I only made $3.50 an hour picking strawberries at 13 years old. I ended up working 180 hours that summer so I could buy myself an iPhone 4. It was well worth it, and the same job helped me finance my own computer as well. Most people scoff at this. $3.50 an hour, why would you do that? For me it didn't matter, because I had a goal and was ready to do whatever it took to achieve it. The same mindset helped me land my first $5 job on Upwork 6 months ago, where I debugged a client's system in 3 hours. And yes, you're not going to get rich doing $5 gigs, I get that. But I had a goal, and I was ready to set aside my ego. Because by doing that, I made $6k last month and this month is looking even more promising. I now have multiple clients giving me full freedom to work on what I want. Looking back, the $5 job was the stepping stone to get here. Instead of seeing it as a bad thing, I saw it as something that would help me in the future. I see people offering automation left and right but not managing to get any clients. I even know some who have been in this space for a full year and made $0. So the question I ask myself is what am I willing to do to make it work. Because I'd rather not spend years spinning my wheels and making zero progress.

For all the good that has come out of AI, I still don't think that when first starting out, this is the best way to automate complex workflows with AI. A real comment from a redditor: -------- I should say upfront that I'm very much a beginner with n8n, and work requires me to build complex automations. I've tried workarounds like n8n-mcp, but I'll get to that another time. -------- As a beginner, I do think the first step is getting your hands dirty. Yes, building things can be tedious. Yes, it can be boring. But it's in the boring parts that you learn how to think and solve problems. Not by letting AI spit out a system for you. And even then, don't get me started on how bad AI is at building n8n flows. That's beside the point. If I were completely new, I would approach it the same way I'm learning PHP right now. Watch one video on the basics, jump into something real fast, and learn by doing. But there's a huge caveat. I can only make that jump because I know how code works, or at least know the basics like: - if, else, or, and - floats, int, string - lists, arrays, dicts - classes, functions - APIs, webhooks, requests If I didn't know any of these, reading PHP code would be even harder. But because I know the basics, I can at least read over the code and understand it to a degree. And as I work with it, I'll get more familiar. Once I'm familiar enough, I'll understand the code at a glance, because code, as a rule, doesn't change. So as a beginner, enjoy really learning n8n. Understand the nodes, build things, break things. Because once you enter a real codebase, all that learning will carry you.