Jesper

I have a friend who is a professional jazz guitar player. He's doing great, much better than most musicians. I don't think being extraordinarly talented is a guarantee that you will make a good living with music. My friend goes on tour through Europe each summer, playing on jazz festivals. He spends a lot of time networking and organizing concerts. If you want to make money with music you have to have business sense as well as musical talent.

Ofcourse it's possible. I used to have a colleague who told me long ago, "Isn't it great? We get to play with computers all day and we even get paid for it!". (I'm a software developer). Ofcourse, to make it your profession, you have to think about how you can make an income with your hobby. One thing to watch out for though is that when it becomes your profession, it's not just playing all day anymore. There will be deadlines and demands from your customers (or whoever pays you for your work). That might make it less enjoyable than when you are doing it purely for your own enjoyment, when nobody is expecting results from you. Computers and programming have been my hobby since I got my first computer when I was 13, but there are certainly days when it's boring or when I feel frustrated because I'm not making progress. I think that you will have good days and bad days with any job, even if you make your profession from whatever you love to do most.

A few years ago I was drinking coffee all day at work, maybe 6 cups or so a day. In the weekends I would get headaches because I drank much less or no coffee. So I limited it to 1 or 2 cups in the morning at work and the headaches went away.

I would never do that. Multi-level marketing is a scam and borderline illegal. The idea is probably that you have to buy stuff from people up the chain, which you then have to sell to people down the chain. You'll probably end up losing money on it. At least be very, very careful with it and do research. Don't do it if you don't understand exactly what you're getting yourself into. Wikipedia says:

I just found that Leo has a video where he talks about Toastmasters: Fear Of Public Speaking - The One Key To Overcoming It Forever

Great that you are thinking about it in such a constructive way, and that you can see how you were acting in the approach and what effect it had. That's what's going to help you improve!

Sounds like a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme scam.

There are two interesting psychological effects which are on opposite sides: 1. The impostor syndrome, where an expert in some field doesn't really acknowledge to him/herself that he/she is really an expert and who is afraid of being exposed as a fraud, even though there is really no reason for it, 2. The Dunning-Kruger effect, where someone grossly overestimates his/her own ability or knowledge in some field and doesn't see how little he or she really knows. I've noticed that sometimes I suffer from the impostor syndrome, especially when I'm being interviewed for a new job. I know I am a good and experienced software developer (I've been doing this work for almost 20 years), but at an interview I still get nervous and sometimes start to doubt my own abilities. What are your experiences with these two effects? For the Dunning-Kruger effect, people obviously don't recognise this themselves, it's something you might have seen happening with other people.

@abrakamowse Toastmasters is a woldwide organisation, and it's already quite old - it was started in 1924. There are about 15,000 Toastmasters clubs all around the world. Here in my home city (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) there are two clubs, an English speaking and a Dutch speaking club. It is not expensive at all, the club I went to costs € 90 (about US$ 100) per year. They have two meetings per month. I went to a meeting as a guest last Tuesday. There were about 20 people, including 5 or 6 guests. The club has a number of workbooks, and each member works through those books in their own pace. In each book, there are a number of speeches that you have to do. For each speech, the focus lies on a specific aspect - for example there was someone who held an inspirational speech, and someone who held a storytelling speech. There's also "table topics", where everybody can join in and hold a short (1 - 2 minutes) improvised speech about some topic. The meeting was very structured: a number of members had different roles, for example to watch the time, to watch for stopwords, to watch for language and grammar. Each of them would give an evaluation of those aspects after a speech. It was very interesting and I can see that you can learn a lot about public speaking and leadership.

Thanks @Rares . I'm going to a Toastmasters meeting of a local club next Tuesday as a guest.

In my opinion, the most fundamental principle behind any kind of business is that you should provide value to your customers. So look at your business from that point of view: How are you providing value to your customers? Specifically with regard to sales: Be detached from the outcome. If you are attached to one particular outcome (for example, you badly want the customer to buy something from you), then you are sabotaging yourself. This is not only true for selling, but also for buying things. I was in Morocco once, where aggressive shop owners try to get you to buy tourist trinkets. They had nice wooden boxes. I wanted to buy one and haggled 50% off the price. I thought I had done well. Then a few days later at another shop I saw the same boxes. I didn't want one anymore, because I had already bought one. But the shop owner persisted and I kept telling him I didn't want it. The price went down to less than half of what I paid at the other shop. What I learned there was: the less I am attached to the outcome ("I want that box"), the better deal I get.

Does anybody here have experience with Toastmasters? What did you get out of it? I am not yet a member of Toastmasters, but I'm interested in it and I'll go to a meeting of a Toastmasters club next week. This week (last Tuesday) I did my first presentation at a conference. It went great. I was prepared well. The conference organizers matched me up with a mentor months ago who gave me some useful tips for preparing the presentation. The best tip he gave me is to record myself on video. I did this 8 or 9 times in the weeks before the conference. It really helped me to get the presentation into my head and when it was time to do it for real, I felt I was completely ready for it and not nervous at all.

Watch out with random people that try to contact you on Skype, there are a lot of scammers out there - people who will try to make them love you and then they start asking for money. There are so many stories of people who sent thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars to someone they met randomly online and that they thought they were in love with, but who they have never met in reality and who turn out to be just trying to scam you out of your money.

Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles (George Harrison). About that after bad times, there will be good times. Helps me to get optimistic when I'm facing difficulties.

Thanks @FindingPeace and @Leo Gura for making me think about the balance between inner-game and outer-game. I'm ofcourse looking at this through my own lens. I am a thinker, and I notice that it's easy for me to spend a lot of time learning theory and think about myself (inner-game) and I find it a lot harder to go out there and do things (outer-game). Because when I do that, I really have to face my fears, and that's scary.