If you want to be remarkable and not average, you’re in the right place.
If you want to live and work the way you want, you’re in the right place.
If you are asking yourself “What excites me every day?”, you’re in the right place.
If you rebel against what a typical life is suppose to be, you’re in the right place.
If you want to open yourself to a new life that you deserve, you’re also in the right place.
Sound like you?
Who Am I?
I’m an blogger, podcaster, and online entrepreneur. The life I have now is far from the life I used to have.
I was lost and confused in my 20’s. I was stuck. I hate my job. Life looked good on the outside, but on the inside I was miserable. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I didn’t know what kind of work I wanted to do.
Then in October of 2010, I hit rock bottom after another long and stressful night working at my family’s restaurant. I came home that night and typed a letter to myself. I vowed to do whatever it took and however long it took to create the type of life I wanted.
I share my lessons and experience in this new chapter on my blog and podcast.
In August 2011 when I released my first iPhone app, Photo 365, and in the first month alone I got featured as App of the Week by Apple. I earned $30,000 in just 30 days. I couldn’t believe how much money it was making every day. It all started eight months earlier when I took a risk to develop that app. I had no idea how to do it, but I learned it could be done.
I thought my golden ticket to allow me to finally quit the job that I hated would be making iPhone apps. After the success of my first app, I made more thinking that having a library of apps would generate enough money to allow me to quit. What happened instead was that each app that I released after the first all failed.
After almost 2 years I was far from being able to quit my job and my app business was a failure.
So at the start of 2013, I made a huge and scary decision to quit my job and go all in. I pivoted to a new way to make money online. I still made iPhone apps but this time made simple iPhone games. Quitting and going all in turned out to be the best decision at that point in my life.
The year after my next business was selling t-shirts online full time using companies like Teespring.com to fulfill the orders. That business earned me $100k in profit in just my first five months.
Now I’m still selling but also including different types of products that I import from overseas and sell in my own online store. I also use Amazon’s print on demand service called Merch by Amazon to sell my t-shirt designs on Amazon.
I know it seems like an “overnight success”, but it is far from it.
My name is Benny Hsu, pronounced “shoe”. People always spell it wrong. I’m used to it.
I got tired of listening to people say “get a real job”. Just cause a job is 5 days a week, 8-10 hour days doesn’t mean it’s real job.
But how many of us are in that real job and are miserable? We expected that money and a stable job would make us happy. It didn’t and it made us unhappy.
I got a real job working in the family restaurant business right after college. While I enjoyed those first few years, I grew to hate all aspects of it. I would dread the days I had to go to work.
What was worse was that I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to enjoy life and enjoy the work I did.
Creating a life where having a life is important to me. I didn’t want to work very hard for 40+ years, while saving up money so when I was ready to start living life after retirement at 65.
Forget that!
I want to enjoy life when I’m still young. My wife and I love to travel and we try and do that as much as we can.
I still need to make money. I’m not looking for a job (which sounds terrible) or a career (which sounds so permanent), I’m looking for ways to generate revenue streams with projects I am excited to work on.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or contact me.
What’s with the Blog Title?
The name of my blog comes from the classic movie “Shawshank Redemption”. If you have never seen it, stop reading right now and go rent it. If you’ve seen it more times than you can remember like myself, you will remember that famous line delivered by Andy Dufrene. No matter how horrible it was in Shawshank, Andy still had a vision and dream. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he got busy and started digging.
To me it means taking control of our lives, instead of waiting for something to happen.