Thread by @Aella_Girl

some ppl I know are real fluid in business, agentic financial success, etc., but it took me *so long* to learn this. It was a foreign language.
here's my timeline of constant failures and dumb mistakes:

im a teen in suburban farmland idaho in a lower-middle-class family, house for my family of 5 cost $130k, 1/5 people in the city have any sort of college degree. I'm homeschooled, as well as all my friends. Adults tell me that I can make my own business and im like ok lets do it

I look at what I can do. I like reading and writing, and I like taking photos of things. Maybe I can sell my photography? I take some photos of people and make a lil website. I do cool boudoir/fantasy style pretty-girl photos. Nobody hires me.

I'm relatively agentic here. I started a lil mime-performance group among my church friends, where we performed at our own church to resounding applause. I google church phone numbers in the area and call all of them to see if they want us to perform, but nobody responds.

I am pretty good at photoshop, so I figure maybe I could teach a photoshop class. I make flyers about my upcoming class and pass them around, I post in local internet groups, I tell all my friends. I price it cheap, host it in my living room cause I'm poor. One person shows up.

I can play piano, have been playing for 14 years, so I pass flyers around my neighborhood offering piano lessons. I get a single call, from one young kid and his mom, who takes two lessons and then I never see them again.

I'm talented at these skills *for my age*, but not talented for all the more experienced adults I'm competing with. I also don't understand how marketing or teaching works, or that I'm supposed to portray a veneer of authority.

After a year of assembling electronics on a factory floor, I get a job as a boudoir photographer based on my photography. I get fired after two weeks because I'm *way* too meek and socially passive. I didn't know I was supposed to be otherwise.

Most adults I knew were either poor or lower-middle class. Dads worked as managers for grocery store managers or mechanics, and women worked as housewives. My own dad actually did build his own business, but it was based on being a pastor, which women weren't allowed to do.

Occasionally I'd meet a guy who had his own business - my dance teacher (who I met on craigslist and taught me for free) ran his own business, but it was a laser printing thing, and anything that required startup costs was completely inaccessible to me.

I had no idea what successful business culture looked like. I had never seen people making calculated business risks, or networking, or investing. Nobody in my culture had money. My attempts to Do Stuff were like taxidermizing a lion without having actually seen one

At this point I'm not in college, because I couldn't afford it (and my parents made enough money to disqualify me from aid, and refused to cosign on loans).
I'm good at photography but by this point I've figured out people don't pay much money for pretty girls, so

so I figure maybe I could do product photography? If you make stuff to sell on etsy or whatever, just send me your thing and I'll take fancy photos of it and then send ur thing back. I get equipment and do research and set up lights, but nobody cares and nobody buys.

At this point I'm a lil traumatized from my year at a factory and am absolutely desperate to figure out some way to do my own business, but every attempt I'm making has failed from my complete raw inexperience.
This is when I got into camming (sex work).

Camming is amazing cause this unrefined effort I've been throwing at random shit, actually pays off. I get to actually watch other girls and learn from them and the way their customers behave. I get to figure out what works and what doesn't, without going broke

I'm exposed to a lot of ripe info, and it becomes my life. I think, sleep, eat, breathe camming. I cam for hours every day. I'm constantly experimenting. I figure out networking - I can see other girls are there and talking to each other, and I talk to them too.

In this period I post the gnome photoset. My highest earning month is 50k. I'm briefly elected queen of 4chan during a certain viral camshow where I perform an elaborate ritual where I shift in and out of an old woman state via mime, surrounded by candles and dildos.

This is the first time I get to learn how marketing and incentives around money work. I get to study customer behavior, with a really fast feedback loop around what makes people spend vs not. I get a much more realistic sense of what my options are, and how to be clever about it

I'm still slow, but life gets better from there. After this, I start to understand the basic fundamentals about Business. I eventually join a crypto startup and learn a ton from watching it fail; I become an escort and gradually realize I'm extremely good at marketing

Now when I look back on the period of time where I was constantly trying and failing, I'm a little... idk, confused? In my landscape today, it doesn't feel like "young person trying without resources or knowledge" is a... concept?

It's hard to articulate. It reminds me a bit of when I was learning python for the first time, and frustrated horribly to find that the online landscape was *not* designed for beginners. It missed the beginner experience entirely.

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345

Like, when I look back I can clearly see I had some spark. I think I would have been a wonderful asset for some other project if I'd happened to end up in a non-sex work field. But how was I supposed to find that with no connections or practical knowledge?

In some parts of my circles, people walk around with a bunch of knowledge and I'm generally curious - how did you get all that? Did you also go through a long process of constant unskilled failure like I did? They didn't go through sex work, so how??

I feel similarly about other things - learning python, about publishing research papers, and until recently early-stage investments. Is there a term for this - the sensation of going "how the fuck do you even begin learning the questions you're supposed to ask" alienation vibe?

like, does everybody go through an agonizing process and then collectively forget that they went through it, or just start treating it as default knowledge? Maybe I'm looking for a term for that mass amnesia sense?

My post Learning The Elite Class feels like my attempt to point at this sensation, though it's about a more recent culture shock around successful people aella.substack.com/p/learning-the…

to be clear i am definitely not over this sense; there's a ton of stuff in the world i vaguely want to do but don't know how to go about starting to learn. I just, at this point, feel like "building a business model" is finally something I know how to do.