born for this : The Art of Non-Conformity

Work

Winners Give Up All the Time

Lesson: “Never give up” is bad advice. Real winners don’t hesitate to walk away from an unsuccessful venture.

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.

You may be familiar with this old adage, often attributed to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Einstein was right in that the real danger of going in- sane, or just failing over and over, doesn’t usually come from doing something new. Rather, the worst failures come from something that we’ve been doing for a while.

Work

Improve the Right Kind of Skills (They Probably Aren’t What You Think)

Lesson: Improving “soft skills” can increase your value no matter what kind of career you have.

Hard skills are things you learned through technical or academic training: how to make architectural drawings with certain software, how to properly administer medication as a nurse, and so on.

Soft skills are just as important—if not more—but aren’t usually taught in school. To be more effective (and to become more valuable), spend time improving your soft skills in writing, negotiation, conflict management, and follow-up.

Et Cetera

Get the “Born for This” Audiobook FREE with Your Audible 30-Day Trial

Link: Free “Born for This” Audiobook with Audible Trial

Hey, everyone!

I had an amazing time on the road over the past couple of months, speaking to audiences almost every night (I don’t take many breaks...) about how to find the work you were meant to do.

Personally I love print books, and I also read some Kindle titles on my iPad—but I also know that there’s a large group of people who enjoy listening to books. With that in mind, we recently released the audio version of Born for This. It clocks in at just over 8 hours, long enough to enjoy on a flight to Europe.

Life

Reflections at the End of a 30-City Tour (At Least For Now)

Just a couple of weeks ago I was going from city to city, a different one every day.

I had the routine down: every afternoon I’d roll into a new place, usually arriving by air and then transferring to Uber or taxi to my hotel. Settling in, I’d do an hour or so of work and catch-up, then change my clothes and head to the venue.

Sometimes the venue was a bookstore, other times a co-working space, and every now and then a theater. The 6pm-10pm was usually fully occupied with the event, which runs two hours start to finish but for me there’s always pre- and post-work.

Work

When You Need to Escape, Build Your Own Countdown Clock

Before my dad packed up his cubicle and moved to a beachside office, he created a spreadsheet that displayed the number of days that remained until his retirement age.

It soon became a topic of dinner table conversation: “Hey, Dad, how much longer at the day job?” I’d ask. He’d respond with something like, “Oh, I don’t know exactly . . . well, I guess I do. Looks like I have 673 days and 4 hours to go.”

When you’re trying to escape a dead-end job or any other undesirable situation, create a calendar and count down the days to freedom.

Profiles

“Turning 50 Is Extremely Liberating”: One Woman’s Path to Her Dream Job

I love second act stories! It's never too late (or too early, for that matter) to create a new life for yourself and change the world while you're at it. Tonya Hobbs took a big risk, and she couldn't be happier.

Here’s her story:

Finding the work I was born to do was the result of a full-blown, midlife-crisis. I had changed careers and returned to school for a master’s degree in social work at age 40, but as 50 approached I was plagued by the question “Is this all there is?”
I worked in a field I loved. My job was never done. Yet I longed for something more... I just had no idea what “more” really meant.

Work

If Plan A Fails, Remember that You Have 25 Letters Left

*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: Craft backup plans. They will allow you to take more risks and make better choices.

There’s no shame in having a plan B, or even plans C–Z. Use the “if this, then that” method to make a backup plan for every career choice, and then make a backup for the backup. If one strategy doesn’t work, move to the next.

Work

Why I Like Giving the Same Talk 30 Times in a Row

Whenever I give a talk for the first time, I’m very nervous. Like a lot of internal struggles, I don’t think the goal is to pretend the nervousness doesn’t exist. It’s a talk, also known as public speaking, also known as the #1 fear for a majority of the population. If you’re not nervous at all, you're probably not treating it with the attention it deserves.

If it’s a new talk or a one-off, something that I prepared entirely for a specific experience and won’t repeat again, I spend at least several hours beforehand thinking about it. Behind the stage, or in the nearby stairwell, or around the block outside the venue, I’ll pace and look at my notes and think through what I’m going to say over and over.

Et Cetera

Life & Adventures on Book Tour: Part II

Greetings from Denver! Weeks II and III of the Born for This tour are coming to an end, and it’s been a great experience overall.

For the most part, it’s been a non-stop experience. At one point I did 14 days in a row with only one day off from events or travel or both (usually both, since I typically do an event in the evening and then travel to the next city the following day).

Oddly enough, I only felt tired on the rare days of rest or during periods of lesser intensity. Maybe the lesson is: when you’re going non-stop, don’t stop. 😃

Work

How to Win the Career Lottery

If you won the lottery tomorrow, how would your life be different? Maybe you’d buy a new car or take a dream vacation. Maybe you’d quit your job... or maybe you’d keep doing exactly what you’re doing right now. The point is that you’d have a lot of new opportunities and choices all of a sudden. This short video, based on the lessons of Born for This, tells more.

Profiles

Dream Jobs Don’t Always Have Glamorous Beginnings

Rosemary Behan has crafted a career in journalism that allows her to travel the world. In this profile, she shares how she got started—and how you can still break into the changing world of travel writing.

People often ask me how I became a travel journalist, and the honest answer is, by accident. I started at the Daily Telegraph, reading and replying to reader letters (most of them complaints about travel companies and holidays gone wrong), and my first assignment was to write about London’s worst hotels. Not a glamorous beginning, but it eventually led to a job as travel news editor for the paper.

Work

The Answer in Your Inbox

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.

The answer may come from your inbox, whether that inbox consists of the actual emails you receive with the same questions over and over, your social media feeds, or just the conversations you have with your friends.

In other words, the people in your network may actually have a better sense of what your most marketable skills are than you do.

Work

Resign Your Job Every Year

*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: Make a commitment to resign your job every year, unless your current job is the best one.

When you’re stuck in a rut or simply not sure if your current job is the best choice, here’s an idea: once a year, on the date of your choosing, commit to yourself that you will quit your job unless staying put is the best possible choice for you at this time.

Work

Joy, Money, and Flow: The Three Qualities of Purposeful Work

*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: There’s more than one possible path. Use the Joy-Money-Flow model to find the best one.

There are plenty of things you could do with your career, but the people who are most successful have found the perfect combination of joy, money, and flow. They’ve won the career lottery by finding this combination—and they don’t have to choose between their money and their life.

Et Cetera

A New Journey Begins: “Born for This” Is Now Available!

Link: BornforThisBook.com

More than eight years ago (whoa) I started writing this blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. I wanted to chronicle my adventures around the world and support other people with big dreams.

But the journey actually begin more than ten years before that, when I first started working for myself. I wasn’t a good employee, having been fired from just about every job that I didn’t walk away from after a few weeks. My motivations at the time weren’t very high-level: I simply wanted to earn money to support my lifestyle.

As the years went by, I learned more about entrepreneurship as a way to change the world. I spent a few years living on a hospital ship deployed to West Africa. I started a quest to visit every country on the planet. And as I wrote, and then as I began hosting events and supporting offline communities, I gradually grew into the work I felt born to do. So I wrote a book about how you can find or create the same for yourself.

Born for This, just released today and available wherever books are sold, provides the answer.

You’ll learn how to:

Hack the job of your dreams within a company or organization by making it work for you
Find your ideal work and your ideal working conditions
Create plans that will allow you to take smarter career risks and “beat the house” every time
Start a profitable “side hustle” and earn extra cash on top of your primary stream of income
Escape the prison of working for someone else and build a mini-empire as an entrepreneur
Become a rock star at any creative endeavor by creating a loyal base of fans and followers

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