“Help! I hate my job. I want to work for myself. PLEASE GOD, there must be a solution. What should I do!?”
- Read 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job, 10 Business Lessons from a Snarky Entrepreneur, and listen to these podcasts: How to Make Money Without a Job, Kick-Start Your Own Business, and Embracing Your Passion (all by Steve Pavlina).
- Read Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love
by Jonathan Fields.
- Read Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur
by Pam Slim.
- Pick up Naomi Dunford’s Summer Camp workshop, which is happening in July (so if you’re going to do it, do it quick)—it’s just for beginners.
- While you’re at it, consider Naomi’s Online Business School—it could close the gap on a lot of basic concepts and skills you need to make money on the internet, and it covers all kinds of different material. It’s pretty crazy awesome.
# Read anything you can get your hands on by Seth Godin(for inspiration and ideas).
- Read anything you can get your hands on by Naomi Dunford (for asskicking and practical steps).
- If you have any problems at all with productivity, check out Charlie Gilkey and Productive Flourishing—he has free planner PDFs that you can use to get moving, and a great blog.
- Find yourself a community of people who want what you want—preferably with a large portion of members who are successful at it! Some possibilities I know are spiffy: Seth Godin’s Triiibes, which is closed—unless you know someone with an available invite (still, worth recommending). Jonathan Fields’ Flight School. Pace & Kyeli Smith’s Freak Revolution, which requires an application but is worth the effort. Michael Port’s Think Big Revolution, also well worth it. In all cases, if you’re trying to get into a community, be gracious and polite, and if you can’t manage membership, fail gracefully. There are dozens of great support communities out there. If you can’t find one, email me. Hell, you can even start your own!
- Drop friends who tear you down, if you have to. (It’s not worth it, man.)
- Figure out what your strengths are, and use them! (GOOD book.
)
- Figure out what your weaknesses are, and befriend / bribe / blackmail… uh, DELEGATE… to someone who’s good at what you aren’t. (If nothing else, get lots of good feedback and professional opinions, and balance yourself.)
- MAKE FRIENDS WITH EVERYBODY. If you’re ornery or hard to get along with, this is going to be a long haul. You MUST read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People
. Help people without expecting anything in return—and they just might show up when you need them most.
- Put yourself out there. If you write well, blog and start building your audience. Seth Godin has great articles about what about a blog attracts tribes of readers. If you can’t write but you can DRAW, start a doodle gallery (or a doodleblog). If you’re a photographer, spread your photos around—let people use them and comment on them. (Creative Commons licenses, people.) If you make widgets, share your widgets. Get someone to write awesome things about your widgets. (If no one will do so, make better widgets. Rinse, repeat.)
- Think up the craziest, most wonderful, most happy-making job you could POSSIBLY HAVE. In fact, don’t even think of a “job”—think of the thing you would most like to spend your whole life doing. Think up something that allows you to learn and be productive, but don’t be afraid to be completely off the wall and list things that no one in their right mind would call a “job”. Then, figure out who you can help by DOING THAT THING. Then, HELP THEM. For free. Because you’re cool. Rinse, repeat. (If you’re not sure what you want to do, try this exercise from Steve Pavlina.)
- Write a manifesto (I’ve got to credit Bob Poole for this one – he repeated it several times in his book
and now it’s stuck in my head. But it’s so good, I’m passing it on to YOU.).
- Band together with others whose skills complement your own, and help them every chance you get. You might find out that you’re an unstoppable team.
- Work for free. ALL THE TIME. (I don’t mean all your working hours—I just mean A LOT.) When you don’t think you have room in your schedule, find something you’re passionate about and MAKE time. This shows other people what you’re like to work with, what kind of business you run, and who you are. Figure out how the thing you do can benefit hungry orphans in India. Figure out how the thing you do can get pregnant mothers off the street. Figure out how the thing you do can affect one person or ten people or forty people. Then do it.
- Use WordPress and Thesis. It will cost very little (in money and/or in learning curve) to set up, and learning to use it will mean you have web-savvy skills for the rest of your life that let you communicate with the whole world. This is ABSOLUTELY PRICELESS. You can even hook up with a web host like HostGator or BlueHost that will install WordPress automatically for you from the control panel, to save yourself some trouble.
- Listen to your people. Really listen to them. Find out how they feel and what they have to say. You may discover that what they need is exactly what you have to offer.
And once you’re rolling, keep these in mind…
- Once you know what you want to do and have a rough idea of how to do it, read Listen First – Sell Later
- Band together with one or two of your competitors. That’s right, I said COMPETITORS. Befriend them. Do things to HELP them. (I’m serious.) Send them clients you can’t help. Suggest useful ideas to them. Be generous and pleasant to be around. Why should you be on different sides? Why? Give me ONE REASON.
- Learn constantly. Search for blogs about your industry or niche, and read like a crazy person. Go to the library. Join a book swap. When you find people you want to be like, figure out what they did to get where they are and try a few new things.
- Keep moving forward!
