Balancing Progress, Risk, and Motivation
August 25, 2025 – Monday
Entry #6
My morning today feels a bit slower, almost like a loss of motivation but not completely. Yesterday, I worked on my website, making changes that I think will improve it. I also started working on my guide for setting up a shop. I really hope this resource is actually good and will help others. I spent almost the entire day making it. I was proud of myself for choosing not to go with AI’s suggestions on rewording parts. When it’s presented outright as a person, it feels a bit like my own, more human-like, which is nice.
I’m still struggling with financial anxiety. I’m not so sure if I should be exploring options for side hustles or just some type of income stream. I have this gut feeling that YouTube will take off enough to give me some type of income, just enough to get me by before I go broke. But there’s also the sensible side of me knowing that is a very risky gamble.
The risks for me aren’t dangerous like going homeless, because I know I have people who would support me. But rather I’d be forced to work for someone, trading my time and energy for money, which may in turn take a lot or all of the time and/or energy for YouTube. It brings the same feelings that I should be posting more, building more, which in turn can be sold for extra money, even though nothing has really been selling on Etsy. Is that my fault or does the platform just suck now? Maybe I need to focus my time more on the tasks that produce expected results. Like I spent a lot of time on my website yesterday, working until almost 1am. Obviously adding/changing website pages isn’t going to grow my YouTube channel like posting a video would, but at the same time I’m in a limbo because I don’t have epoxy to continue my project yet. I could move my epoxy mold to get space so I can work on the base, or start editing that video, which probably makes the most sense.
Yes, this reminds me of the Brinq days when I’d criticize my decisions to work on things that didn’t produce results when needed first. Maybe these decisions are important, maybe they give me a sense of accomplishment. I guess that’s reasonable.
Maybe I just need to set boundaries. I could say I get to work on B-tier tasks only for X amount of time or have a reasonable set goal I can complete that day, like publishing one new webpage only. I’m going to try this today and report back tomorrow my feelings on it. My goals today are to edit my new shop video, consider video titles for my epoxy table video (mentioned a few days ago), and do one website page. I really want to start with the website page, but maybe I should force myself to start with something else. I think the editing is most important but takes the longest. I’ll start with epoxy title ideas, that’s my least interesting right now.
