February 26, 2022

A Tip for Job Search: Gold Rush Skills

 If you need to make some money very quickly, what would you do? Your answer points to the kind of problems you can solve. They give you some measure of confidence and hope.


Exercise: Gold Rush

TO FIND A GOLD RUSH, DON'T THINK DIFFERENT, THINK BORING

A lot of people get stuck in the search for a "big idea." But as you saw in Chapter 5, you don't necessarily need a big idea to make big profits. You need a helpful idea. Consider the guy who invented the cupholder. Granted, it's not as sexy as making the latest smartphone model. But if you're driving along with a beverage, that cupholder sure comes in handy.

Consider as well some of the examples you've seen in this chapter. Harry Campbell, the ride-share guy, provided profitable tips to new drivers seeking to be more effective. Mike Hallatt founded Pirate Joe's in Canada to import specialty groceries that he knew there was a market for. Again, being helpful is the highest value.

These qualities are good signs of a potential gold rush:

  • A big, untapped market
  • A new technology or advancement that a lot of people don't know how to use or participate in
  • Confusion or uncertainty over how to participate in the new thing
  • Something people want but can't get ("illegal" groceries from across the border)
  • Something that is perceived as scarce or involves FOMO (the fear of missing out)

Remember, always strive to meet needs and solve problems. Also, when you find a possible gold rush, strike at once.

"BORN FOR THIS", page. 160


February 17, 2022

The Kind of Problems You Should Solve for Your job Search

 The kind of problems you should solve for your side-hustle, portfolios or brand.

Exercise: Solve Specific and Measurable Problems.

2. Solving specific, measurable problems is much better than attempting to create huge behavior change.

A friend of mine once spent six months putting together a huge set of resources for aspiring business owners. who were struggling with their marketing. When I saw the list of materials, I was impressed. "There's so much there!" I said. But that was actually a problem: there was too much there, which is probably why the initial response from her, audience was okay but not great. Instead of feeling inspired, people felt-overwhelmed.

My friend revised the course to focus on a more specific issue: helping business owners improve cash flow. This was better! She was much more successful with the revised offer directed at one specific problem.

3. To avoid getting off track, always ask, "Why should people care about this?"

This isn't a question you can overlook. Ultimately, your success in life and work depends on it ...

"BORN FOR THIS," The Answer In Your Inbox, page. 111



February 9, 2022

A Job Search Tip: Do the Work without Pay

 Show off your skills and contributions by doing some parts of the work but without taking any pay.

It takes some thinking and planning.


Exercise: Start Work in Secret

These are a few ground rules that will increase your chances of getting an interview and getting the job you want.

  1. Choose a project that is small and manageable and get to work. Companies want to know you are proactive, not desperate. For your own sanity, make sure that the project you take on demonstrates your skill and takes under five hours to complete.
  2. Ground the project in a hard skill. This is not the time to demonstrate your leadership abilities. This exercise works only if you ground the project in a hard skill that the company needs and that is related to the job the company is hiring for. Do you want to work as a marketing manager? Run one Facebook ad, and show the firm the different tests, results, and methods you used to optimize the traffic. If you want to work in human resources, choose an open position and send the firm a lead list of candidates that you sourced, with an explanation of how you chose them, explaining why you want to do this work in-house.
  3. Make sure you pick something you know you can do well. If you are leading with your work, you have to be good. This is not the time to practice learning something new. You will be judged based on what you produce, so make sure it is relevant and up to the company's standards.
  4. Send an e-mail to the CEO or a high-level employee telling what you did and that you are committed to working with the company. Adapt a version of the e-mail that will get you the job (184).
  5. Don't expect a response. Read the chapter on creating a job search spreadsheet (170). A company doesn't owe you a response no matter how much work you put in. The more preparation and actual work you put in, the easier it is to forget this fact and expect the company to hire you. ...

"5O WAYS TO GET A JOB", page.210


February 1, 2022

A Job Search Tip: Solving Problems

 Solving problems show that you care, that you have initiative and leadership.

Exercise: Solving problems is a short-cut!

Help Solve Problems

Anyone can drop a complaint into the metaphorical suggestion box, but the mark of a truly brilliant employee is coming up with solutions to those problems. Becoming a problem solver shows that you care --- not only about your own career, but also about the long-term health of the entire business. And don't sit back and wait for problems to find you; even if there aren't big crises staring you in the face, there's always something that could be done better or more efficiently, in every workplace.

Maybe in your role as a project manager, for example, you spend a huge portion of your day documenting what you did on each project, which is limiting your ability to make much progress on the project itself. And you know this doesn't only affect you; you've heard similar complaints from the rest of your team.

It would be easy to bring up the problem to your boss and wait for him or her to come up with a solution. But it would be a true sign of leadership to not only bring up the issue, but also present a solution --- like an idea for templates that would significantly cut down on the time you spend documenting each project. Better yet, offer to create those templates yourself if your manager likes the idea!

If you're the one who identifies workplace challenges and suggests a way to fix them, you won't only make your life easier; you'll prove to your boss that you're ready to solve the bigger and thornier problems that fall to a manager or leader.

"THE NEW RULES OF WORK", page. 302

So, what problems can you see to solve right now?


January 26, 2022

Stop "Job Search." Start "Work Search"

 If you can't sympathize and can't gain insights into others' problems and needs, your job search can be long and painful. Stop "Job Search." Start "Work Search". Here is how.


Exercise: Job Search Has Become Ineffective

Why Think Differently About Job Search?

Job search has become the most diabolical of systems. It's a system that looks fine on the outside; but from the inside, it is slowly killing souls, costing money and wasting time. Like a devil with a winning smile dressed up in a $2,000 suit with not a pointed horn in sight.

As anyone who's been through it already knows, when a person sits down at the computer and starts tossing resumes out into cyberspace, stands in line and fills out applications, pays people to fashion a resume that must surely be better because it's paid for --- most of the time, nothing happens.

Watch the terror-stricken eyes of a person reading job ads as she slowly realizes, "Wait! Nothing here describes me!"

Watch what happens when a recruiter lies about a job because their client just lied to them or could not express what they wanted in the first place.

Job search becomes a barren and cold place where people work really hard and nothing happens. But most of all, it's lonely. The kind of lonely uniquely and sharply felt while standing in a big crowd of people.

We have equated work search with job search. The result is an isolated, demoralizing, illogical path down that rabbit hole where all the unread old resumes go.

Where does the problem start?

Job Search vs. Work Search

We forget that work and jobs are not always the same. Simple point, right?

Not really. Often the two words are used interchangeably. As if the difference between the two words doesn't matter, and we're saying the same thing two different ways.

"Finding Work When There Are No Jobs", page. 15


January 18, 2022

A Job Search Tip: Better Than Networking

 Networking is shallow and self-centered. You can become an insider and reap richer fruits.


Exercise: Communitize

We'll say good-bye to what used to be called networking right now.

Simply by turning "community" into an action verb, you aren't just going to a network lunch and standing in the corner talking to competitors about how no one has jobs. You aren't following a script of conversation starters. You don't join every single online networking site, only to get bombarded by e-mails that don't apply to your search at all.

When you communitize, you become woven into the fabric of a community --- any community. Because communities have needs and needs are springboards to work.

The action in communitizing comes from being able to provide an answer to the question: if I were part of this community, what need could I fill?

When you communitize, you look for the needs of a community from the inside. Not from the outside like a networker. In the needs of a community as seen from an insider's perspective, you find clues to finding work. The Communitizing Principle stands on the shoulders of the groundbreaking work of Bob Beaudine's book, "The Power of Who."...

....................................

Communitize. It's a word we made up here, simply by turning community into a verb. Communitizing is not networking. It is mot going to a network lunch and standing in the corner talking to competitors about how no one has jobs. Networking all too often has a one-dimensional quality. "We are here to get jobs. That's it!"

In contrast, communitizing is multidimensional. As a member of a community, actively participating in the life of the community, your actions are multidimensional. You directly participate in working community challenges through to completion. You celebrate community joys. You interact with communities connected to your own. When one communitizes, one becomes woven into the fabric of a community --- any community. Communitize is an action verb.

COMMUNITIZE AND YOU'LL FIND NEEDS

The more embedded in a community you become, the more you see needs. As we've said, needs, not job postings on the Internet, are what prompts work. In this section, well explore more deeply how to find needs.

Want to find work when there are no jobs? Stop looking for the jobs! Look for the needs.

Often, needs start out as being abstract. More like ideas. Needs like safety, healing, power, communication, or organization. But the more work you do within a community --- the more you communitize --- the more down-to-earth and real the needs become.

You start to see community needs in terms of the concrete stuff of everyday life. That stuff we all need to touch, hold in our hands, hear, smell, and get done.

Working from the inside of the community to your fullest, you are in the absolute best position to find those needs and connect them to work for you. You are embedded in the community. You are communitizing.

"Finding Work When There Are No Jobs", page. 22, 83



January 11, 2022

A Job Search Tip: Uncovering Emotions

 Are you freaking out? You cannot will or wish your fears away. See your fears in multi-colors and in 3-D. And measure up to the heroes and idols you have been worshipping.

Exercise: Uncovering Emotions

We cannot always identify our emotions directly. Then we need to invite our on-conscious to participate!

In the early days of my career, I provided talking therapies to my clients. Most of my work was within what you'd traditionally think of as therapy, talking to people about how they felt and their experiences, and using psychological explanations, diagnoses, labels and cognitive models to support the work. And I still find these useful today. But I have realized there's another well of resources available to us in finding real, sustainable solutions for dealing with emotions. This is using the wisdom of your own body and mind, especially your imagination.

Over years of coaching and counselling conversations, I've found going beyond reason and rationality, tapping into the imagination, to be a powerful complement to traditional talking therapies. The imagination gives us little nuggets of wisdom that come in the form of images and stories about what is going on for us. They can add useful layers to our understanding, give us some clues about what is hiding inside. So as much as you want to 'fix' your feelings and transform immediately, sometimes giving a little bit of space to the imagination is useful.

Bringing images into play might take a little longer than using labels or words to try to see and describe your fear. But it is also much richer and offers us many more insights. It's the kind of 'seeing' that you add to bit by bit, the way a piece of art gets created, in layers. And I've found that slower change with these more vivid insights is better, the kind of change that lasts.

Below, I'm going to explain what using images looks like, and the stories in chapters 14 to 20 will bring it to life for you too. There is no work I do now that doesn't have this at the root of it.

You might associate your imagination with creating fear - the imagination running wild, an overactive imagination. Which might explain why it's been ignored or underused. But it's equally powerful as a way of understanding. As author Deepak Chopra wrote, 'The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.'


Fear is an energy, and if we try to use only words to articulate it, it can lose some of what we want to express, like pouring it into a jar that is too small: a lot of the meaning will run down the sides. The words we might choose often come from other people too, whereas images are more likely to be just your own.

When you use an image, it's vivid and comes from your soul. It lets you get a little closer to the experience of fear itself, nestled in your unconscious.

"Fear Less : How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself"


Unfair Hero-worship

More specifically, as entrepreneurs in the tech industry, believing in the tech genius is a death sentence to our dreams. By believing, we are dismissing ourselves. Every token of credit, every gesture of goodwill, and every unit of measurement that we transfer over to the tech genius is a transaction on a balance sheet. It's a credit on their side, but it's also a debit on our side.

In believing, we entrepreneurs seek the protagonist of our stories outside of ourselves. We are literally outsourcing our own founding myth. Instead of our hands on the clay, we motion for another to come in and perform a work of wonder. Instead of fiddling on the keys and working the melody out, trying every possible combination, we forge our very own Mozart letter. We eat a meal, take a walk, and wait around for a bolt from the blue to overtake us. We're waiting for Odin's fire to fall from the sky and entrance us with power. It's a farce -- a travesty. Why do we do this?

"Average Joe: Be the Silicon Valley Tech Genius," page.376

A Tip for Job Search: Gold Rush Skills

  If you need to make some money very quickly, what would you do? Your answer points to the kind of problems you can solve. They give you so...