I don’t remember exactly when I watched the video. In December 2019, I had just graduated from university. It was three months before Covid-19 happened. I was unemployed for almost 8 months after I graduated, and Covid-19 made it worse.
Every day I spent my mornings reading ebooks and watching random videos on YouTube. Until one day I saw a guy named Kukuh Aldiyanto making a YouTube video about how to make $2,500 or Rp30,000,000 a month while working from home.
Having a bachelor’s degree didn’t mean I had proven skills to sell. I signed up to the platform anyway. My account got verified two weeks later.
Still, I didn’t get a job instantly.
I spent hours every day looking for interesting projects on the platform. The struggle was real.
My first freelance job was about redrawing a Fall Guys game character using Adobe Photoshop (I didn’t know about Adobe Illustrator yet at that time), and I got paid $25 for one image. It was more than just money; it was validation. It was the first concrete proof that I could actually earn a living this way. Luckily, the guy ordered again after the first project. I used those earnings to support my account and buy more credits for applying to more jobs.
A lot of things happened in my head after that experience. I now believed people could earn money online by working from home. It went against my old belief that only physical skills were real, and things that saying getting a job was easy for people who graduated from university, no but educated people does.
Since then I’ve decided to live my life as a freelancer, I don’t know until when. There are still a lot of things for me to learn, things to fix, and things to improve.
I’ve learned a lot from my journey as a freelancer over the last 5 years since 2020. That first design job gave me the confidence to pursue other skills, which eventually led me down the path of programming. The same persistence I used to land that first gig, I applied to learning how to code. And now I’m a Python Developer.
Kukuh Aldiyanto’s video taught a powerful lesson: you never know the ripple effect of a single action. The same principle applies to all of life’s decisions — the book you choose to read, the person you happen to meet, or the random video you decide to watch. You never know which one will change your life forever.