Monica O'Brien is the author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. The book is a step-by-step guide for small and mid-sized businesses that want to find more customers effectively. Get the book:

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How to Find Passion in Your Career

By Monica O'Brien on October 13th in Uncategorized 6 comments

60 Days to Entrepreneurial FreedomShould you be an entrepreneur? In most instances, people mistake becoming an entrepreneur for finding what they are passionate about. The two are sometimes related, but they are different concepts. Finding your passion could mean you are happy working for other people, while entrepreneurship is about building a company, plain and simple.

You don’t have to build a company to find your passion. I repeat, you don’t have to build a company to find your passion. Here is how to find your passion, whether you want to be an entrepreneur or not:

Look to your childhood

I spent most of my free time as a child with my nose in a book. I also spent countless hours documenting my life (yeah, not a good read from the perspective of an 10 year old) and writing short stories. In fact, my dad recently sent me a copy of a published short story I wrote when I was 8. It’s awful. But it reminded me that I have always been passionate about reading and writing. Always. So passionate about writing that when people ask me how I keep writing on my blog, or how I can write a book, I have no advice, because I always write.

You are probably passionate about many things, but you will find your strengths by remembering what inspired you when you were young. What did you care about then? Ask your parents or siblings if you are stuck.

Reexamine your hobbies

One of the best sources for finding your passion is stuff you already do for free. And don’t stop at things you do – also keep in mind subjects you are constantly reading about, ideas you’ve dabbled with on a blog, and magazines you are subscribed to. But be careful – sometimes turning a hobby into a job doesn’t work out.

Find the good in your current job

Compartmentalize your job. Even if you hate your current job, there must be at least one thing you like about it. Maybe it’s something unrelated, like you work with your friends, or it’s only 15 minutes away, or you get free bagels and orange juice for breakfast – but that’s still something you should know about yourself.

When I completed my analysis, I learned that I love to be near home. I think about the jobs I’ve quit and it was mostly due to the commute. So now I know to never take a job unless I plan to move within 15 minutes of it.

Do this with all your jobs, and look for patterns. You could find some skill set that you’ve overlooked. At the least, you will better understand your priorities in life.

Volunteer

You can find your passion by process of elimination. So volunteer whenever you can – for unusual projects at your current job, with a local organization or charity, at your church, wherever. Internships and apprenticeships, and shadowing are also good ways to eliminate options.

Throw out the BS

It’s so easy to tell yourself you are not good enough to do something as a career. Question those negative thoughts. Why can’t you? I recently watched something on TV where this guy who weighed over 600 pounds lost all his weight and became a fitness trainer. Can you imagine?

Pump yourself up, do whatever you need to do to boost your self-esteem, and above all, don’t rule anything out because you don’t have the education, the skills, the know-how, the degree, the talent, or the look. Skills can be learned, attitude can’t; so having the right attitude probably counts more in whatever field you want to enter.

This is not to say you should never stop pursuing an impossible dream, but don’t rule it out before you even begin.

Research

Learn about careers you think you could be interested in. Ask around. Sometimes your friends can help you see yourself differently – the people close to you may see a great career path that you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.

Take an assessment

I don’t have all the answers for you. It’s impossible for me or anyone else to look into a crystal ball and tell you exactly what your passion is. But luckily, there are a few people I can recommend who can also help you find your passion. Two passion tests I really love are:

Find Your Career Path by JT O’Donnell


Find Your Career Path is about getting a career and work environment that is compatable with your strengths. The workbook is divided into four sections using the G.L.O.W. Method:

Part I: Gaining Perspective – a series of unique personality assessments to give you a better perspective of your strengths
Part II: Luminating Your Goal – a guide to determining a best fit career and workplace environment
Part III: Owning Your Actions – information on creating your resume, developing a career story, and taking the steps necessary to get your dream job
Part IV: Working It Daily – a worksheet that will help you stay committed to reaching your goals

Get the book here. Or you can learn how this book literally changed my life (umm, yeah, I don’t say that often, so you know I mean it) by reading my entire review.

Passion + Profits Test by Jonathan Mead

ppt-previewI love this test. Jonathan first takes you through what getting paid to exist means in a video presentation. Then he has you brainstorm potential passion businesses, and gives you a 25 question quiz to evaluate the validity of your potential business.

Get the Passion + Profits Test here (short email sign-up required).

Start up your business today

By Monica O'Brien on October 3rd in Uncategorized 7 comments

60 Days to Entrepreneurial FreedomSo you want to become an entrepreneur. But where do you start? You don’t have a big idea that’s going to change the world, you don’t have partners to found your company with, and you don’t know how to even start pitching for funding.

Well, the truth is only 4% of small businesses are true start-ups that require angel or VC funding. In fact, if you want to even think about funding, you should know that investors expect a 10x return on investment. So unless you are building a disruptive technology, you don’t need to pitch for funding.

Sidenote: Here is a test to see whether you are building a disruptive technology:

  • Is your product a radical new way of doing something that people already do?
  • Does your product suck compared to current alternatives? If you improved the product enough, would people choose it over the current alternatives?
  • Does your product provide something that will democratize the current method of doing something (ie: will it provide free or easy access to something that used to be out of many people’s price range?)
  • Can your product bring death to an entire company or industry, the way cell phones brought death to landlines, or the way digital photography brought death to Kodak, or the way computers brought death to typewriters, or the way guns brought death to warrior swords?

If you didn’t answer yes to these questions, then you are probably not eligible for angel or VC funding. Keep reading.

The second way to get funding is through loans – from the bank, from your friends and family, or from your credit cards/home equity/personal savings. While you don’t pay back funding, you do pay back loans, if you can even qualify for them in the first place – which is getting more difficult every day.

This is all dismal news for aspiring entrepreneurs. And it makes it even harder to know where to begin building a new company.

The answer is that you start your company by yourself, part-time.

While there 60 million people who work for small businesses in the US (businesses with 500 employees or less), at least 30% of the group is working for a business with only one employee.

The chance of starting your huge business as a freelancer or consultant, then building your business one additional employee at a time, is quite high. In fact, it’s the way almost every business is built (aside from the start-ups, who artificially inflate their cash flow to gain market share quickly, because they are building disruptive technology).

So even if you have a full-time job right now, you can venture into entrepreneurship part-time, until you have enough steady business to match the suggested 50% of current income. The internet makes it easier than ever before.

Action Item #1: Set aside time for your new business.

If you are working 40+ hours a week, you already know that your time is valuable. How much can you afford to put towards your dream business? For me, it helps to think in daily terms, because then I budget enough hours to make progress during the week.

Action Item #2: Turn your business dream into a part-time, freelance, or consulting job.

Let’s say you want to open a coffee shop. Well, you can’t exactly do that part-time, single-handedly. What you can do is start a coffee blog. You can open an e-commerce site and sell imported coffee grounds online. You can decorate coffee shops, or teach coffee shops how to use social media. You can invent new drinks and sell the recipes to local coffee shops. Or you could just work part-time at a coffee shop, to gain the experience.

Whatever you want to do, take one step towards doing it today. There’s no excuse.

Action Item #3: Create your transition plan.

At some point, you will have to make the leap from your coffee blog to your coffee shop. In some cases, you will take many jumps before you even get into a position to leap. But once you have a goal in mind, you can create a timeline – transition plan to get there. Consider these questions:

  • What is your unique selling proposition?
  • How much do you need to start your company?
  • How long could your company survive without revenue?
  • What is the breakeven point for your company?
  • How are you going to fund your company?
  • How much do you need to be saving (personally) to make the leap?
  • When can you expand? How will you expand?

This is just a scratch of the information you may need to start a business. What do you want to know more about?

What are you looking at?

By Monica O'Brien on July 10th in Uncategorized 2 comments
The newest trend in social media: Fortune 500 PR disasters via YouTube. Dominos had one back in April when their employees contaminated food for fun, and now United Airlines is getting called out via singing sensation for mishandling luggage. Companies, you don't control your brand message anymore, so pay attention to where your camera is pointed. The joke is on you.

The newest trend in social media: Fortune 500 PR disasters via YouTube. Dominos had one back in April when their employees contaminated food for fun, and now United Airlines is getting called out via singing sensation for mishandling luggage. Companies, you don't control your brand message anymore, so pay attention to where your camera is pointed. The joke is on you.

Image from nolifebeforecoffee on Flickr

The risky angle

By Monica O'Brien on July 9th in Uncategorized 16 comments
How many times has the Eiffel tower been photographed? There are millions of straight-on images of this structure, complete with smiling faces of tourists at the base. In social media, companies are content with playing it safe and taking the traditional shots; but it’s the risky angles that create the most buzz.

How many times has the Eiffel Tower been photographed? There are millions of straight-on images of this structure, complete with smiling faces of tourists at the base. In social media, companies seem content with playing it safe and taking the traditional shots; but it’s the risky angles that create the most buzz.

Image from paveita on Flickr

Making Connections between Social Media, Home Ownership, Job-Hunting, and the Power of Telling Good Stories

By Monica O'Brien on January 17th in Uncategorized 12 comments

First… Announcing my new Making Connections series

Making Connections is a new series that I will write somewhat regularly to share my favorite links from the past week or two. (Notice the ambiguity there. I’d like to make this series a weekly ritual if it’s popular, but we’ll see what happens. If you like this series, you should leave a comment to let me know.)

The goal is to talk about small ideas based on what I’m reading on the web. Many of these ideas are not yet big enough to be a blog posts themselves, though I may elaborate on some of them in a blog post as my opinion forms. My hope is to give people some inspiration for their own blogs by pointing to interesting concepts. Please feel free to use any of these mini-blogs to build upon in a post.

The bonus of Making Connections is that I get to link out to a lot of people who are sharing insightful ideas. If you’d like your blog posts to be considered for this series, send your feed url to m[at]twentyset.com. I will add you to my feed reader and keep track of your ideas, and post the best ones to my twitter account and blog.

And to follow this series, subscribe to my feed so you can read my Making Connections series for free as soon as it’s available. My post picks are also available in the sidebar of my blog and sporadically on Twitter (follow me @monicaobrien).

Here we go!

News Flash: Young Professionals With No Experience Are Screwed.

MSNBC reported that Gen Y unemployment rates are the highest right now, at 9.6% compared to the average 7% (Further reading here).

Here’s what I think: first, that a lot of young people might have graduated in December into a horrible economy. Second, that Gen Y job hunters are holding out for the right opportunity, which is actually very smart, because taking a job you hate (or end up hating because you didn’t investigate well) will have you jobless again within six months. Finally, I think some young professionals aren’t casting their nets wide enough, aren’t sending out killer resumes, aren’t willing to concede on pay, and aren’t preparing carefully for interviews. The job hunt is difficult for everyone right now, but older generations are seasoned professionals who know how to do the job hunt better than millennials.

Above all, keep a positive attitude to end your job hunt faster! It helps if you read about how companies are struggling to recruit millennials still.

Gen Y Might Be Doomed. But Please Buy a Home.

Generation Y is possibly the kindest, most “Good Samaritan,” do-gooder generation that has ever lived. Not only are we going to fix the workplace and fix politics, but we are also going to fix the real estate market. Yeesss!

All jokes aside, housing prices are pretty low right now. If you have the money and are fairly confident you won’t get laid off, it’s a good time to get rid of your rent and start investing in your future. I bought my condo in 2007 and 1.5 years later it is valued at $40,000 over what I paid, even with the recession. Career Girls tells you how to make home ownership happen for you.

The Social Media Career Outlook

Despite marketing executives complaining about Web 2.0 overkill, Mashable announces that social media marketing is still the #1 growth area in online marketing. Of course, they’re right, but the caveat is companies probably aren’t looking for expensive consultants to teach them how to get the job done.

The right way to make money in social media during a recession is to write an e-book (or 10). Small business owners want a cheap form of How-To that can get them up and going quickly while also allowing them to bootstrap.

Then again, brands might simply put their own employees to work as evangelists for the company’s products. Sure, but I still don’t think companies will cut all social media hiring. Social media will go main stream in companies quickly in 2009; and eventually, it will be a required skill you must have as a marketing professional.

Get a Job From Your Blog, It’s All the Rage this Season

It turns out even recessions are a time for ideas to go in and out of fashion. Something that is tre en vogue right now is using social media to get your next job. Aside from the obvious, that most of the jobs you can get through social media are for web professionals, freelance writers/artists, and developers anyway, it’s really bad advice for anyone who has just lost his job and doesn’t have a blog already.

Just goes to show, you need to put your network in place before you get laid off. Here’s a guide if you’re ready to get started now. If you are already into social media, LinkedIn is a great place to find referrals!

Some People Just Tell Good Stories

There are a few links that I want to include that don’t fit with anything else at first glance. Nisha Chittal writes about what it means to be an American and Steve Errey writes about dating troubles. Both of these posts are fantastic and I would recommend them to anyone.

But you know what else? Both links have everything to do with social media and job-hunting, because people who tell good stories succeed at both.

So if you are struggling, use these two posts to figure out your story both online and offline – it is bound to bring you success.

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