I'm always banging on about how to have a fun and rewarding career, as you might have noticed. So, am I any good at taking my own advice? Or am I a big steaming hypocrite? Perhaps with a series of embarrassing failures, missteps, and career disasters lurking in my own chequered past? Many of them, in retrospect, highly amusing and instructive, especially if you're not me?

Well, I'll let you be the judge of that.  Now you can read the full, toe-curling story, as told to my fellow creator Zack Proser, in this cheeky little fun-size book (41 pages). You'll learn how I failed upwards through a series of jobs, including porn server administrator, cable plugger-inner, spaghetti coder, and undercover consultant, to become a successful independent writer and mentor, for certain values of “successful”, as long as you're not my bank manager. It's been quite a ride. I'd love to have you come share it with me.

Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Hilariously relatable reading. I nodded so much at some points I gave myself a neck-ache.”
—Stephen Ocampo

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I really enjoyed this book. It's great to hear about people's successes, but much more valuable to hear about their failures. John seems to have had plenty of both.”
—Cary Witney

About the book

This will make me sound like a massive hypocrite (especially as the author of Code For Your Life), but I never really had a career plan as such. I just bounced around the tech industry for a few decades and ended up somewhere more or less randomly that's turned out to be pretty great. In this book, I share some war stories about my horrible career: how I got into this business, how I made it my business, and also how I made my seven hundred worst mistakes, so that you won't have to.

I've ended up in a pretty decent place. I'm running my own company that supports me and my family. No one can tell me what to do or when to do it. I have the freedom to work on, learn about, or write about whatever I want, providing I can occasionally turn that into money. I no longer feel that life is passing me by, while I dance to somebody else's tune. Instead, I'm living it on my own terms. So what does that look like? How do I pay the bills as an independent writer, teacher, and content creator?

You'll learn my hard-won business secrets, as well as hearing the full story of everything that went wrong along the way. And if your career has occasionally taken a wrong turn or two, take heart: when you hear about mine, you'll realise there's hope for us all!

What you get

Your digital download is a ZIP file containing the book in PDF and ePub formats. These should be suitable for any ebook reader, Kindle, computer, phone, or tablet.

Table of contents

Read a sample chapter

Updating to the latest edition

All my books come with free updates for life, so if you’ve bought a previous version of this book, here’s what you need to do to get the latest edition. Click the link in your original download email (make sure you save this, as it’s your key to future updates). You’ll see what looks like an error page saying your download link for the old edition has expired, but that’s okay: click the link in the text, and you’ll be sent a new download email for the current edition.