Episode 31: The 5 Different Types of Laptop Life Living

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Hope you are doing awesome today. I want to talk about basically the title of my podcast, right? I call it Create youe Laptop Life, but. And I know I hear that a lot or you hear laptop lifestyle, but there are actually several different types of laptop lives you can live once you join the online business world. So I kind of want to dive into those a little bit so that you can find the one that's going to work for you. You. All right, so let's get started. The most typical laptop life, when you hear that word that what comes to mind is being on the beach, maybe a pina colada laptop on your lap, right? So the first type of laptop life that we all associate with kind of this online business world is the digital nomad. I have a friend, her name is Julia, she is on Instagram as destinationnomad and she is literally, literally a digital nomad. She has an RV and she travels around the country and on any given day she could be in Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, who knows? And she is a WordPress developer. So she codes WordPress websites and that is her job and that is how she supports herself while she's on the road. So that is one type of laptop life. So if you have a desire to travel full time, you want to go around the world, you want to get an rv, travel the country doing some sort of online business, whether it's service based or info product based, allows you to completely travel around the country. A couple things to think about when you are doing that type of laptop life. You want to make sure that you're considering your WI fi situation. She said that that was probably the biggest problem when she went on the road, sold her home, was making sure she had really good wifi all the time so that she could connect with her clients and continue to build her website. So whether you're traveling to Bali, China, Australia, you know, keep in mind different countries are going to have different requirements. Even in China, there are some websites you can't access that you could access in the States. So if you are really considering a digital nomad life, that'll be your biggest hurdle to jump. In fact, we were on a cruise a couple weeks ago and we were like, what would it be like to do a cruise around the world? And we actually there is one, it's like 200 and I thought that would be amazing. It's like 80 grand to do it for the whole year. And if you are a single person and you can just hop on a boat and travel the world, the only thing that's a real sticky wicket there is the WI fi. Okay, so that's the first type of laptop life there's actually. And that's the one that we most commonly associate with the words laptop life. But that's not actually the only one there is. Second type of laptop life is the kind that I started out with, which is the side hustle or the moonlight. So maybe you're in a 9 to 5 job and you don't really like the job and you have other passions you want to pursue, so you create a side hustle. It could be something like a blog, it could be a freelance job like writing social media. You could also be moonlighting because you want to eventually have your own business, but you know, you can't make the leap. Now. I did the moonlighting thing. I started as a side hustle. So when I was married to my first husband, he had the insurance, he had all the things right. I was a stay at home mom. And once the kids went back to school, I realized, oh my gosh, they're all in school six hours a day now. I need to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. I had spent my 20s in a complete haze of breastfeeding and diapers and potty training. And so now I had to make some decisions. So I started as a freelance writer doing a side hustle. I was on all the sites, upwork and textbroker and hubpages, oh my gosh, throwback days. And I was really just trying to make enough to pay for the groceries. So for me that was like 150 bucks a week. That's all I cared about. And so I kind of stayed in that side hustle mode for quite a few years now when we ended up getting divorced, and it's a big long dramatic story, I ended up needing to not just have a side hustle, I needed to have a full time job. And I was pregnant at the time and it's hard to get a job when you're pregnant. I don't know if you've ever tried to do it, but it's not easy. I found a temp job, but I knew that that would run out because it was temporary. So I did my temp job by day and I moonlighted by night. And I would say that the laptop life of a moonlighter is a little different than a side hustler. So the side hustler laptop life, you know, if you're trying to make a million dollars or have these big, high reaching goals, when you're in the mode of a side hustler, it's really hard to get the fire under your butt to really make that kind of money. I mean, I stayed inside hustle mode from 2000, like 9 to 2014, right? 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. It's like five years. And I never really hit more than 1000 or $2000 a month. Okay. When I got divorced, I went into moonlight mode and that was a different mode. The laptop life for moonlighting is, you know, you're up all hours, you are hustling to try to get clients to try to, you know, build your business, get your list built, do the things that you need to do so that eventually you can take the leap. So that is a. So I would say I would consider those two different types of laptop lives. The moonlighting one is not designed to be a forever. Eventually you want to go to the next version of a laptop life, which is full time laptop living. Full time laptop living means that your full time bread and butter income that you use to live is happening from a computer at home or wherever you happen to be. So a lot of young small agencies or info product coaches, consultants, course creators eventually go from moonlighting to their full time gig. That's what I did. I did it as an agency owner. I have always preached that doing freelance service provider work first is the easiest way to make a full time living online. Because you don't need a huge following, you don't need a big enormous list, and every single customer that comes into your door, you can charge a fair amount of money for. And so full time laptop life living could be you in the dining room as a mom with kids, but also running a small agency. Or it could progress to technically, I don't know if I can call my life a laptop life anymore because I'm not using a laptop. It progresses to having an office in your home, right? You, you have gotten to that level where it's like, all right, I need a dedicated office space. If you see my office, like I have a big, giant desktop. I mean, I just need, I'm about to get a second screen. You know, it's, it's like it's becoming more and more and more legit, right? Of course you can still travel, you can work from anywhere, but you really do have set office hours. You're in your office every day. I know for me, when I finally took that plunge, it was time to get childcare and I was in the office by 8 in the morning and I would come out by 4, you know, what have you. The idea eventually is for most people, they have to make a choice. And that laptop lifestyle is now you're really full time running your own business. And it's thrilling and amazing, but eventually people want to work themselves out of their business, right, and just work on their business instead of in it. So there's a couple trajectories you can take once you have become a full time, you know, laptop life liver. The first one is that you can just continue to work full time and run your agency, run your business, run your coaching practice. Whatever happens to be. The second thing you can do is continue to grow. At some point you will begin hiring people. At some point you may decide that you need an office space because you need that sense of place, in which case you kind of graduate out of the laptop life. It's a little sad, you know, but it's cool too. You create an office, you have employees. Maybe most of those employees are remote, but if you work in house, you know, you'll see a lot of, you know, Brandon and Kalyn Poulin in the Ladyboss. Their ladyboss and they're in the clickfunnels community. They started out Laptop lifers, right, with their laptop, making money using their membership platform and their course creator platform. And they actually, I don't know if you have heard them tell this story, but they once they made a fair amount of money, they went and retired to Puerto Rico and they tried that super chill laptop life where they work a few hours and just live on the beach. And they didn't really like it. They ended up saying, you know what, never mind this, let's go back, let's go back to the States. Let's actually continue to grow the company. Now the company has headquarters and an office and I think last time I checked they had 50 or 60 employees, you know, so it's, it's really fun. So you can decide, you know, kind of where you want to go. Once you hit that full time, full time business sort of moment in life. Lastly, there is also another type of laptop life and it is the laptop life where you are actually a remote employee. So in this kind of life you are not running your own business for whatever reason, whether you don't want to, or you just prefer the security of a regular paycheck, or you like working on a team. You feel like you're better as a, you know, a teammate rather than CEO. But there is, there are a lot of people that are remote employees. So they get the all the benefits of the laptop life. Being able to work from home, being able to travel different places and still log in, but they are employees. So I know companies like Clickfunnels, which I work for and work in, has a lot of remote positions. I know you know companies like WordPress, there's more and more companies are doing remote work. So for those of you guys listening, the laptop life can take on many, many forms. Whether you are a freelancer in an rv, traveling the, traveling the country, or you are side hustling or moonlighting, or jumping into that full time online business space where you have like carved out a spot in your home where you're business is going to take up residence. Consider that you will probably go through multiple evolutions as you grow your business. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there. I have literally, except for the digital nomad, done all of them. From side hustle to moonlighting to full time in my office, even the remote employee. I've done it all. So I would not change my lifestyle or the work that I have chosen for my life in a million years. And for any of you listening who haven't quite gotten into the lifestyle that you want yet, don't give up, okay? Don't give up. The world is changing and this kind of lifestyle and remote work is only going to become more and more mainstream. You are still on the front end of this revolution. So there is opportunity everywhere and anybody who just absolutely refuses to quit will eventually get there. You may have to change your idea of what your laptop life was going to look like or maybe what you thought your business was going to look like. But if you don't quit, it will happen for you. So hope you guys have an amazing day. Appreciate you all. Talk to you soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.