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Feb 2025: earning money from my food blog, publishing on Amazon, and my first uni acceptance
If this is your first time here :
I'm Lisha Lovely, a young South African who loves learning 🧠, people 🫶, and all things beautiful in life 🪸. These monthly newsletters are all about sharing my meandering journey to somewhere big ⛰ (as yet undefined), as I build a life of impact and meaning.Piccie of the month 📸
Google Adsense for the win!
Towards the end of Feb, I opened my email to find that someone had sent me a decent lump of money. I was confused (who the heck was it from? 🤨) but obviously pleasantly surprised (who the heck was it from? 🥰).
It took me a while to realize that this was a payment from Google. Yes, Google. Google Adsense, to be specific.
A few years ago, I signed up for Google Adsense with delishasfood.com (my food blog) thinking that, though the adverts are kind of ugly and annoying, I could perhaps someday maybe potentially by some miracle earn some money from posting recipes.
This month, I reached the $100 dollar payment threshold, and the money is mine! I earned money from, well, a hobby. Along with the joy of dreaming up new recipes, cooking, photographing, and writing, there’s now the extra little sparkle of getting paid every now and then.
This has taught me two major lessons:
Continuity is important. I started my food blog at 15 (launching it on my 16th birthday), and I’m 20 now. As someone who (somewhat cringe-worthingly) calls herself a “budding entrepreneur” I think it’s important to remember that any business I build is going to be a long journey. Taking the journey (building a successful business) means keeping at it when growth is low, when problems arise, when the initial excitement wanes.
I can get paid to have fun. A career can be a beautiful, creative, and exciting thing. There’s no reason why work should mean the painful stuff I do so that I can grasp at little moments of beauty, creativity, excitement in my free time. Okay, obviously $100 is a piddly salary (and food-blogging is not my career plan), but I think it’s a little sample of the wonderful possibility of earning a living doing something I love.
Work, werk, wek, wek, quek, quack 💼
So on the premise that a career can be a really enjoyable, meaningful beast, I’m left with the seemingly unanswerable question: which career is right for me? I’m reminded of the Japanese concept of Ikigai:
Food blogging doesn’t fulfill all the Ikigai requirements (I doubt the world NEEDS another food blog). Neither does waitressing, though I’m finding it great for this season (I don’t necessarily LOVE it).
I don’t yet know which career ticks all the Ikigai boxes for me.
I’m not one of those people who’ve known what they want to do since 12 years old. That was all fine and well until I suddenly (🧙♂️💥) turned 20. I’m really meant to start choosing a direction and yet I have not the foggiest idea what direction I want to go in.
This month, I worked through Tim Urban’s post How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You).
I can’t say I’ve found clarity in what I want to do, but I can say that I’ve found encouragement. Encouragement because I’ve come to view my career more as something that can, and probably will, shift and change in major ways throughout my life. In Tim Urban’s words, careers are no longer like 40-year long tunnels:
Talking about careers, I’m getting closer to step one: the training part.
I am not in fact a lost cause
Cue the trumpets and noisy party blow-y thingies 🎺 🥳…
I’ve been accepted into a tertiary institution — Emlyon in Lyon, France. For a BSc in Data Science for Responsible Business.
I know, I know, it sounds like a pretty niche course. And it is.
But when you literally have no idea what on earth you want to study, picking a university course means scrolling on websites until you find something that sounds interesting (aka, I don’t know anybody who has ever studied this).
The direction I seem to be heading (in a meandering, rambling kind of way) is business/computer science/economics, and I thought this course combines them quite nicely.
I’m awaiting responses from US unis towards the end of March before making a decision.
I’m keen to study in the US because I would only have to declare my major after the first year, giving me time to experiment (and further procrastinate choosing a career).
Experts only ⚠️
In all of this uncertainty, there is one thing I’m sure about: I’ve found a new home on the slopes. Initially, I was apprehensive about the snow, the cold, and the seemingly treacherous sport. But I already know how much I’m going to miss it; how much I’m going to miss the crispness, the vistas, and the feeling of gliding over the snow.
This month I went down the Lauberhorn World Cup run (but in like 20 minutes instead of the 2 minutes 22 seconds of this year’s winner). This ski race is one of the highest-attended winter sports events in the world and it happened in Jan. I was very chuffed to stand next to the sign reading, “For experienced users only!”.
Here’s a video of me going down the steepest part of the Lauberhorn:
Though I’m pretty proud of myself (the hill is way steeper than it looks on video, as always), watching this video showed me that I have serious room for improvement (especially keeping my torso pointing downhill). To get all deep and introspective about this, it just goes to show how important it is to take an outsider’s perspective on yourself if you want to improve. In this case, the outsider’s perspective is a video, but in other cases it could be feedback from colleagues, friends, family, customers, etc.
Okay, to lighten the mood a bit, here’s a slightly ridiculous video of me skiing off-piste:
The Animal Alphabet travels the world
I’m pleased to say that the African animals my Animal Alphabet Workbook for Preschoolers have made it into the Amazon.
I published The Animal Alphabet on Amazon so it’s now accessible to anyone in the world.
My goal is to grow sales of the workbooks so that I can subsidize even more of them for learners in Southern Africa. Let’s see how that goes.
That’s it for this month. See you soon 💗 (really soon, actually, since this newsletter was so late.