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You could make your own work. Create crafts and get a booth at your local craft fair. Or plant a garden and sell produce at the farmer’s market. Have yard sales — they are a lot of work, but you can make money (you go to yard sales of people who are just unloading stuff, buy them out, and then work at making presentable items which you sell at a higher price and wait for the right buyer).

You could also put flyers in the doors in your neighborhood offering to do cleaning and other services. Unfortunately, some things you might run afoul of government regulations, like you can’t just offer to drive old people to the grocery store because of the “taxi” rules.

I do understand — the easiest thing to do is to find someone else who did the hard work of figuring out how to sell a product or provide a service, and then hitch your wagon to theirs by taking a job with their company. But that isn’t the only way to earn a living, especially not in the internet era, where millions of people have full-time jobs selling items on e-bay and Craig’s list.

My son made $400 acting in a commercial once. And me and my two kids make almost $1000 a year each working weekends in October as haunt monsters at the local theme park. I do that while working a full-time job.

And for 8 years, I made $30 a week writing a column for the local newspaper. If you have a local paper, submit some editorial/opinion columns and see if you can get picked up.