Are Your Excuses As Big As These?
May 17, 2011
I haven’t blogged anything forward in a while because Facebook and Twitter are very effective channels for sharing an interesting blog post or article. In fact, they serve that purpose for me better than this blog, because it’s very easy to pass something along when you see it on social media. And it’s easy for people to keep forwarding it.
The value of posting a link here is that it becomes part of these archives and is easier to find in the future. Barbara Winter shone the light on the following article by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.
Any time you’re doubting, any time you’re questioning, any time you look at your vision for a custom-designed life and ask, Is it really possible? come back to this article. It will remind you that when you commit to your vision you can find a way.
Ignore the title, except the “Get Paid to Change the World” part, and be willing to read all the way through to the reality-jarring surprise. You’ll be energized to go blow up some excuses.
Read Jon Morrow’s blog post here.
Forget Finding Your Passions?
February 17, 2011
*Content warning: This post is rated PG-13 – or, depending on your neighborhood, community, or sub-culture, possibly PG-7.
I met Marianne Cantwell at The Joyfully Jobless Jamboree. She trains, consults, and coaches on custom-designed careers and small business development primarily for people who want portable work so they can explore the world. Her business, blog, and Twitter account are named “Free Range Humans.”
Imagine my surprise when I saw this tweet from Marianne’s Twitter account that said “Why you should say F-you to ‘finding your passions…’ ” WTF?? “Follow your passions” and “Work at what you love” and “Find your true calling” and “Live a life you love” are the steady mantras of lifestyle entrepreneurs and custom career designers. Was Marianne calling this approach all wrong?
Turns out in her blog post with that title she doesn’t oppose the idea of people finding what they love to do and incorporating it into their work lives. What she does oppose is the frozen resistance of contemplating your navel waiting for a nearby bush to burst into non-consuming flames and tell you what your one great life purpose is.
Marianne’s preferred approach is to focus on what you really love doing, and to discover that by paying attention within, instead of looking without for some clue to an undiscovered deep calling. This is probably in line with Barbara Sher’s point of view that finding your calling is just finding what you love to do. Sher says what you love to do is what you are gifted at, and your calling is to do what you are gifted at – to develop and express those talents to share them with the world.
Marianne is energetic and joyful and a bit unconventional so you’ll probably enjoy her article and be interested in looking at more of her material. Since she likes to be provocative you’ll probably find yourself questioning old thinking, even the recently established old thinking of a fairly new movement like custom designed careers.
Marianne’s post got me thinking, or actually forwarded my thinking. Read more
Wings and Feet
January 14, 2011
In a post by Jeff Walker called Let’s Go Negative the product launch wizard unpacks the problem of constant optimism in business planning. Although optimism is important to sustain you through the challenges of starting a business or launching a new product or service, he tells us, relentless optimism interferes with a key component to success.
In the post he lays out a process for taking an idea that has you excited and then brainstorming all the obstacles to implementing it. This meshes with a framework I use for talking about business ideas. They need wings, to take them into the future and to higher potential results. But they also need feet, so they can land in the real world.
That means they need to be practical, and to be practical you need to invite the skeptic to evaluate them. Small business owners need both capacities – visionary dreaming and proactive, practical, operational planning.
That skeptic guy may not be the life of the party, but he’s key to the life of the business. Offer to buy him a drink. Don’t worry; he’ll probably just have a glass of water.
My Kind of Revolution
August 22, 2010
It’s a quiet movement, but it’s gaining momentum. It stays mainly under the radar, but every so often people not in the movement catch a glimpse and remark on it as a fad or trend. But it is no fad. It is no trend. It is a revolution, a revolution in how we see work and its place in our lives.
It is a revolution in our definition of “business.” No longer will everyone nod in acquiescence when someone says the only purpose of a business is to make money. To the revolutionaries, whose number is growing, the purpose of a business is to be a vehicle for them to share their gifts and talents with the world. It is their opportunity to display their personalities and express their values. It is their way to be socially responsible members of society. For some of us, running a small business is a rigorous program for self-development and even spiritual growth.
We are having a party, a happy and possibly noisy festival to celebrate the empowerment and the freedom that come from self-employment. We are going to share our victories and our strategies for surmounting obstacles. We are going to ramp up the creativity and challenge each other to set bigger goals and make bigger plans. We are going to help each other rediscover the purpose of work as dedicating ourselves to doing what we are gifted at, what we love, what we were born to do.
This is my kind of revolution.
Godin 07-09-10: On Lists and Commitment
July 11, 2010
I’m a skeptic by nature, so when I see lots of classes (tele- and otherwise) offered on how to grow your lists – on social networks, for your newsletter, for your blog – I have lots of questions. Then I read an article or excerpt and hear the techniques, and my skepticism grows. What’s the benefit of adding someone who falls for that technique?
People with strong reputations say it’s all about the numbers. But I’m pretty sure the list of subscribers for someone with a strong reputation is a lot more responsive than a quickly grown list built by “techniques”.
Seth Godin’s recent post on fans, participants, and spectators confirms my skepticism. The stats he shows for conversions are a little dreary. But he offers a solution.
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