I couldn’t bring myself to just say, “Hey, we’re going to eat dirt with a kid and a mortgage and all this stuff,” so I just woke up at 3:00 AM instead and wrote for three, four hours, then went to work. Worked some retail, did my photography jobs, came home, had dinner with my wife, put her to bed, and then wrote for another two, three hours, then got two or three hours sleep. I just did that for two years, I just ground it out. I wrote, I don’t know, however many articles.

[...]

There was no magic to it, it wasn’t any big break stuff. It was just really grinding. Just publish, publish, publish, then I did that for two years.

And then two years into it, I just saw a tweet and somebody was like, “Hey, we are looking for a West Coast writer” and I looked up the website and I’m like, this is run by some crazy Dutch guys and they’re trying to compete with TechCrunch and all these other websites, and that was The Next Web. They very graciously took a chance on me and I said, “Here’s my portfolio, here’s my website, go look at it. This is my portfolio, there’s nothing more to this, I don’t have a degree to show you, I don’t have a journalism credential. What I have is this body of work.”

What I have is two years of waking up at three in the morning and hustling.

That’s it. And I said, “Read the stuff at the end.” Read the newest things.