself up on all the possibilities is electrifying. Hoping for it all to go perfectly is so exciting. Then when it doesn’t quite work out right, assuming failure and playing the victim brings a self-serving satisfaction in some twisted way. Letting you wallow in bad feelings and giving you excuses to act out recklessly.
It takes discipline and patience to stick through the hard parts of anything. The boring parts. The confusing parts. The parts that don’t have an instruction manual. Where you can’t find anyone to guide you. That stuff isn’t “fun” at all! It all feels opaque and tedious. But those are probably the most valuable parts of any experience.
That’s when I remembered some form of this very famous quote:
People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.
– J.C.R. Licklider, 1965, from “Libraries of the Future”
Looking back, I really only remember my life in 1-2 year increments. I never really worked on anything longer than that. So this would take some serious change in my natural outlook.
Plan for the long term and devote myself exclusively to it.
That’s when I decided I would make that 5 year plan and stick to it.
No Short Cuts
My second realization really put things into perspective. All the ‘hustle culture’ and ‘self-employment’ content I had been consuming over the last few years wasn’t even made for me.
Think about it. All that self-employment entrepreneurial ‘hustle culture’ content has to do with breaking out of the 9-to-5 rat race. It speaks very negatively about working for an hourly wage, trading your time for money. It’s targeted at people who’ve been working full time in a career but haven’t gotten ahead in life. People that have finished college, landed in a career, worked as a loyal employee, but haven’t found financial freedom.
They’re talking to a middle class person who wants to break into the upper class. Not an impoverished lower class person struggling to survive!
I hadn’t even gotten 25% through my degree at that point. All I did was flaked out on entry level minimum wage jobs for a few years. I spent most of my time daydreaming and ‘following my passions’. I never even gave the typical 9-to-5 working life a real chance.
I was trying to skip ahead. I was trying to outsmart the system. I was trying to short-cut my way around the 9-to-5 job. I convinced myself that a normal job just wasn’t for me. I convinced myself I wasn’t the type of person that should do that. But why?
When I was growing up I saw all the adults in my life work for decades in jobs they hated. I hadn’t ever wanted to be like them. So I’d brainwashed myself into whole-heartedly believing I had to find a different path. All the ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘work for yourself’ content I was consuming tapped into that bias I’d built.
But was any of that realistic? Practical? Logical?
Coming to this realization took accepting and internalizing some hard truths about myself.
In truth, I’d always been undisciplined, unfocused, and catastrophically impulsive. I had very little self-control and I always thought I knew better than the people I was working for.
In truth, I never wanted to do the boring day-to-day work. The mundane normal average stuff. The work you have to do at the beginning of your career. The boring thankless stuff. The work that allows you to grow and eventually move up in the ranks.
How the heck could I expect to suddenly gain the self-discipline, self-control, good habits, focus, and maturity required to run my own successful business when I had a hard time doing the basic entry level work in someone else’s?
Accepting this concept meant letting go of the idea of shortcuts. I had to do the mundane, thankless work that would allow me to grow. The work that would give me the experience to move up in the ranks. This shift in perspective was crucial.
Dedication To Realistic Goals
This line of thinking led me to my third realization. I don’t need to be rich, I just need an average stable life.
Yeah, you heard right. I don’t need to be wealthy. The next layer of brainwashing that I’d gone through is that I needed to become a millionaire as fast as humanly possible.
One part of this was the fact that I felt so far behind. The median net worth for someone in their 30s is something like $90,000! Considering my $20k of debt, that meant I was… $110,000 behind? How was I going to suddenly earn $110,000??! It felt like an extreme emergency to me. It seemed like the only solution was to find some kind of instant windfall success. I felt like I was too old to even consider any kind of slow, average solution. Unfortunately, that line of thinking is exactly what the scams, hucksters, and get rich-quick-schemes prey on.
The other part of this was that I was blind to the value of larger sums of money. I’d been living in poverty my whole life. Any amount of money above $2000 sounded the same to me. The concept of having $20,000 in the bank felt so far out of reach that it might as well be $200,000 or $2 million. I honestly couldn’t tell the practical differences. It felt like any large magnitude of money could immediately solve most of my problems.
Truthfully, I had no idea how to handle money, control my spending, pay my bills regularly, or set some aside for savings.
So even if I started getting successful it would have probably disappeared as quickly as it showed up. I mean, just look at all the lottery winners, professional sports players, and other people that get a sudden boatload of cash. Most of them go bankrupt a short time after their initial success. The trick about money is that if you spend it… you don’t have it anymore and you’re right back to square one. If you don’t invest it correctly, it’ll just sit there doing nothing… slowly disappearing.
But if you have the habits to consistently earn and save money, then over time it can grow to be a much larger and stable amount than any windfall could ever promise.
My life was falling apart because all the energy and attention I put on finding a short-cut was keeping me from upkeeping what little I had.
I needed to come back down to earth. Learn what money was actually about, one step at a time. Take the basic advice of financial experts and learn the fundamentals.
Absolute Honesty
When I was a kid I had a problem with telling lies. Little white lies to make people feel better, big substantial lies to get out of trouble, or silly imaginary lies to tell my friends when I was bored. Over time, as the pain of being dubbed ‘the bad kid’ really started setting in, it made me care less and less about telling the truth. I broke my own heart enough with my bad decisions that I started to lose the empathy required to care about other people’s hearts. It was a serious problem.
Thankfully, for the most part, I grew out of that as I got older. Still I’d slip up and lie in critical moments, ruining relationships and losing friends. Lying is an incredibly difficult habit to break. It makes you look like a kook. It’s the lazy way to just hit the ‘Easy’ button and get through any situation in the short-term. I’m convinced most people lie all the time in little ways, possibly without realizing they even do it. It’s only when someone calls them on it that they realize it – ‘Oh wow sorry, yeah that was a lie… my bad…’
The really insidious thing is it’s even easier to lie to yourself. In your own head. Where there’s no clear consequences and no one can call you on it. You can go on with your life, thinking the same lies to yourself, for years and years. It saves your own feelings. It avoids difficult realizations. It saves your ego. It let’s you rewrite your memories and your history. It warps your reality. Everyone does it, to some minor degree. It’s just built into our natural psychology. Unless you purposely do what you can to recognize it and avoid it, you don’t even realize it’s happening most of the time. The longer you hold on to those secret internal lies, the more detached from reality you become. It can really screw things up.
For all these reasons and more, I decided once and for all I would be fully committed to telling the truth. To myself and to anyone else.
Of course I wouldn’t hold anyone else to it, that’s not my place. I know people are always just doing the best they can. People will inevitably tell a lie when they feel they have to. Instead, this was a totally personal thing for me.
Here’s the thing. Look back at the last few sections of this writing:
- “Truthfully, I was trying to fit a warped screwed up peg into a perfectly circle hole…”
- “The truth is, this habit stemmed from years being of impulsive and undisciplined….”
- “In truth, I had always been undisciplined, unfocused, and catastrophically impulsive. […] In truth, I never wanted to do the boring day-to-day work.”
- “Truthfully, I had no idea how to handle money…”
The common theme with all the realizations I was coming to was based in simply realizing that the truth is the way. Examining things with honesty. Learning to accept the harsh reality of my situation and what I had been doing wrong. What I could do better in the future.
After thinking through everything and clearing my mind, I found plenty of other difficult truths. The main overarching lesson in all of it is very simple:
All beneficial roads are based on truth. Being truthful to others, but especially being truthful to yourself.
The Foundation
Armed with these 5 main realizations, and a few other ones, I went about restarting my life.
- Reset: To get the life I wanted I had to drop my old habits, reset my brain, and start fresh as the type of person that could sustain that life.
- Long Term: I had to start thinking and planning in longer spans of time, setting up a 5 year plan.
- No Short-Cuts: My resistance to just work normal traditional jobs and attempts to find a clever way out of them brought more harm than good.
- Realistic: My desire to skip directly from poverty to wealth was dooming me to never have a stable life.
- Truth: Lying to myself and others will always keep me detached from reality. Try to see life for what it truly is and not what I, or others, want it to be.
Along with these, there were two other things I came to realize early on in 2018. These are subjective, you might disagree with them, but I wanted to give them a shot and see how it worked out:
- Straight forward simplicity is usually the best way to go with everything in life. Not everything is simple, but executing complex things in simple ways is the most powerful thing you can do. If things get too complex and complicated, it’s an indicator that you’re on the wrong track or what you’re doing isn’t as good as it could be. More benefits can come from simplicity than complexity.
- Taking large risks isn’t worth it when it comes to your livelihood. People that promote the idea of ‘Big Risks, Big Rewards’ are speaking from a survivorship bias. In any high-stakes domain there’s usually far more people that lose than win, but if you only hear from the winners – you’ll never realize how likely it is you’ll fail. Living a successful life doesn’t require the risk that ‘hustle culture’ content creators will have you believe it does.
I created my 5 year plan with all this in mind. It was simple. It was low risk. It was realistic. It didn’t short cut anything. It was based on the best truth I knew.
The Results
Here’s the part that I’ve struggled with putting into words. Five years is a really long time to condense down into an article. Even trying to write about the first 6 months turns into an excessive 10,000+ word manifesto that I’m sure no one will ever read. So I’ll spare you the ‘story-mode’ and just list out the milestones. I think this really illustrates how unintuitive, yet powerful, following through on a simple long-term plan can be.
2018
โ๏ธ (Jun 2018) Simplify my life: quit everything and start fresh.
โ๏ธ (Jul 2018) Get a simple part time job [$11/hr, 20-30 hrs/week].
โ๏ธ (Aug 2018) Restart community college.
โ๏ธ (Oct 2018) Reach $2000 in emergency savings.
โ๏ธ (Dec 2018) Get a full-time tech job with good salary [$55k/year, 40 hrs/week].
2019
โ๏ธ (Oct 2019) Transfer to WGU for a Computer Science Bachelor’s degree.
โ
(Nov 2019) ๐ต Pay off all my bad debt [$25k].
โ๏ธ (Dec 2019) Keep my tech job for a year, receive 5% raise [$58k/year].
2020
โ๏ธ (Jan 2020) Get a new position at work, 11% salary increase [$65k/yr].
โ
(Feb 2020) ๐ Get a reliable used car and start paying it off as fast as possible.
โ
(Aug 2020) ๐ Move out on my own, renting a house.
โ๏ธ (Dec 2020) Annual 5% raise [$68k/year].
2021
โ๏ธ (Apr 2021) Pay off my car loan 100%.
โ๏ธ (Sep 2021) Save 6 months of living expenses [$20k].
โ๏ธ (Dec 2021) Save up enough for an FHA down payment on an house [$30k].
โ๏ธ (Dec 2021) Annual 3% raise [$70k/year].
2022
โ๏ธ (Mar 2022) Get a job position, 17% increase [$85k/year].
โ
(Mar 2022) โญ Buy a house with an affordable mortgage.
โ๏ธ (Dec 2022) Refill savings for 6 months living expenses [$20k].
2023
โ (Jan 2023) ๐งโ๐ป Get a tech job earning $100k+ per year [$115k].
โ Graduate with a Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree… (85% complete)
In retrospect, these results are pretty modest. This wasn’t a meteoric overnight rise of massive success. This isn’t the kind of hustle-culture get-rich-quick clickbait you’ll see plastered all over the internet. I haven’t finished my college degree yet!
Some years I felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all, that was frustrating. My life took unplanned turns and there were plenty of confusing situations I struggled with. There were many times I slid back into bad habits, too… playing video games too much, getting distracted on side-hustle ideas, etc. Really, there’s a lot more I could have done, and a lot of what I did could have been done differently.
Tons of people out there accomplished far more than I did in this timespan between 2018-2023. They probably even started in far worse conditions than I did. I’m sure if I was a perfectly efficient robot, I could have made 10x more progress… but I’m not. And I’m kind of proud of that.
In all my imperfection and spotty consistency, I still managed to find a new level of happiness and stability in life that I never thought was possible. If I’d been relentlessly focused on accomplishing my goals as fast as possible – I don’t think I’d be able to say that.
Lately my main challenge has been finding a sustainable balance. A balance between having fun and enjoying my life while still following through with the goals I made. That part hasn’t been easy. I don’t think I’ll ever master that balance, but I do think that it’s going to end up providing more than the ‘ 100% hustle culture’ attitude ever could.
Thanks for reading. I hope you got useful insights to start your own long term plans.
If you have any questions just drop a line: will@wforbes.net
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