I spent 5 hours a day on a bus. I did not need a new city.

Hey everyone, this is Allan and today I’ll talk about the process of learning a skill until it paid for me, based on something that happened to me a few years ago.

Bus Routine

In 2020 I decided I would stop taking bus rides every day. I grew up in a small city in Brazil, and to go to college I had to spend about five hours on a bus each day, two or three hours to get to campus and another two or three hours to come back home. I left the house at 4 p.m. and didn’t get back until around 1 a.m. I tried to study on the bus, but I wasn’t motivated and I wasted a lot of time. That routine lasted three or four years while I was in college, and it just didn’t work for me.

Choosing a Skill

I realized I needed to stop commuting and find a way to work online. The key is to develop a skill that someone is already willing to pay for, even if it’s not the thing you love most. At the time I loved playing Dota, but no one paid me for that, so I looked for skills that already had demand. When you aim to make money with a new skill, you have to chase existing demand, not just personal preference. That doesn’t mean you can’t eventually enjoy the work; you might not love it right away, but you can grow into it.

You also need a floor you can come back to if everything breaks. In my case that floor was my parents house. If you already have a job, that job is your floor: try making more money with the small amount of time you have before you quit without being prepared.

Anchor Skill

JP Resende, one of the founders of Hotmart, calls this the “anchor skill”, the one that gives you solid ground to stabilize yourself again. It is a skill you pick based on proven demand, something you can point to with real payments or completed projects. For example, building a website gives you a tangible product you can show to future clients. If you choose a skill by feeling alone, you may have to start over if it fails. An anchor skill gives you a solid floor to restart from; it’s not necessarily the skill that makes you rich, but the one that stabilizes you.

My anchor skill was building websites in WordPress with Elementor. It wasn’t the most exciting thing, and with AI it’s less in demand now, but it allowed me to learn to code while I could still pay my bills. I learned it entirely on my own, no teacher, no senior mentor. That experience taught me that the real anchor skill for me was learning how to learn.

Learning to Learn

Learning how to learn gave me income I can restart, options, and the right to say no. If WordPress didn’t work, I could pivot to another skill. What it does not give you is a calling, meaning, or a ceiling, and it does not make any of it easy. The anchor is the floor, never the ceiling.

George Mack puts the same idea as a question in High Agency in 30 Minutes: you wake up in a third world jail cell and you are only allowed to call one person you know to get you out of there, so who do you call? Whoever you just thought of has high agency, and that is the kind of anchor worth building in yourself.

Exercise

I want you to try an exercise this week: think of three skills you could charge for within 90 days, and for each skill find three proofs of demand, an ad, a job post, or a recent payment. If you can’t find three proofs, drop that skill from the list. Proof is essential because when you’re starting you need to show something concrete right away; people won’t trust you without evidence.

Proof of Demand

For instance, a guy messaged me on Instagram and created an AI-generated thumbnail for me. That was proof of demand for AI thumbnail creation, even though I didn’t end up using it. I can show his thumbnail to other potential clients as evidence of what he can do.

Today I delivered a project for a shop that helps sellers communicate with clients on WhatsApp. I have screenshots and a tutorial video as proof, and I can now pitch that system to other businesses that face the same problem of missed leads.

Freedom

Looking back at those bus days, I realize I didn’t need to move to a new city; I needed a skill that someone would pay for. Six years later I finally named the thing I was chasing: freedom. I hated being stuck for hours in a routine I didn’t control. Now my decisions are guided by preserving that freedom in the medium and long term. I can lose some freedom in the short term, working more or traveling for learning, but I protect my ability to work online whenever I want.

That’s it for today. See you in the next video.