YGG Interview: Michael Dunlop!

I just had the great pleasure of interviewing Michael Dunlop, he is a great advocate of working on your own terms and not letting it rule your life, but using it as a means to enhance your quality of life. He is in the process of building quite the online empire, so watch out!!

Here is what he had to say:

We know you’re a “Young Go Getter”, but so our readers know, how old are you?

Hello everyone, my Name is Michael Dunlop and I am 20 years but started my first business venture when I was around 10 years old.

Can you tell us the quick history about yourself, and what drives you to succeed?

So many things drive me to success, mainly I want a life style that allows me to do what I want when I want. I hate the idea that I am not FREE just to do that, everyone has so much holding them down, not me and never will I. Being an Internet entrepreneur means most of the time I don’t know what time it is and what day it is, because it doesn’t matter!

History… Well I dropped out of College here in England at 18 years old with out doing my exams, which is high school for you Americans. I failed most things at school and I hate to play the Dyslexic card as it seems to be over rated and used as an excuse but I was very bad a reading and writing. I remember even at 13 years old my mum trying to get me to read and fulling asleep because I was so bad.

At 15 I won an award from the Young Enterprise foundation for the top website in our district and that was my first site ever built. I then realised I enjoyed working online and did a lot of eBay till I finally created my first successful website. It was called ShoutGFX which was a graphics forum, whats funny is I can’t design to save my life and didn’t know what GFX standed for at the time. I simply saw a lot of people had these forums and were doing well but seem to do so many things wrong, with in 6 months I had the biggest website and was the most known guy in the niche. This lead to my first “Failure” where I was hacked multiple times from competitors as they didn’t like how quickly I progressed and how quickly they were losing members. After a long battle to keep the site online, the hackers finally won and I had to move on.

Now I run arguably the biggest Young Entrepreneur website in the world, Retireat21.com and one of the top blogging sites called IncomeDiary.com

What has been your biggest asset while building your career?

My Dad has been an entrepreneur from a young age, he has helped me a lot from pointing things out I do wrong to taking me to seminars where I can further my learning. One of the most important things you need to do is keep learning.

Adversely, what has been your biggest vice?

Focus, being young we have so many options and distractions. You really need to work out your end goal and make sure you surround yourself with the right kind of people to prevent you going astray. Seminars and workshops have been great for me to refocus and get around great people.

What can we expect next from the talented Michael Dunlop in the near future?

I think its important to not do to many projects at once, so many people do this and lose momentum with their biggest project. I want to focus on IncomeDiary and make Retireat21 a Advert FREE website which is soaly focusing on showing of young talent and have a FREE accedemy to help young people.

I would also like to write my first book, Retired at 21 ;-)

Everyone starts to feel burn out on a project every now and then. What do you do to keep yourself motivated and focused?

Focus on a new area on the website, I think we lose interest because we get bored at looking at the same website or business every day. Make sure to keep refreshing your business and that will keep you excited.

Can you give us three tools that you use every single day to make your life as a younggogetter more efficient, productive, or fun?

Twitter – Driving 10,000s of visitors monthly to my website, if you don’t use it, then start to!

Wordpress – Not sure if it’s a Tool, but it saves me so much time as its so simple to add content to my websites and the customizations and options are perfect.

Taskus.com – I outsource all the nasty stuff so I can have more fun. Although I do outsource, the one thing you can’t do is outsource your passion so make sure you don’t ask them to write any direct content, just research and tasks you hate doing.

What is your favourite quote?

Have the end in mind and every day make sure you are working towards it – Ryan Allis

And last but not least, if you could give one piece of advice to fellow Young Go Getters, what would it be?

Just do it, everyone says that they will do something with their lives, 99% never do the things they say they will. Get off your ASS and start is 90% of the battle, the other 10% is easy.

More importantly, be Happy, there is no point to life itself, if you can’t live it.

You can catch up with him at Income Diary or check out his eCourse!

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