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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Commitment

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?

Women MBAs Should Consider Hiring a Cook. Or a Maid. Maybe Even a Nanny.

By Monica O'Brien on April 1st in Careers 3 comments

So everyone I know is going to read the article about higher divorce rates for female MBA’s (Hat Tip: Brazen Careerist) sometime this week and I feel obligated to write about it, even though the numbers in the article will bother me until the study itself is published. Here’s an overview of the study’s claims:

  • Education Level for Females – Divorced or Separated
    • 12% MBAs (business)
    • 10% JDs (law)
    • 9% medical degrees
    • 11% only bachelor’s degrees
  • Education Level for Males – Divorced or Separated
    • 5% MBAs
    • 7% JDs
    • 5.1% medical degrees
    • only bachelor’s degrees not given

The first question I have is the statistical significance between women MBA divorcees (12%) and women w/only undergrad divorcees (11%). The article doesn’t list the details of the study, but there is a range of error for both these percentages due to the sample population. If that value is 1% or more for either (say women MBA divorcees are actually in the range of 10-12%), then comparing the two is moot. What makes these statistics more suspect is that both law and med. female graduates have a lower divorce rate than women with only undergrad degrees.

My second issue is that the author doesn’t compare these stats to all women, and studies show that women with any higher ed. degree are less likely to get divorced than those without.

So if there isn’t much of a difference between undergrad vs. grad degrees, and there is still a huge difference between no degree and any higher ed. degree, then getting a graduate degree is still a fine idea for a woman. Between these two issues, it’s doubtful that getting an MBA as a woman is an automatic marriage death sentence. My gut tells me it has little statistical significance actually; but I guess we’ll see when the study is published.

And yes, I have a third issue. For MBAs, the author fails to mention that the actual number of women and men getting divorced is about the same. With roughly 30% of MBA candidates as women, the number of MBA divorcees is about 7% total, with half men and half women. What’s interesting is in law and med programs, women make up roughly 45-50% of the population, so the disparity is much clearer there; though the gap between women and men is much smaller than with MBA graduates.

Despite disliking the way the study is portrayed, I do think there is some truth to the conclusions the author presented; namely that highly successful women are attracted to similarly successful men but might be better matched with men who have less stressful careers and thus more time to support a high-earning spouse.

This is not representative of all professional “high-earning” women, but every female MBA I know falls into one of two categories: “single” or “serious relationship with highly successful man.” My friends date dentists, lawyers, their fellow MBA candidates, or PhD candidates from other fields. My own husband is going to be an eye doctor.

But this partnership is difficult when trying to run a household, even without kids. My husband and I know we’re being pulled in different directions trying to balance two careers and the possibility of a family in the distant future; so we recently decided we each need to compromise on one thing until we finally meet somewhere in the middle. The first thing I asked of him was that he support my career decisions and trust me to make good financial choices while still following my entrepreneur dreams.

He asked that I cook at least once a week. I’m not joking. Way to waste your three wishes Aladdin.

So that’s the (impossible?) challenge for a woman who wants her dream career: conquer the world, but be home in time to start dinner. Because most men still just want wives who will take care of them the same way their mothers did (Hat Tip: Art of Manliness). And really, I can’t completely blame them, because I sometimes get irritated that I’m the sole breadwinner. It goes both ways.

Will this compromise work for us, or other couples who both want high-powered careers? I have no idea. But when posed the question: do you need an extremely supportive spouse to have a high-powered career as a woman? My answer is a resounding hell yes. I guess the article got something right in the end.

Reaching Your Goals – All It Takes is a One-Time Commitment

By Monica O'Brien on December 31st in Goals 7 comments

Image Source: SF Buckaroo via FlickR

As 2008 approaches, people around the world are coming up with new year’s resolutions.  Quite frankly, a resolution is a resolve to meet a objective, so why don’t we come up with goals instead?  Maybe then, we might actually keep them.

Why We Fail To Reach Our Goals

There are a few problems with most of our goals, especially those that ring in the new year:

  • they require a colossal amount of commitment that we don’t recognize upfront
  • they are not SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely)
  • we often have an entire year to complete them, leading to procrastination
  • we do not outline plans to complete them
  • we get discouraged when we don’t see instant results
  • we do not choose goals that we have the passion to achieve

Here’s an example:  My goal for 2008 is to lose 20 pounds by June.

Okay.  At first this seems like a great goal.  This goal is attainable (through dieting and exercise), measurable (20 lbs), realistic (losing about one pound per week), and timely (June 1st), so it has some elements of a SMART goal.  To lose one pound per week we can cut 250 calories from our diet per day and walk 30 minutes per day, so we know the time commitment and have a plan.  So why do we make this same resolution every year and never reach our goal?

Choosing A Good Goal

We fool ourselves into thinking we’ve created a good goal, but the truth is we usually create bad goals.  So here is how to stop creating bad goals that will never be reached, and start creating good goals.

Step #1 – Start dreaming.  If your life were exactly what you wanted, what would it be like?  Where would you live?  How much money would you make?  What would you look like?  Who would you spend your time with?  What would your job be?  How would you spend your day?  You need to figure out what you truly desire.  Go crazy.  Dream the most ridiculous things.  Then write them down so you can move on to…

Step #2 – Stop dreaming.  Look at your list of crazy goals.  Choose one or two that would make you extremely happy to achieve.  Now that you have your focus goal(s), go to…

Step #3 – Think of things you could realistically do this year (or whatever time frame you choose) that would bring you closer to reaching your chosen goals.  These are your tasks.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say I want to live in Italy, make $200,000 a year, be 120 pounds, be married, have 3 best girlfriends who truly understand me, design my own clothing line, and spend my time schmoozing with celebrities, designers, artists, fashion editors, and stylists.

Now I’m going to choose “design my own clothing line” as my focus goal.  What could I accomplish this year to get me closer to that goal?

Hmm.  I don’t actually know how to sew.  So let’s make “learning to sew” my goal.

Breaking Down Each Goal

Great.  You have a goal or set of goals.  Now it’s time to break each goal down into different subgoals.  When you are finished, each subgoal becomes a new goal and for each new goal you need to perform a litmus test, which will be explained in further detail in a minute.  For the litmus test you ask yourself, does this goal require any more than a one-time commitment?  If it does, you must break the goal into more subgoals.  Once you feel all of your subgoals pass the litmus test, sort them chronologically and start adding realistic dates.

The One-Time Commitment

What is a one-time commitment?  Anything that requires you to take action only once.  Continuing with my example, “practice sewing every day this year for 30 minutes” is not a one-time commitment.  “Purchase the book Sewing For Dummies and read to completion by Jan. 12th” is a one-time commitment.  Do you see the difference?  Which are you more likely to complete?  The goal that requires you to commit 365 times or the goal that requires you to commit once? 

Why Does This Work?

When we break down our goals using the method described above, they get very SMART and, because of the short deadlines that naturally come about, we see results instantly.  The commitment for each smaller goal is very little, and we can more accurately measure how much time we have to give to this goal.  We essentially create a project timeline that is manageable in small chucks.

Goal-Making Is Serious Business

This sounds like a lot of work, and that’s because it is a lot of work.  If you are willing to do the work, however, you are more likely to actually reach your goals this years.  So why not make a one-time commitment to spend an hour trying this exercise for yourself?  Remember, you don’t need a new year to start reaching your goals… there’s no time like the present.

What do you think of this exercise?  Will it be helpful as you continue to make goals, in the new year and beyond?  Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.  It might be your idea that sparks a conversation!