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As the new year approaches, many folks begin to think about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the coming year. Sometimes these goals involve your job, your health habits, or other personal development topics.
Jeremiah Owyang published a list of Six Career Tips for people in the corporate world. One of the most interesting was this one:
Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.
Another tip that resonated with me was his perspective on education. Quite a few of the people that I have managed and trained in the past have been young people, just going off to college, and they have asked me about the value of education and what they should study in order to get a “good” job.
My advice often conflicts with what they have heard from parents and guidance counselors. In my own experience those guidance counselors were dead wrong and the whole profession should be outlawed. An education is important, depending on what field you are looking to go into. Most of the time I recommend that you go to college and study something that you are passionate about, or at least very interested in. I’ll let Jeremiah cover the rest:
Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.
The future of work is changing, schools are not preparing children for it.It is increasingly up to you to help and educate yourself.
(Editor’s note: this is not exactly a Productivity post, more of a personal update. Skip it if you like, or if you want to learn about the next exciting chapter in this journey we call life, read on…)
I have been Tweeting about “John Galt” quite a bit recently, as the lovely bride and I have been preparing to simplify our lives and try something new. As of 31 October, and for the foreseeable future, we no longer have a permanent physical address. Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s Note: This post is kinda long and rambling. I am talking here about what I have been up to, and what I am going to be working on in the future. If you’re just here for actionable productivity tips, skip it. If you are interested in the new direction I am taking, please read on.
There’s an old cliche that says “Entrepreneurs do what other people won’t in order to do what other people can’t.”
The suggestion there is right on the money - that the entrepreneurs who get to live the life people dream about did so because they were willing to make the sacrifices it took to make that life happen.
So the question really is: can you afford not to be an entrepreneur?
If your answer is “yes”, then your life will probably be just fine. Keep doing whatever it is that you enjoy doing. But if you really want a taste for what it means to control your own destiny and reap the benefits of taking risks, starting your own business is really the only option.
Getting a Paycheck vs Getting a Pay Out
Most of us see starting and growing a business as leading to the financial rewards of being the business owner. That’s because business owners enjoy the difference between earning a paycheck and earning the bigger reward - a pay out.
You may think those with a big paycheck, like those sports celebs with the $25 million contracts are the big winners. Not at all. It’s the person who can write that check, like the owner of the team.
Even if Kevin Garnett continues to be the highest paid player in the NBA for the next decade, he still won’t be writing the checks that his boss can.
The real cash comes from either the profits of the business on a regular basis or the eventual sale or IPO of the business down the road. Until your earnings are tied to the performance of the company, not your position, you’ll never be in the situation where you can truly enjoy the real rewards.
Give Yourself a Raise
As big as they can get, paychecks are inherently limited to what someone else is willing to pay you. If you can’t stand the idea of someone else determining what your pay scale should be, then starting a company is the fastest way to change all that.
The day you start your own company, the only person that will ever determine your income is you. If you’re as good as you think you are, the sky’s the limit.
Most entrepreneurs are stifled in their current jobs, both financially and creatively. Since salaries are often dependent on age and experience, not raw capability, your wages probably do not reflect what you are truly capable of.
Consider this: Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs were all around 30 when their companies went public. How much do you think that they would have been paid if they had stayed on in their salaried jobs? Clearly their ages had nothing to do with their capability, and starting their own venture was the only way to prove that.
Don’t Leave Money on the Table
When you’re working for a paycheck, you’re making yourself a bit of money, but you’re also making the company a bit of money. Every hour of your time is putting a dollar in your pocket, but it’s also putting a dollar in the owner’s pocket as well, which is good for him, not so good for you. This is the part that bothers me the most. And as I get older, it bothers me more and more.
Of course, the fastest way to double your pay is to put both of those dollars in your pocket for the same amount of effort! As the owner of the business you may have more overhead than you would as an employee, but long term you’re not only maximizing the payout on your time, you’re creating a business that will one day exceed your own value.
On the other hand, by leveraging the power of the internet, you can keep that overhead to a minimum.
Build Your Own Cumulative Value
Even if you’re incredibly well paid in your current position, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re only one person. You can only earn as much as your own time and contribution will afford you. At some point, in order to get to the next level, you need the company working for you, not the other way around.
That means taking on employees and leveraging the economies of scale. As the employer, you can infinitely scale the size of your income by adding more business and more employees. At some point the cumulative value of their contributions will far exceed what you could possibly earn as a worker bee.
Stop the Slow Bleed
No one is ever surprised to hear that you can make a great deal of money as a successful entrepreneur. They are mostly just afraid of taking that chance. People also tend to be afraid of not having that steady paycheck coming in every two weeks so that they can pay the bills.
The real chance you’re taking is in not thinking about just how much you’re losing by not being an entrepreneur yourself. When you add up how much value you’re losing by taking a paycheck every week, you start to wonder what was keeping you from taking the plunge in the first place.
In many ways, starting your own company is the only way to eliminate the risk of not being paid enough.
Starting My Own Company
That is why I have chosen to begin my own company, start working for myself and be my own boss. This new venture will start small, with a new blog and a new focus on small business development.
This blog will stay the same!
Everything that you, the readers, have asked for (and demanded!) will be here for you. The change is that the other topics that I enjoy writing and learning about (such as Leadership and New Media) are going to be found at their new home:
Please come on over and check it out. It’s a mini blog-network aimed toward small business and developing that business by developing the entrepreneur running it. I have learned a lot over the past two years of blogging, and I am looking forward to sharing that information - helping you to help yourself. I will also be offering my services for hire, on Productivity, Social Media Consulting and more.
The primary categories that we will be addressing at the new site are:
Each article, or post, will also be tagged with a more specific topic name. In this way you can not only just read posts about Blogging, for example, but you can read all of the posts that are tagged “blogging tools” or whatever topic you wish to develop today.
Click on the category links above to learn more about each specific category. I’d love to hear your feedback!
I am considering starting a weekly conference call with anyone interested on chatting about productivity practices and principles. I am thinking that this could be fun and educational, a way for the readers to connect with each other and share their problems and their solutions.
Would you like to share?
I also think that this would make an excellent podcast - a recording of this conversation might be very helpful to those readers that can’t make the call, so I am considering recording the call and making it available here as well.
So the question is this: Would you be interested in participating in a conference call to talk about your own productivity needs, and if so, what time and day are best for you?
Lets talk about it in the comments, and if enough people are interested I will go ahead and publish the phone number, we should be able to make a go of it this week!
UPDATE: The call went very well, we had a good discussion of tools and using them to manage inputs and organize your day. Watch for a new feature and the podcast on Tuesday, 14 October.
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December 1st, 2008 by Stephen
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I am considering starting a weekly conference call with anyone interested on chatting about productivity practices and principles. I am thinking that this could be fun and educational, a way for the readers to connect with each other and share their problems and their solutions.
