Hey, I’m Bryan Ng.
Two years ago, I had no choice but to join the Singapore Army.
Many people my age end up sticking with this career because of the financial stability it provides.
I don’t blame them. Pay is good, and you’ll never have to worry about being unemployed.
But apart from that, it’s nothing but a golden prison. I had to suck it up to my superiors who just yelled and bossed me around all day long.
And I didn’t have that freedom to wake up one day and decide on a whim that I wanted to… I don’t know, go hike a mountain.
I knew I wasn’t cut for this life.
I wanted freedom, flexibility, and to do work that excited me. I wanted to see the world, work with people I admired, and do all that on my terms.
But I had to work to get to the point where I never had to take a job I hated just to cover my expenses.
And that’s what I did…
My initial goal was simple:
Make an extra thousand bucks from my laptop.
I knew that if I did it once, all I needed to do was replicate the same process.
That was my key to a life of true freedom.
There was just a small problem…
Finding an online income turned out to be harder than I expected.
Trust me, I literally tried everything.
I started a dropshipping store (cmon we all did…)...
Put a Shopify store together, choose a supplier, picked a “winning product” and ran Tiktok ads to it.
But despite refreshing the dashboard a million times, sales stayed the same - zero.
Ok. Let’s shut down the store and stop running ads.
Onto the next thing - a local tutoring business.
All my life, I’d been a straight-A student. I figured I could make some money teaching high schoolers economics.
And for some time, that kinda worked. Except, it quickly became a nightmare once I got to 4 students.
Messaging parents, checking in on my students, and preparing materials.
I was spread too thin.
And it showed in my business.
No matter what I did, I got stuck at $1,500/month.
Which isn’t exactly enough ‘f**k you money’ to pack up my stuff and quit my job.
I needed something else. Something that allowed me to replace my income without having to work the whole day.
That’s when I stumbled on the world of online writing.
Back then, Twitter ghostwriting was pretty popular.
Every day, I read stories of people my age - total strangers who had no online presence - who made 10 times what I was making writing for some of the biggest brands and creators…
All while traveling the world and working on their terms.
I wanted a piece of that, too.
So I started a ghostwriting agency for Twitter creators.
I reached out to hundreds of business owners, and convinced a few to try out my services.
I wrote a few tweets for them – and some of them even did pretty well.
I felt like I was on the right track - building a portfolio and the social proof I could use to land more clients.
Until - for some reason - things slowed down.
After the initial contract expired, the few clients I got started ghosting me.
Landing new ones got harder and harder.
I kept trying for months, but I was getting frustrated.
I had failed yet another business opportunity. And I started to ponder if I was even cut for this.
No matter how many proposals I sent…
What kind of career I chose…
Or even if I offered to work for free to get that initial traction…
It seemed impossible to replace my income with ‘online money’.
I was slowly burning out - trying to juggle working for the military during the day, and finding a way out at night.
Every day, I saw my dream of packing up and building a business while traveling evaporate in front of my eyes.
That is, until something unexpected happened…
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