Mike McMahon Timeline

The first 18 years of my life compared to my life now seem bleek and uneventful. Born in Sydney, Australia I spent the first 9 or so years in a small town called Foster/Tuncurry 4 hours north of Sydney and lived a relatively simple life. It wasn’t until this point that my parents started to become entrepreneurial and we started chasing contracts up and down the east coast of Australia that things started to get a bit shaken up. One of the distinct things that I remember was the amount of times I changed schools resulting in a rather low self-esteem as I would always arrive the year after everyone had made friends making it challenging to break into the existing social circles to say the least.

Having lived a “sheltered” life (as I would discover later on) I managed to escape school as quite possibly the least popular student, extremely shy, and having never had a girl friend which didnt help the self image at all.

The same week I finished year 12 I was shipped up to townsville to help out with the family construction business as a labourer which entailed such joys waking up at 2am for a 3am concrete pour, 16 hour days and absolutely no life outside of work what so ever (which I didn’t even know what that ment at the time). After nearly being killed 3 times and having my thumb crushed between a swinging steel platform and a wharf I learned that constuction was not for me.

The Turning Point

As I remember it there were 2 distinct events that triggered my life turning around, the first came 2 months after breaking up with my first ever girlfriend where I was an emotional train wreck and felt as though my life could not get any worse and in my desperation vowed that I would turn my life around or die trying, and the second came almost completely by accident when I was searching for NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and stumbled across a Wayne Dyer’s personal development series “No Limit Person” which opened my eyes to a whole nother world that was always there, I had just never seen it before. After that I became obsessed with anything personal development which gave me the skills I needed to finally quit the family business, move out of home, and start living a no limit life.

At this point I had a decision to make. With only a little money saved, no income and a house to live in I needed to choose whether I should chase girls or chase money? I chose girls so I enrolled at the place where I thought the hottest girls with the most time on their hands hung out… university! Turns out my uni game was crap and I didn’t pickup in the 6 months I was there but it was fun anyway. There I learned how to socialise and found myself useful helping out other students with their studies. Things were looking good.

While studying dating in my spare time to learn how to pickup hot chicks, one of the presentors David Deangelo (who I much later discovered is really Eben Pagan) mentioned that he had an internet business with 50 virtual staff working for him. This was my first real exposure to the inner workings of the making money online game and facinated me so I began looking.

By the end of my 6 month uni stint I was faced with yet another choice, do I rack up more debt and fart ass around at uni learning a useless degree, or do I say goodbye to all my friends and start a business online? Given the earnings potential and the fact that I could dedicate 2.5 years to a business where I never need to work again as opposed to a useless degree I chose to become and entrepreneur. It made sense for me to leave the layed back natured Townsville and head to Brisbane where I had family and a few select friends so thats what I did.

On my last week in Townsville I decided to celebrate so I went out clubbing, drunk as a skunk where I met a girl who later became my girlfriend for the next 10 months. Once I arrived in Brisbane she showed me how to get a job, practially writing my resume for me, and I started working while doing internet business stuff on the side.

And Then Came The Money

My first real success came in the form of SEO minisites and after about a year I had finally hit that mystical $100/day mark and quit my job as fast as I could (never liked working for someone else). Funny story, I quit my job and met my current girlfriend on the same day so the 2 things that took up most of my time, chasing girls and working, were no more lol. Took about 3 months of refreshing my adsense account pretending to work before I finally got back on the bike and started working on bigger things. Since then I have had success (although some minor) with ecommerce, CPA, affiliate, and PPC.

Now days I get to live out my dreams of world travel with friends while continuing to work on a few projects mainly via outsourcing.