\n\n“Love is celebrating each other’s success. Not hating it.”\nPieter Levels, 2014
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The quotes on this page are translated back from my Turkish version. His original English words are in the images below.
\nPieter Levels (@levelsio) today makes 219 thousand dollars a month, alone, with a laptop. But the money is not what moved me. What moved me is how a man who woke up gasping for breath every morning in 2014 turned that year into the turning point of his life. I told this story on Threads as a 15-part chain. The original English of every quote here is in the images.
\nAt the end of 2014 he wrote a post called “Love, Anxiety and Startups”. He tells the story there, in his own words.
\nFor years he made music. His YouTube channel brought in up to 8 thousand dollars a month. Then royalty agencies started taking his income, a little less every month. In 2013 he sold everything and flew to Thailand. The girlfriend he was supposed to go with never came.
\nThere is an older wound too. In 2011 he and a friend prepared an Uber-like taxi idea (SnapSnap) and pitched famous, rich investors. None of them invested. His own word: “Quite humiliating.” That day he decided he would neither chase investors nor become one of those arrogant rich people.
\n“I set myself a goal so I wouldn’t lose my mind.” He wrote “12 projects in 12 months” on his blog, then for fun deleted the word “projects” and wrote “startups” instead. A few months later WIRED and the New York Times were writing about him.
\nThen he noticed something: every day he was meeting people who had moved to the other side of the world because of his sites. He gave a section of his post this title: “My startups did matter.”
\nAt the end of the year he went back to his parents’ house. “Nothing had changed here. It was all in my head.”
\nIn his worst year, to keep from losing his mind, he set himself a goal and told everyone about it. That year became the one that changed his whole life. Maybe the bad year we are living through right now is like that too.
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