🤠 How To Use Education to Become Even Better

Day 64: Learn to Earn

by Edward Smith

07 Sept 2020

You're Only as Cool as Your School

In this article I want to talk about education, and how education has helped me to become better.   If you read one of my earlier articles entitled  🤠    How to Buy Books Online and Have the Books Pay For Themselves, you would have learned how I make some extra cash on the side doing a thing called Mturk.   That's not really the point of this article.   

The point of this article, is that I thought I knew everything there was to know about MTurk and making side money, but boy was I wrong.

How Education Can Lead to Exponential Gains

What a weird world we live in.   Back on 31 July 2020, I was writing about how I was able to make $1.50 a day doing online surveys on the side.  That's only a month ago.  Thanks to some education, the whole thing changed overnight.   Education is awesome.

Back in July, I was excited that I could open up my door and it was like a buck fifty was sitting on the ground waiting for me every day.   I'm still happy about that, but boy was I shorting myself.  If you put in the work, you can really make good money doing non-traditional things.  You just have to believe in the process and set your goals high.  Once you do that, it starts to happen.

August Was a Game Changer

In the middle of August, I began looking into MTurk again and stumbled upon a reddit feed that actually helps MTurk workers network with one another.  

In this feed I ran across a handbook that this girl created to help people raise money during the Corona virus outbreak.   It was free to use and free to share.   

As you may or may not have heard, many people have lost their jobs during the pandemic.  So people are looking for work, or for ways to raise extra cash to help out.   That is where this reddit post came in.  In the post this lady listed out a bunch of tools and ideas for raising your MTurk earnings.   In her article she claimed she could make $150 to $200 a week doing MTurk.

I had heard statements like this before, but I wasn't really buying into it because I had never done it on my own.   I decided to try out some of her techniques, and low and behold, they work!   

I haven't reached the amounts she does yet, but doing what she suggested has really improved my earnings, so I'm overjoyed.   Here is what I learned.

Working Smarter

In her handbook the author pointed me to this cool little script mod called MTurk suite.   Here is the link.

If you download this script, it embeds itself into your internet browser and it suddenly makes your standard MTurk user interface super smart.   

Thanks to this download I can now view a fancy report that tells me how many jobs I worked and what the future is likely to look like.  It shows me what is outstanding, how much I expect to get, and what I might get for the entire month. It presents this in a very easy to read document, so no extraneous digging is required.   

It also does history reports and lets me download the info and manipulate it within a spreadsheet.

That's not all though.  MTurk Suite also lets you find jobs way faster.  It actually auto looks for everything every 3000 milliseconds.   That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you are used to manually navigating a website that takes a few seconds to update, you find out there is an entire world of job listings out there that you never saw, because while your website sluggishly updated, the competition grabbed them all up using the script that you weren't using.

MTurk Suite has revolutioned how I interacted with MTurk.   I began to take MTurk very seriously again, and began working the required hours to boost up my income.   I wanted to see if I could hit a goal of fifteen bucks a day.   

Turns out if you aim high, you earn high.   Last week I did this for five days and I averaged over $15.00 a day.   There are peak times and down times, so you have to learn when to walk away, but there are also times where you can make a lot of progress in a short period of time.   It's all about managing your time effectively.

On average I think I worked about 5 to 6 hours a day, but I could have easily walked away during two of those hours each day because there were noticeable drops in work during certain times.   I just didn't know that so I had to stay active during every hour watching for when the work would show up.

Then I learned and adapted.   

Now that I know there are low times, I can schedule around those low times and only show up when the work is around.    As I said, education is awesome.   You know what else is awesome?   Fifteen bucks a day.   Let me tell you about that.

What I Can Do with Fifteen Dollars a Day

Fifteen bucks a day is ten times more than what I was doing previously.   This is a total game changer for me.  

If I do twenty days of work at $15.00 a day I'll  have earned $300 extra dollars for the month.   That's money I can invest in the stock market.   Do that for a year and I'll have an extra $3,600 working towards improving my future me.  It also doesn't affect my household in any noticeable way.  I can do this while I'm doing online classes with the kids for school.

I also can use it to offset our budget and help pay for things that we need.   It's completely flexible.  It's like we got a side gig, and I never left the house.   My entire budget outlook has been flipped upside down.   

Conclusion

Spending time online to learn something new was dramatically beneficial for me.  

I learned about MTurk suite and my ability to earn extra cash for the house blew up overnight.

It's made me look at myself again in a different way.   I've had to review who I am and what I'm capable of.  Instead of settling for $1.50, I can put in the work and earn a substantial amount of money every week above and beyond what I thought I could do working from home.  

$75 bucks a week might not change your life, but in my world, I can do a great many things with that small amount.    That's also assuming that I can't learn something else and boost it up even higher.   This might just be a step to something bigger. 

It's all about perspective and intention.  If you think you have done all there is to do.   Stop what your'e doing, review the problem and try again.  You might be short selling yourself.   Don't settle.