Aussie writer with 1B+ content views in 10 years | I teach people to use writing online to create career opportunities | Let's connect: tim@timdenning.com

I quit my eCommerce startup with 100+ employees. Then got depressed, developed an eating disorder, and got a minimum-wage job in a bank. I now work for myself and make 7-figures writing.

I'm not that smart and have no college education. The way I used the internet made the difference.

And going to a Tony Robbins event changed my mindset. He taught me to go from being a victim to be in control.

This led to:

• 1B+ content views
• Financial freedom
• Book deal with a major publisher
• Meeting my heroes (like Tony Robbins)
• Quitting my banking career forever in 2021
• Multiple successful businesses fuelled by obsession

My mission: Help 100,000 people start online businesses. 

My beliefs that drive everything I do:

- Anything is possible
- Positivity above all
- Ego is the enemy
- Challenge the status quo
- Chase obsession, not passion
- Always be kind, grateful, and a good person

How can I help you?

• Social media audience building
• Starting or growing an online business

Join my email list with 200,000+ other high performers for more helpful insights:
https://timdenning.com/start-social-hustle-linkedin-bio/

Tim Denning

Most people's version of freedom looks like this:

Work 40+ years. Save enough. Retire. Do nothing.

They call this "the dream."

I call it a slow death.

━━━━━

Retirement isn't freedom. It's delayed living.

You spend your best years trading time for money. Your healthiest decades sitting in meetings. Your most energetic moments answering emails.

Then at 65, you finally get permission to live. Except now your body hurts. Your energy is gone. Half the things you wanted to do require a younger version of you.

The math doesn't work.

━━━━━

I watched my friend’s dad do this.

He worked his whole life for a company that didn't care about him. Saved diligently. Did everything right. Finally retired at 64.

Two years later his health started failing. The travel plans got shelved. The bucket list gathered dust.

He traded his best years for a retirement he couldn't fully enjoy.

━━━━━

Freedom isn't an age. It's a feeling.

It's waking up and deciding how your day goes. It's saying no to things that drain you. It's having options instead of obligations.

You can have this at 35. Or 45. Or right now.

But not if you keep waiting.

━━━━━

I used to think freedom meant "not working."

I was wrong.

Freedom is working on what matters to you. It's building something you own. It's choosing who you spend time with and what problems you solve.

The people I know who "retired early" and did nothing? Most of them are miserable. No purpose. No growth. Just endless days of golf and Netflix.

That's not freedom. That's a comfortable cage.

━━━━━

Society sold us a broken definition.

Work hard now. Sacrifice now. Live later.

But "later" isn't guaranteed. And even if it comes, you'll be a different person with a different body and different energy levels.

Stop optimizing for a future version of yourself that may never exist.

━━━━━

Redefine what freedom actually means.

Freedom isn't quitting everything. It's designing a life where work doesn't feel like work. Where Monday doesn't feel different from Saturday.

Start building that now. Don't wait for some magical age when you're finally "allowed" to live.

The permission slip you're waiting for doesn't exist.

Give it to yourself.

If you want to level up your career faster, then join my unconventional Substack newsletter with 176K others: https://lnkd.in/gMkRFmj9

Aussie writer with 1B+ content views in 12 years | Teaching high performers to build million-dollar digital businesses | Let’s connect: tim@timdenning.com

The exact moment I knew my "safe" career was killing me.

I sat in a hospital gown waiting for results.

The doctor walked in. His face told me everything before he spoke.

They found 2 tumors inside my guts. The kind that usually become cancerous. The surgeon removed them right away.

━━━━━

I was working in banking at the time. The "safe" career. The one my parents celebrated. The one society told me would give me security.

And there I was, sitting in a hospital bed, realizing my body was breaking down while I chased someone else's definition of success.

The stress. The long hours. The constant pressure. The feeling that no matter how hard I worked, I was building someone else's dream.

My body kept score. It always does.

━━━━━

I went back to work two weeks later.

Same desk. Same meetings. Same bullsh*t.

But something had shifted. I couldn't unsee it anymore.

The "safe" career wasn't safe. It was slowly killing me. The stability was an illusion. The security was a lie I told myself so I didn't have to face the risk of doing something different.

━━━━━

I stayed in that job for a while longer. Fear will do that to you.

But the tumors gave me something I didn't expect: clarity.

I realized I'd rather fail building something I believe in than succeed at something that was destroying me from the inside out.

━━━━━

I'm still in the high-risk category. I get regular checkups. The anxiety before each appointment never fully goes away.

But I'm no longer trading my health for a paycheck. I'm no longer pretending that a salary and a job title equal safety.

━━━━━

Your body is keeping score right now.

The stress you're ignoring. The passion you're suppressing. The risks you're too scared to take.

It all adds up.

Don't wait for a hospital bed to give you clarity.

Take the risk. Build your own thing. Stop calling it "safe" when it's slowly killing you

If you want to level up your career faster, then join my unconventional Substack newsletter with 177K others: https://lnkd.in/gMkRFmj9

ATS Critical Facilities

CF Engineer 1

Ainsworth Inc

• Assists Delta Connects in designing and selling control systems for commercial buildings.
• The idea is to move into a sales role after mastering the basics of construction project management, to include working with contractors and designing building plans.

Estimator

Urenco USA

Building Operator III

Entest of Testforce Systems

• Commit to growth and development by participating in supplier and training workshops (technical andsales).
• Travel (as required) throughout the United States of America and Canada.
• Demonstrate strong technical competence in our suppliers’ products and how they can benefit the
customer.
• Build strong working relationships with customers and suppliers.
• Identify and prioritize accounts by developing a deep understanding of customer profiles including details on the customer’s businesses, strategies, operating methods and needs.
• Identify new sales opportunities with existing or prospective customers.

Technical Account Manager

Testforce Systems

SolarWinds

As a Sales Development Represenative, I make 60-100 cold calls + e-mails a day to schedule discovery calls and demos of Solarwinds products. I use a variety of tools in order to prospect, such as Sales Navigator, Salesforce, Outreach, Netsuite, and Zoominfo.

While my job primarily involves cold calling for meetings, with almost no inbound, management trusts me enough to do Solarwinds product demos as part of discovery calls before I qualify a meeting. My programming experience helps a lot with demoing some of the more involved software such as security and database analysis.

I bring a level of technical expertise and engineering knowledge to. My goal for the next 3-6 months is to build my business acumen with sites like CIO and Harvard Business Review to give even more value to clients.

Sales Development Representative

OEM Group, LLC

Managed relationships with emerging and established customers of OEM Group, a semiconductor capital equipment manufacturer. Provided integrated product solutions from tools to customer support contracts for semiconductor customers from universities to microelectronic manufacturers.
* Used a combination of inside and outside sales techniques to assist senior engineers, C-level executives, and VPs with purchasing multimillion dollar tools, upgrades, and services from the Lead to the Close stage.
* Maintained pipeline predictability and forecast accuracy via face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, and phonecalls for 80+ FABs and foundries.
* Covered a sales region to include TX, CO, NM, AZ, and MN.

Account Executive

DRS Technologies, Inc.

Designed procedures and test fixtures and used these to executed tests on Naval power electronics such as overload relays,controllers, contactors, meters, circuit breakers, and switchgear. Tests include thermal, humidity, computer operational tests,hi-impact shock, and withstand and interruption testing. Able to repair and troubleshoot the hardware and software of units under tests to MIL-SPEC and customer requirements.
* Developed, reviewed, and tested over 2000 hours worth of procedures to test military hardware according to Navaland customer specifications.
* As needed, worked closely with a rotating team of technicians and other to support continuous testing, procedurerevision, and test fixture construction.
* Instrumental in re-qualifying the N2000 DRS Overload Relay under budget and on time through the use ofprogrammable power supplies and customized AC Controllers.

Electrical Test Engineer

CSID

Led and developed an electrical engineering graduation project, under the supervision of CSID, a peer-to-peer botnetinfiltrator called CAP2P. Project required several months worth of server sandbox assembly, malware decrypting, and programming.

Software Engineering Intern

US Navy

After 18 months of schooling at Nuclear Power School/Prototype, served the rest of my career at the USS John C. Stennis stationed in San Diego, CA and then Bremerton, Washington.

Senior reactor operator during deployment, along with being chosen as the reactor operator for the ORSE workups. Position required months of downtime training to culminate in a multi-week performance where difficult and esoteric plant conditions are simulated to test divisional readiness and level of knowledge.

Nuclear Reactor Operator

I wish to share others' thoughts and raise questions on the aspects of sales and business culture that I feel get overlooked for being too counterintuitive or obscure. Which is why I also have a fondness for sales and marketing leaders who think at a more systemic level like Dave Brock and Keenan and Hank Barnes. These leaders specifically see the value in focusing on details and trends we overlook and try to bring our attention to them, and I want to one day be one of their peers.

As for my personal history, I enlisted in the Navy as a Nuclear Electronics Technician/Reactor Operator for six years, then received my electrical engineering degree in a Top Ten university. I spent two years with DRS Naval Power as an Electrical Test Engineer and afterwards transitioned from Engineering to Sales with Solarwinds as a Sales Development Representative (SDR). After working at TestForce as a Technical Account Manager, I spent some time in Operations as a Building Operator over at Urenco, which provides enriched Uranium. Worked as an Estimator at Delta Connects, but left shortly after ChatGPT came out in March 2023 after seeing the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Prompt Engineering. I am currently looking for a role that will allow me to leverage my past experience in sales, engineering, and the military in a way that develops AI through the magic of LLMs.

I know it seems strange to say that becoming a prompt engineer is a lifelong dream, but it is. The technology just wasn't there to give me clarity of vision until ChatGPT got released, but now that it's here, I know exactly what I want. I want a job that engineers and creates, but not just a surface-level on requirements. Having been on both sides of the vendor and customer table, I know how frustrating it is not to be able to precisely execute a project the way you want due to real-world friction. And LLMs promise to change that.

As far as teaching goes, I've had quite a bit of experience. As a B2B sales rep who gave customized solutions to customers, such as semiconductor capital equipment or commercial HVAC plans, I know how to explain my proposals and give post-sale support to customers. I also had to train other people while I was in the Navy. And I don't just teach as part of my career, one of my favorite things to do is to write guides. I have a couple of guides I am particularly proud of in this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zgCcjuHcuq1aoZl0Z0ljVxchV6WPOZ8F5DYBqn3vTRk/edit

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The Battle

Tim Denning

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The Battle

Tim Denning

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tim Denning's LinkedIn Performance

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