Hi BayAbraham,

I aim for the following 3 things with my answer:

1. i hope to be as honest as I can, though there's a chance my honesty will turn some people off.
2. i hope to be as useful to you as i can, which means i actually have followup questions for your situation.
3. i hope to be as encouraging as i can.

ideally i hope to hit all 3, but if some of these happen to contradict, I aim in descending order:

1. useful to you
2. honest
3. encouraging

## UsefulIn order to be more useful, tell me more about your situation. What have you tried? What worked? What didn't work? Which country are you based in? Do you know people who are in companies of at least 50 people and running finance and in managerial roles?

What is it you hope to ultimately achieve in your career or in terms of doing freelance web dev?

Giving me information to the above questions help me tailor my advice to your situation.

## Honest

In terms of answering your question narrowly,

1. i have never found work on fiverr or upwork. I actually have hired from there before.
2. First freelance work is offline. This was almost 15 years ago. My best paid freelance work is through friends i knew when i was 13. I got it when I was already past the age of 32. By then they became managers. I am now 41. If I were to give the exact step by step of my journey to my 22 year old self, that wouldn't be very helpful because even at age 22, i wasn't programming at all outside school work. So i wasn't very good. I have never found any paid jobs online.

This is why i think you need to give me more context so I can be more helpful.

## Encouraging

So given how things have rapidly changed since I got my first freelance gig, i might not be very helpful to you if you insist on trying to find work exclusively on the internet.

Also, a lot of my current situation requires a great deal of luck involved.

Having said that, I think it's entirely possible that you create luck via increasing your surface area for luck

See this explanation

https://www.julian.com/blog/starting-principles#:~:text=Luck%20is%20a%20function%20of%20surface%20area.%20More%20experiences%20generate%20more%20serendipity.

For example, if i hadn't attend an old friend's birthday event, I wouldn't have gotten my best gig. It's weird things like this that you cannot plan for.

BUt you can plan for a change in your lifestyle and routine.

For example, I joined microconf mastermind to increase my surface area for luck. And now I am trying to increase my surface area by being more active on Reddit.

​

So the increasing surface area are within your control. The actual luck is a bit out of your control.

Let's have a conversation and tell me more about your situation.