BORN FOR THIS by Chris Guillebeau

• Many people really are stuck in soul-crushing jobs, with no escape route in sight. If you find yourself trapped for the foreseeable future, you have two obvious options: settle or make a trade-off.
• This book will also challenge many popular beliefs about the way we live and work. As you’ll see, some of these conventional assumptions about what a dream career should look like are misguided or simply wrong.
• Even if you receive a regular paycheck and have no intention of ever starting a business, it’s important to understand that you are still essentially self-employed. No one will look out for your interests as much as you will, so you should make active decisions and take responsibility for your own success as much as possible.
• There may be a few superhumans out there who know from age five exactly what they want to do when they grow up, and what form it will take. For the rest of us, it’s almost never that simple.
• Simply put, the process of discovery unfolds a bit differently for most people.
• You can learn something from any job, of course, but most of the time we learn as much about what we don’t want as what we do.
• Finding the work you were meant to do is rarely a linear journey.
• The Path to Lottery Winnings Decisions: make the right ones Luck: increase it wherever possible
• in the vast majority of jobs, specialization is hugely overrated.
• Put simply, here’s what we’re looking for:
• Something that makes us happy (joy)
• Something that’s financially viable (money)
• Something that maximizes our unique skills (flow)
• The reality is that there are some career fantasies you’ll never achieve no matter how hard you try…so whatever those are for you, they shouldn’t be your goals.
• It’s hard to be truly happy if you don’t fundamentally enjoy how you spend most of your time.
• Generally speaking, we want our work to “spark joy.” If you’re not sure whether your current work sparks joy, it probably doesn’t.
• It doesn’t matter how late you can sleep in the morning or how fun your co-workers are if you have to spend eight hours a day doing something you despise.
• The point is, working conditions are a huge part of finding that ideal combination of joy, money, and flow. You can’t just find the best possible work. You also have to find (or create) the working conditions that best suit your personality and preferences.
• Just remember: there’s more than one path, but the goal is to find the best one. You want work that meets the three requirements of joy, money, and flow. The closer you come to your ideal intersection of these three qualities, the happier—and more successful—you’ll be.
• Learn to evaluate risks, make better choices, and create a series of backup plans that will allow you to take the right kinds of chances.
• With a few exceptions, no matter how good a gambler you are, the people who run casinos are better—that is, better at separating you from your money.
• We play the game of life, especially the part about career planning, a lot like a roulette wheel. We make decisions based on intuition, and we tend to make the same mistakes over and over.
• It’s when the odds of success are between very unlikely and close to a sure thing that matters get complicated.
• Because we tend to make decisions based on fear or perceived scarcity, we sometimes feel pushed into a less-than-ideal course of action.
• The more we can make rational decisions based on the information currently available to us, the better we’ll become at assessing risk.
• With games of perfect information, everything you could possibly want to know about the game is reflected on the scorecard.
• Backup plans don’t make us wimpy; they actually allow us to take on more risk.
• In programming, good coders try to create fail-safe options in case something doesn’t go as planned.
• You can apply this kind of “if this, then that” thinking to your career planning.
• The next time you take on a potentially risky gambit or endeavor, sit down and sketch out your own “if-then” equation. Remember, there can always be a backup plan. If plan A fails, you have 25 letters left.
• Have more than one source of income. Even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur or real estate mogul, having regular income from more than one paycheck is often the simplest and best way to reduce risk.
• There’s an old proverb about happiness: if your income exceeds your expenses, you’ll be happy, no matter how much money you make. By the same token, if your expenses exceed your income, you’ll be unhappy, also regardless of how much cash is coming in.
• When your income increases, you tend to spend more—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The key is to make sure you don’t spend more than what’s coming in.
• Because relationships are always your greatest asset, take time to regularly evaluate how you can be a better friend and colleague.
• How do you become luckier? An old idea suggests that luck is predictable, and to have more of it, you should take more chances. Let’s modify this a bit: to be luckier, take better chances. Remember, it’s not just a numbers game. It’s about managing your risk by picking the right numbers in the first place.
• Done is better than perfect.
• The point is that breaking out of prison, whether a real one or the career equivalent surrounded by cubicle walls, will force you to think differently and use a varied set of skills and tools.
• Most universities do not award degrees in escapology, and even if your prison is a corporate one, no one will hand you a key to freedom. Just as in prison, you’ll need to make one yourself.
• In working with thousands of people who’ve successfully broken out of prison, I’ve noticed that they are best positioned for success when they focus not just on improving their skills but on improving the right skills.
• They also tend to be acutely aware of two important facts. One is that everyone’s an expert at something.
• Often, the “something” has nothing to do with what you went to school for or even what you’ve been doing for however many years you’ve been working away at a job.
• Everyone has another skill or fountain of knowledge, perhaps hidden away or currently unused, that can be uncovered and developed in pursuit of a different (and more profitable) career goal.
• The second important fact is that if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else.
• Even though your formal qualifications may not be the most relevant in the search for freedom, you’ve probably gained skills along the way that can be repositioned or redeployed.
• Qualifications show that you can follow directions (good job!). But merely following directions rarely leads to freedom.
• Today, it’s easier than ever to self-learn the skills you need to get ahead in your career.
• Lesson: there’s often more than one way to do a job or obtain the qualifications you need.
• So before worrying about upgrading your skills and adding new ones (more on this in a bit), it pays to understand what your existing skills are.
• Make a list of things you do well.
• Even if your skills aren’t quite as specialized, the key is to make sure you have a simple inventory of them.
• Write down at least one thing you hate doing and aren’t good at.
• Just as breaking out of jail requires us to know our skills to execute a successful prison break, it’s also important to be in touch with our weaknesses.
• Your greatest weakness will probably never become a strength, especially if it’s not something you care about improving.
• Decide for yourself when “D-Day” will be, and do everything you can to work toward it.
• When most people think about “improving their skills,” they think about things like getting better at spreadsheets or practicing irregular verbs in another language. But for the most part, these things won’t help you make big advances in your career.
• If the goal is to break free of the job you hate and move into the job you dream of, you want to make rapid advancement in the right kinds of skills.
• There are two broad categories of these. In your specific field, there are technical skills that relate directly to the work you are hired to do.
• We’ll call these “hard skills”—they aren’t things that most people will learn, but they’re important to what you do.
• Other skills are more universal, or at least widely applicable. We’ll call these “soft skills” because they are abilities that help you no matter what you do in life and work.
• Improving soft skills will make you a better employee, a more attractive job candidate, and a more confident spokesperson for yourself in general. There’s no good reason not to improve them, at least for most of us.
• Improve your writing and speaking ability.
• To improve your writing, remember that all writing is essentially persuasive. Make sure your writing contains a call to action. Ask yourself, “What do I want people to do after reading this?”
• Another hallmark of good writing is simply to be engaging.
• Be succinct and try to keep it interesting, no matter the subject.
• The key is to learn to be more comfortable and natural when speaking in front of others.
• No matter what type of work you do, being able to craft a cogent argument is key.
• The lessons for both writing and speaking are: be persuasive, be interesting, be confident, and get other people on your side.
• Learn to negotiate.
• The art of negotiation is about finding win-win solutions to any problem in or out of the workplace.
• To improve your negotiation skills, consider the classic advice from the poker table. It’s not just about playing well; it’s about knowing what table to play in the first place. Clearly understand what you hope to achieve, as well as what the other party hopes to achieve. Play your cards wisely and save your best bet for when it feels right.
• Improve your ability to follow through and follow up.
• Successful people, no matter their field, are good at following through and following up.
• It’s easy to come up with ideas. Making ideas come to life is where the real value is.
• Writing things down is one of the most basic ways to improve your follow-through and follow-up skills. It’s nearly impossible to remember all the things you’re supposed to, and the mere act of trying to recall everything with total precision can drain your energy. But don’t just write down your action items; you should also give yourself a deadline for actually doing them. Follow-up is useless without the follow-through.
• Become comfortable with useful technology.
• Those who will thrive in the future, in other words, are those who will have the skills to use technology to make their lives better and more productive.
• When escaping from prison—or any job you don’t love—improving your “soft skills” increases your value in the post-prison job market and helps you break into the work you were born to do.
• DON’T JUST BE GOOD—BE SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU
• To sum up:
• Professionals with marginal skills: undesired.
• Professionals with strong hard skills but poor social skills: needed on a short-term basis, but not always valued over the long run.
• Professionals with strong hard skills and strong social skills: indispensable.
• To be so good they can’t ignore you, focus your efforts on improving soft skills.
• As much as possible, ignore sunk costs.
• Fun as it might be to storm out of the conference room, it’s generally smarter to take your time and plan your escape a bit more deliberately. If you have the choice, use your prison sentence to plan for a better future by upgrading your skills using the strategies you’ve read about in this chapter; then use those skills to tunnel yourself out to freedom.
• “Everyone’s an expert at something” is a good principle to keep in mind, and often the “something” comes as a surprise. But even if you know what your skills are, a skill is only as valuable as the extent to which people will pay you to use it.
• Here’s the core principle: when you’re not sure what your “thing” is—when you don’t know quite where to look to find that job or career that brings you joy, flow, and a good income—the people you talk to every day can help you find it.
• Solving problems of daily life is usually the easiest and most successful approach.
• You can’t go wrong by helping people solve universal, everyday problems like losing weight, getting stronger, saving money, feeling better about themselves, or anything along those lines.
• Solving specific, measurable problems is much better than attempting to create huge behavior change.
• To avoid getting off track, always ask, “Why should people care about this?”
• List five problems you’ve been able to solve for someone.
• As I’ve traveled and met with groups all over the world, I’ve never stopped being amazed by all the different business ideas hatched and new careers created simply by finding ways to be helpful.
• Always do what feels most authentic to you.
• Remember, the whole point is learning what you’re good at that other people want to pay for.
• No matter what type of work you currently do—whether you’re an entrepreneur, a self-employed consultant, or an employee who’s looking for a way to bring in extra cash on the side—if you’re struggling to figure out what it is that you do well and that others will also pay you for, consider giving the 100 Person Project a try.
• People are not always able to clearly express their needs. If you can learn to pay attention to the unstated agenda and the unspoken needs, you’ll build stronger relationships.
• Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an employee, your goal is to meet needs and provide solutions. The more you focus on activities related to this goal, the more successful you’ll be.
• “Develop the habit of being a humble expert. Be interested more in how other people do things than in telling them how you are doing it. Your work will speak for itself.
• Of course luck plays a part in it, but every human being has genius-level talent. There are no chosen ones.
• Remember:
• Joy: what you love to do
• Money: what pays the bills
• Flow: what you’re really good at
• Your first step is to eliminate ideas that don’t bring you joy when you think of them. This should usually be the initial decision-making criterion, because life is short and you certainly don’t want to do something you don’t like.
• You should next eliminate ideas that don’t have real potential to produce income.
• Finally, you should eliminate ideas that you aren’t particularly good at, or where your skills aren’t unique.
• Sometimes you need to think like a CEO, but other times you should think like the janitor, the guy who works throughout the building, knows everyone, and keeps his eyes on the pulse of the business at all times.
• By choosing only five life goals, you’ll be far more invested in achieving them.
• If you’re having trouble finding your unique combination of joy, money, and flow, take a few minutes to consider what you’d like your resumé to look like several years from now. We’ll call this your “resumé from the future.”
• Generally speaking, everyone should have some kind of side hustle.
• Forget about updating your resumé; most dream jobs are found or created through nontraditional methods.
• Real winners won’t hesitate to walk away from an unsuccessful venture.
• The principle: you don’t have to quit your job to start something on the side, and it doesn’t have to take over your life unless you want it to.
• Whether you want to be a full-time business owner or not, everyone should have some income that independently arrives in their bank account, preferably on a recurring basis.
• life?” If you want an outcome different from the one your current path is leading to, somehow you’ll have to find the time. Being too busy may be the new social currency, but the real winners find time to do what matters to them.
• Sell something.
• What can you sell? Look at what other people are buying.
• Provide a consulting service.
• Become a middleman.
• The key to making money as an affiliate lies in leveraging at least one of two market forces: either some kind of technological advantage (better search engine results, for example) or “authority” in the minds of people interested in purchasing something through your referrals.
• Join the sharing economy as a provider.
• Trends and specific services may come and go, but the “sharing economy”—platforms and services that allow ordinary people to rent out things they own when not in use—is here to stay.
• Become a digital landlord.
• If you’re pursuing an entrepreneurial solution instead of just hopping on board an existing service, don’t base the price of your product or service on how much time it takes you to provide it; price it based on the value it offers.
• What matters most is how your customers’ or clients’ lives are improved. Think about that value when choosing a price.
• Go above and beyond to make sure people are satisfied.
• Opportunities are always around us, and when one gold rush door closes, another opens. Walk through the open door!
• TO FIND A GOLD RUSH, DON’T THINK DIFFERENT, THINK BORING
• You need a helpful idea.
• Again, being helpful is the highest value.
• Remember, always strive to meet needs and solve problems. Also, when you find a possible gold rush, strike quickly.
• Begin your experiment even when you aren’t sure what will happen. If it works, you can always improve it. If it doesn’t work, well, you haven’t invested much time and can easily move on.
• The reality is that you don’t usually know which projects will take off and which won’t.
• It may sound obvious, but when choosing between different ideas you’re equally attracted to, choose the idea with more income potential.
• Pricing based on value is always good, but you probably shouldn’t charge a fortune for something you create very quickly.
• once in a while, set aside a dedicated block of hours, typically the majority of a working day, to spend specifically on brainstorming things that can be done to improve or add to your current cash flow.
• But remember the point: side hustles generate disproportionate amounts of satisfaction for relatively little investment of time or effort. They allow you to keep doing what you do best at your day job, while exploring other passions and ambitions during off-hours.
• The bottom line is that a side hustle can be a low-risk, low-commitment way to test the waters for something bigger—and earn some extra money at the same time.
• There’s a classic business principle called “first-mover advantage.” It means that when all other variables are equal, the company or organization that enters a market first will be the default leader. According to this theory, it’s not necessarily impossible to topple a first mover, but the first mover will have a built-in head start.
• Find convergence between what you value and what other people will pay for.
• Start quickly and with a low level of investment.
• Growing a side hustle into a business is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. With any product or service, there are only two ways to grow:
• 1. Sell more to existing customers
• 2. Sell to more customers
• If you don’t invest in yourself, who will?
• If you decide you’re ready to be an investor in You, Inc., there are four areas you need to consider.
• 1. Skills. Improve both the technical aspects of your work (just as Heath set out to learn about the new technology in videography) and your soft skills such as writing, reading, negotiating, and more (see Chapter 4 for more advice on this).
• 2. Connections. Commit to networking and meeting everyone you can (like the debut author who gave Heath his first gig).
• 3. Experiments. Try new things and expose yourself to new places, people, and ideas (as Heath did on his year-long cross-country tour).
• 4. Opportunities. Say yes to business deals and opportunities (Heath said yes to almost every opportunity, even if they weren’t 100 percent related to what he eventually wanted to do).
• “Horizontal progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. It’s easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. It’s harder to imagine because it requires doing something that nobody else has ever done.
• As scary as going out on your own can be, try to resist the temptation to trade one semi-secure situation for another by copying an existing idea or simply joining up with an existing business. Instead, create your own security by going Zero-to-One and building your own small (or not so small) empire from the ground up.
• There’s one surefire way to make a decision if you’re on the fence: you quit your job when your business is making you enough money to live on—not when it’s merely promising and has potential, but when it’s actually providing enough income to pay your bills, even if it’s less than what you make in the job. Until then, resist the urge to quit unless you feel absolutely confident that your budding empire is on track for greater things.
• People tend to assume that starting a successful company requires a ton of skills or experience with technology. But these days that couldn’t be further from the case.
• Remember that the whole point of going into business on your own is so you don’t have to be a slave to anyone else, and in this case “anyone else” also includes technology.
• You don’t need to master every innovation that comes around; you just need to use technology to accomplish your goals.
• Instead of trying to be everywhere, do a good job staying present and engaged with your fans on a couple of networks, and leave it at that.
• Make sure you have a way to get paid.
• I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in the book, but it bears repeating here: you can’t make money if you don’t have a way to get paid.
• You can accept money for your goods or services just by setting up a free account with PayPal, Square, or several other systems.
• The most important thing to remember is to make it as easy as possible for the person who’s sending you money.
• Here’s a crazy idea: it doesn’t matter what you think about any particular payment method but rather what your customers prefer.
• You need some kind of website.
• There are a number of misconceptions about business school, the biggest of which is that earning an MBA will help you learn how to start a business. If you want to be a middle manager in a big corporation, an MBA can be a good choice. The letters stand for “master of business administration,” because what you learn is how to run someone else’s business.
• Let’s get a depressing fact out of the way. Most advice about getting the job of your dreams is highly misleading and even damaging.
• As with most things in life, when trying to find and land your dream job, it’s helpful to consider the other party’s perspective.
• There’s a popular principle from sociology called “the strength of weak ties.” The short version of this principle is that our acquaintances can open more doors to more people, and thus introduce us to more opportunities, than our friends can. This is because we tend to travel in the same circles as our friends, but people we know only casually (“weak ties”) tend to have much different networks of friends and other acquaintances.
• Success isn’t found completely in persistence; it’s found in working hard and smart. Try, try again, sure—but try again in a strategic manner.
• What matters is figuring out who your people are and where they hang out.
• A good writer seeks to build connection with the reader, and it starts with considering that person on the other side of the screen or page.
• WORKING SMARTER DOESN’T MEAN NOT WORKING HARD
• even if you’re earning a steady paycheck, you are essentially self-employed in terms of being responsible for your own career. Therefore, you should continually build your skills and look out for yourself. This is important for two big reasons: first, to safeguard your current position, and second, as a means of advancement.
• When your team, company, or business simply can’t function without you, you’ll have the best bargaining chip in the world when you come to your boss asking him to let you design your lottery-winning role.
• To be indispensable, be the busy person who gets things done—and keeps other things on track for the rest of the group.
• It’s hard to remove unproductive work completely, as there will always be a certain amount of unavoidable slippage in our daily tasks and meetings. Most unproductive work, however, is simply the result of a common bad habit of people taking on work to make themselves look good or enhance their stature without adding any real value.
• Economists refer to activities that seek to transfer wealth without increasing value as “rent-seeking.”
• Don’t just be a hard worker; find a way to boost profits or otherwise draw a direct connection between your efforts and the greater success of the organization.
• No matter your industry or employer, ask these questions about the business and consider what you can do to support positive change:
• Will people still want our products and services in five years?
• How can our business continue to be relevant in changing times?
• What can we do to build for the future?
• You want to be reliable and indispensable. The real heroes, though, are able to see the bigger picture and come up with solutions that are truly good for everyone involved.
• Be sure you can do everything in your current portfolio with excellence before raising your hand to volunteer for a ton of other stuff.
• A sabbatical can be a great way to reboot and recharge, so you come back to work energized and raring to go. It can also be a great opportunity to reflect on what’s not working for you in your current role, gain some perspective, and maybe do some experimentation to figure out what changes you can make to turn your current job into the work you were born to do.
• Almost without exception, those who succeed in the new economy share four specific characteristics: a body of work (product), a group of fans (audience), a means of sharing the body of work (platform), and a way of getting paid for their work (money).
• ALWAYS FOCUS ON MAKING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS
• If you get a few big things right, in other words, you can get a lot of small things wrong.
• Remember, there’s no set formula for what a career should look like, and we’re all making it up as we go along.
• The point is that remaining in paralysis is often worse than making any actionable choice. Like it or not, by refusing to make a choice, you’ve already made a choice to do nothing. And doing something—or several things, even if they turn out to be the wrong thing or things—is almost always better than doing nothing at all. Even when you feel paralyzed and indecisive, you must find a way to take action and move forward.
• commitment.” A barrier is something that discourages certain behavior, either positive or negative.
• A pre-commitment is the logical extension of a barrier. With pre-commitment, you create the conditions in advance to lead to your desired behavior or outcome.
• Sometimes the oddest pairings end up being the most lucrative business ideas
• “Never give up” is bad advice. Real winners won’t hesitate to walk away from an unsuccessful venture. Master the art of moving on by learning when to quit and when to keep going.
• The real secret is that selective quitting is a powerful practice—you just need to learn when to give up and when to keep going.
• When the Stakes Are Low, Make Changes or Give Up Quickly
• Don’t waste time on small things, and when the stakes are low, make changes right away.
• if you want to be successful, you can’t live your life out of fear.
• Ignore “Sunk Costs” as Much as Possible
• When the stakes are high and you need to choose whether to give up on any project or course of action, ask yourself these two basic questions:
• 1. Is it working?
• 2. Do you still enjoy it?
• GIVE UP THE NEED FOR PETTY CONTROL OF USELESS THINGS.
• You don’t need to be copied on every email or informed of every decision. If the right things are happening, don’t interrupt the flow.
• If you try to do everything, inevitably you’ll fall behind.
• Just as regular deposits in your savings account or retirement plan will grow over time, so too will regular investments in your relationship bank accounts.
• Contrary to popular belief, if you want to win, you shouldn’t always just keep going. You should regroup and try something totally different.
• “Winners never quit, and quitters never win” is a lie. To win, sometimes you need to find a new game to play.
• There’s more than one possible path. Use the Joy-Money-Flow model to find the best one.
• Craft backup plans. They will allow you to take more risks and make better choices.
• Make a commitment to resign your job every year.
• Improving “soft skills” can increase your value no matter what kind of career you have.
• Stop storing things in your head.
• Choose your own job title.
• Hack your job to create the best possible working conditions.
• Create a “side hustle” even if you never plan to work on your own full-time.
• Don’t fear commitment.
• If something isn’t working, give up.