Hi everyone, my name is Pablo and I’m going to tell you what FiveM brought me and how motivation can only help you in everyday life 
(Please excuse me for any potential mistakes, I am French).
To start, I started FiveM towards the end of 2017, following my departure from the Minecraft game. I started like many of you by playing and discovering RolePlay on a few servers, which allowed me to discover a world I was completely unfamiliar with. These first steps allowed me to meet a lot of people, some of whom quickly became friends (and still are today), the RolePlay occupied a small part of my experience on the platform, and I was really happy to have this experience, these are memories, unforgettable moments with friends and people who share the same passion for RP.
In 2019, I started to get interested in what was behind the FiveM servers, and therefore, in development! My beginnings were extremely complicated as I was a total novice in the field, trying to figure out how the scripts worked and at the time I was only doing simple configuration. Then, with time, determination and a good number of evenings sacrificed to the detriment of learning how to program FiveM, my first “public” script appeared at the beginning of 2020 (you can see it here), it was basically intended for a private server that my friend and I had, but it was a real accomplishment for me to have finally succeeded in creating my first script.
The more time passed, the more I continued to learn despite a level that was still quite uncertain. During these learning periods, my motivation took a few hard knocks when I wanted to compare my work to the most popular scripts at the time. Despite all this, I vowed that I would learn again and again until I could claim to make my own complete scripts from scratch…
In the middle of 2020, the founder of the Greed-Island server (Simon) offered me to join his project as a developer (yes, it was official, my very first developer role on a server), this opportunity was a dream come true (a first one), it was a chance for me to be able to use everything I had learned in order to please players and guarantee them a better gaming experience. This position as a developer gave a huge boost to my motivation, I was finally going to be able to put my skills to use. So I developed a lot of new innovative systems as well as some anti-cheat measures (which brought me a lot of knowledge), the founder was satisfied with me. Then, after spending more than 4 months with them, I decided to leave the project to aim for another server.
Let’s come to RedSide, it was precisely this server that I wanted to join as a developer, except that at the time my skills were passable for a medium-sized server, but this one sometimes counted up to 600 simultaneous players (or more), so you’ll understand that my skills weren’t strong enough to be able to contribute on such a project. Luckily, the founder (SanGlitcher) decided to give me a chance by giving me a script as a test, it was a weapon manufacturer, he told me to give me a week’s time to complete it. That day, I can’t say what really happened, but the pressure mixed with the apprehension and the hypothesis of what this project could bring me gave me an incredible strength and I managed to make this script in less than 24 hours, I would never have succeeded before.
So I passed the founder’s test, I was a developer on a very big French server, so I was only 15 years old when I was officially recruited. As time went by, the pressure mixed with the desire to please a whole community allowed me to improve my skills in programming FiveM scripts from a fair level to a very good level. So I was very satisfied with my work.
In parallel to the server, I decided to open a Twitch channel and a Youtube channel to share my knowledge and my passion for development. On the Youtube channel, I posted videos of FiveM programming tutorials in French (there was none available in this language at the time), these videos were a huge success which gave me even more the desire to continue sharing my knowledge and what I was doing on the platform, so I launched into the Twitch adventure.
At the beginning, I streamed my development sessions on the server, then with time I decided to diversify my content with free live script creation. The content I was proposing, interested a lot of people (curious to know what was going on behind FiveM), so I passed the 1k followers, 2k, then finally I found myself with 5k followers, more than 250 people simultaneously on these lives and a status of Twitch partner that was granted to me, it was for me a totally unexpected success and a dream that became reality. My creations also had an unexpected success and pleased many people.
After 1 year of working for the RedSide server, I decided, for personal reasons, to leave the project and start my own business, aware of the knowledge I had acquired through my motivation and of what this project had asked of me in terms of making my knowledge available. To support myself in terms of stream material, I opened a store with a single script (the zAdmin), this script was also a huge success with more than 100 sales, which allowed me to buy a whole stream material, partly my computer and some accessories.
Since then, I worked for many other servers, made more streams, scripts and gained more knowledge, and today, I’m 17 years old and having learned a lot through Open-Source, I’m now making a framework on FiveM open-source to improve my skills and allow server founders & developers to have a new free tool at their disposal.
To conclude, FiveM brought me a lot of things, whether it is in terms of contacts (influencers, developers on the platform (…)), knowledge or simply maturity. It was part of my adolescence and without it, I probably wouldn’t be doing the studies I’m doing now and I’d probably still have a laptop that could only barely handle the game.
If I were to sum up my entire history on the platform, I would have only one thing to say:
Believe in your dreams, and give yourself the means to make them come true.
And beyond that, thank you FiveM for existing and thank you to the developers and various administrators who allow the community to evolve in a secruited environment