My Google Adsense Cheque is Here and it’s Useless

My Google Adsense Cheque is Here and it’s Useless

by Anant Shiva

I came back home from work yesterday to a nice surprise – my first Google Adsense cheque! Unfortunately, I can’t do anything with it.

You see, I’d started my Adsense account with a name that wasn’t mine officially. My full name is Ananthasiva. For the sake of filling up online forms with mandatory first and last name fields, I split it up into ‘Anand’ and ‘Shiva’. Also, it sounded cooler.

Since I’m based in Singapore, Google doesn’t allow me to change my name once the account is created. I was blissfully unaware of this fact until I realized that my earnings were quickly reaching the payment threshold of $100.

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I owe Adam Baker a huge apology

by Anant Shiva

There are a couple of guys online who I love coz they’re people I would wanna hang out with in real life. Adam Baker from Man Vs Debt is one such guy. He’s all about his family and helping people online and just keeps it real. I love that about him. It must have shown coz when I reached out to him about 2 years ago to ask if he could do a video interview for me, answering a couple of questions, he readily obliged.

Adam Baker took the time to shoot a video for me – me, just some random guy on the internet with a blog. And he’d even gotten his lovely wife, Courtney to read out the questions to him in the video. It was such a sweet thing for both of them to do, especially since Adam barely knew me.

And how did I repay his kindness? I never got around to writing that post. Eventually, I let the blog go to waste.

I owed it to myself to keep my blog going, I knew that. But for whatever reason I can’t remember now, I didn’t. The question’s been nagging me for the past two years – why didn’t I keep working on my blog?

I think I know now. Two years ago, I lacked purpose. There was no reason for me to start a blog. Perhaps you could say that well, I had nothing to say. That’s not the case now. I don’t have some ulterior motive to make a gazillion dollars off my blog. I just wanna keep myself accountable in my debt-killing mission and meet a few like-minded folks on my journey. Like Adam. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to hang out one day.

Here’s Adam: