Born For This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do

by Chris Guillebeau

• Teach people through lessons, tutoring, or consulting • Create a product, course, guide, or app • Design a service that takes a time-intensive task off someone’s hands • Apply this model to your job (see below) If you’re not

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.

19 DAYS TO HUSTLE: A SUGGESTED TIMELINE When you’re launching your first side hustle, it can be tricky to figure out how to start. Here’s a suggested timeline to get you going. By spending one hour a day for 19 days, you’ll be off the ground before a month has gone by. Day 1: First things first! Decide what your side hustle will be. What skills will you utilize? What passion will you tap into? What problem will you solve? Day 2: What’s the deliverable? Make a decision: will this be a product, a service, or some kind of hybrid? How will you make money off your side hustle? Day 3: Think about the ideal customers or clients for this idea. Who are they and what are their struggles? If you had five customers or clients, what would they all have in common? Day 4: Set a budget. Determine all costs necessary, and keep them as low as possible. Day 5: Write down three key benefits for your new side hustle. This is particularly important, because the benefits you offer matter much more than any other details or features. Day 6: Decide how much you’ll charge for your offer. Day 7: Set up a simple, one-page website. No need to make it complicated or fancy; for a quick guide on how to get a website in less than an hour, visit BornforThisBook.com. Day 8: Write a simple sales page for your website. Again, it doesn’t need to be complicated; just think about what you’re offering and how it will help people. Oh, and tell them what they need to do to purchase or sign up. Day 9: Write the “Fre...

First-mover advantage applies to plenty of big industries and markets, but when it comes to building a small to medium business (You, Inc.) it may actually be better to be second, third, or tenth to enter the market.6

The early bird may get the worm, but the late worm gets to live.

Don’t stress about the fact that social media is constantly changing. There’s a new network every day, so how do you keep up? Answer: you don’t. 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. • Keep up with the main forms of communication. Communication technology changes more slowly than social media, and here it’s important to keep up. If you’re emailing when everyone else is texting, or using an AOL email address while everyone else is on Gmail, you’ll feel left behind. • 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. Luckily, new technologies have made getting paid easier than ever. 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. I once knew someone who hated PayPal and regularly turned away business by refusing to accept it. 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. Like it or not, if Google can’t find you, neither can your potential clients or customers. The good news is that you can set up a website or blog in one hour or less using WordPress, ...

Bonus: If you’re still on the fence, be sure to check out Josh Kaufman’s classic treatise The Personal MBA. It has a retail price of less than $20, so you’ll save approximately $59,980 on tuition from a typical top-10 program.

off-the-wall

Fortunately, the answer is very clear. 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).

Somewhere along the way, most of us were given some terrible advice: you must choose a career niche in order to survive. You must focus on one thing alone to the exclusion of all others, or so you are told, and there is no room for mixing things up or having more than one primary career interest. You can safely place this advice in the paper shredder underneath your desk.

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.

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.

To be more effective (and to become more valuable), spend time improving your soft skills in writing, negotiation, conflict management, and follow-up.

Choose your own job title. Select the title you want, not an existing one. Write a job description of your future expertise and responsibilities. Determine what it will take to achieve that role; then work backwards from the goal.

Use the 19 Days to Hustle plan (see here) to create an all-new source of income. If you know what you’re doing, use the 24-Hour Product challenge (see here) to finish even quicker.

“Winners never quit” is another misguided assumption. Real winners quit all the time . . . sometimes right before they go on to win the lottery.