From the desk of Don Domingo
It’s 03:46.
I’m writing to you from the double dungeon, but beyond this I cannot disclose the location further. You know me as James. My friends and family know me as various other names. In fact, my old university housemate once described me as “the man of a thousand names”. I believe he now lives in communist Canada. I pray for his soul.
This morning I have awoken a beast once more. Only a select few know the name Don Domingo.
Don Domingo - the alter ego that has dragged the old James, kicking and screaming, into a life he may have never had the strength to build himself. It’s been 2 years since I promised myself that I would rather die than live another day on my knees.
I was the typical aimless boy, the class clown, who loved to slack off, with no thought to his future or the responsibilities that would soon be a reality. The aimlessness and lack of foresight that many of my generation will never shake themselves free from.
I went to university because it was easier than deciding what career to begin after finishing school. I chose English to study because I found it easier than anything else. I’ve always been naturally gifted when it came to writing, thanks to the thousands of stories I’d devoured reading as a child. I chose the university I attended because there was a high ratio of women to men, making chances of success with the opposite sex easier. Every job I’d ever fallen into, including winding up teaching on the Amalfi Coast and the purgatory of corporate recruitment I landed in upon my return…
It was all aimless. Whatever fell into my lap was what I would do.
I had no ambition. I didn’t really ever want anything. Except mainly to be left alone. Because it was easier.
But the problem with accepting the easy path is that all those decisions made in pursuit of what was easiest slowly build into a prison of your own making, and your life is infinitely more difficult than if you had made some hard choices along the way.
Those easy choices slowly added up into a hard life. A life I hated. Making thousands of calls to the great unwashed, the general public. My idea of a circle of hell.
So on 1 January 2023 I promised myself that whatever it took, I would build the life I wanted, not just accept the life I’d fallen into.
I had no idea where to start. Only that I knew I wanted to make more money because I was broke, and I wanted to get far away from the world. I wanted to only speak to my kind of people. There are only a handful of people I can stand these days thanks to 6 years of pretending to like people in recruitment, so solopreneurship seemed perfect. Work alone, build a life of freedom and solitude, get paid on my terms, not beholden to the strong-arm corpo contracts that pay you a fraction of your true worth.
But I’d been beaten down into a compliant corporate drone over those 6 years.
I’d forgotten any hint of the bravery I’d mustered to move alone to a foreign country only being able to speak 6 words of the language. I’d spent the last couple of years holed up in my old flat, scarcely leaving for anything other than a once a week late night grocery trip to avoid as many people as possible.
A shell of my former self.
But these are the depths that you have to reach in order to truly change. There are no half measures when bargaining with the universe.
I took a course, "The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing" by Google. I had been inhaling free marketing content for the best part of a decade, but always passively, reading, watching YouTube videos, thinking it was cool, but never seriously believing that it was possible for me to run my own business. I didn’t have any dreams for myself. I only made the most logical choice each time one was presented to me, with the goal of each choice to make my life as easy as possible.
That course was the first time I’d ever done something for my future self that I didn’t have to. No-one was forcing me. No-one even knew.
Anyway.
This is getting long and I need to wrap this up.
From "The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing" in January 2023, to starting a Twitter account in March 2023, to landing my first client in November 2023, my first serious ongoing client work in Feb 2024… to now earning a living writing professionally 9-5. Whatever “professionally” even means.
Is it the end goal?
No. The end goal is to be my own client and to wave goodbye to corporate forever. But I’d be foolish not to learn what I can along the way. And to escape the hell that was being an extrovert turned introvert in a sales type role, making cold calls?
It feels like a big step towards the life I want, instead of the one I was assigned.
If you are currently stuck in a prison of your own making, you need to make something happen for yourself... but your copy just isn’t hitting, leaving your product or service gathering dust on the digital shelf…
Go here:
Don Domingo is available for only the most righteous of crusades, but his results are undeniable.
James Perkins
