🎉 8 years later, I finally achieved my dream. (Sharing the full story of how I got here ❤️)

for the last eight years my dream has been to be a digital Nomad and guess what I am currently in Vietnam doing that right now so you'll notice that my background is different and that's because I am in an Airbnb last month my 99th YouTube video blew up and I went from 4 000 subscribers to now 17 000 subscribers and last month in January I made about three thousand dollars Canadian from YouTube AdSense which is unbelievable because that's kind of like almost like a full-time income and then from my Etsy Shop which has been open for three months I've made one thousand dollars in net profit so this is the first time ever that I've been able to make any kind of substantial passive income so last week as a lot of you saw on my Instagram stories I flew to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam on a one-way ticket and yeah I'm here I'm living my dream and in this video I want to share with you kind of the last eight years how I started having this dream and then everything leading up to this point and it feels like it's been so so long like the last eight years but it's been so worth it like this whole journey has been so worth it so why did I have the stream in the first place eight years ago when I was 20 years old I went on Exchange and this was the time when I was in university and I started following a lot of like these travel bloggers like Brent on the road and nomadic Matt and I did an internship in China at a clean tech startup company where I met people who kind of just started a business from scratch and I was like wow this is so cool like this was the first time I was ever exposed to somebody starting a business just from zero and making it successful I've always loved vlogging so since I was 11 years old I've had a Blog and when I was 20 years old I started this blog kind of like a travel lifestyle blog and I wrote about my experiences when I was on Exchange and then I also did a six week solo Europe trip like backpacking around like 10 cities in Europe and I also wrote about that in my blog so from that time I was always interested in blogging travel sharing my journey and because I was following these travel bloggers and I met these business owners who just started businesses from scratch I thought oh my gosh like maybe this could also be a possibility for me and I just love the idea of being able to work and travel at the same time and so that's when it kind of started becoming like a dream of mine so since then I've tried like a whole bunch of things to try to make this dream happen so when I was in university I was studying business and I did one internship at Global Affairs Canada which is the government of Canada's International Trade Department this is the government Department that sends diplomats out into like different areas of the world to work at embassies and consulate and because I had this internship I thought okay maybe I could kind of like travel and work and become a diplomat and I also speak French as well so I thought okay maybe this is something I could do and I could see myself doing it so after University I got a job at the British Consulate in Vancouver and it was a pretty cool job because I got to travel around a lot I was mainly stationed in Vancouver I was like going to the office every day from nine to five but every three months I would go on a trip so I went to Europe one time I went to San Francisco maybe like three times I went to Toronto five times during my two years that I worked there and then a couple other small trips to different parts of the U.S for conferences and business meetings and stuff like that and so my experience working for the Canadian government and the British government like the experience was really really great but I kind of just felt like something was missing I wasn't doing my own thing and I've always wanted to do my own thing like become a travel blogger or like a lifestyle blogger or something like that and this entire time I still had a boss I had to ask if I wanted to go on vacation I had to get permission I felt like I just didn't have that much Freedom even though I was traveling around a bit and I could continue on this career path of becoming a diplomat so when I was working at the British Consulate I thought okay how can I become my own boss and travel the world so one year into working at the British Consulate that's when I started my first ever side business which is selling greeting cards and teaching calligraphy workshops which I have shared a lot about on this YouTube channel and at the time I had no idea how like eventually I would be able to travel with this kind of calligraphy business but I just knew that the first step was to start any side business for me I thought like okay starting a calligraphy business is maybe the easiest and most realistic thing for me to do you can watch this video if you want to learn more about like how I started the whole calligraphy business but yeah I started the calligraphy business and then one year after starting it I quit my job and I was basically just full-time teaching calligraphy workshops I did that for a couple of months and it actually got really really tiring because I was teaching one Workshop a week and it was really hard to sell the tickets and my Revenue was low and this whole time I was thinking about how can I travel but I'm like stuck in Vancouver teaching workshops so that's when I had the idea to turn my calligraphy business which was like all physical and I had to be in Vancouver turn it into a online business so I then started to coach calligraphers on how to start a business and it was actually really good timing because that's when covid happened in 2020 so I had to cancel all my calligraphy workshops and my main income Source became coaching for calligraphers when I talk about this it kind of it sounds like oh Dina just started a calligraphy business it seems like it was just very easy for her but it was actually really really really hard like I had so many mindset problems when it came to like transitioning the business from the physical calligraphy business teaching workshops into this online business it was very very difficult but I knew that this was the step I had to take to turn my business into something online which then could allow me to travel so I did the coaching for about two years and in those two years of doing coaching that's when I started this YouTube channel and it was actually my mentor Ryan Robinson who is a huge blogger is because I won a blogging scholarship from him and so I had a couple of calls and he's the one who told me to start this YouTube channel so I could basically like funnel calligraphers into my coaching programs and my goal with YouTube was never to become a big YouTuber it was literally just so I could make a couple videos add them to my blog post on my website which is Dina calligraphy.com and then get people to join my email list and then I could sell coaching programs to them so starting the 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