How to Turn Your
Passion Into Your Everyday Dream Job
A system for
identifying your dream job. Figure out how to generate revenue from enhancing
your everyday life.
Gone are the days where young people strive for long-term job security with the same company for the majority of their professional
careers.
We want to not
only make a lot of money but enjoy what we do as well. We are willing to take
on the risk of unstable pay in exchange for following our dreams.
Unfortunately,
your dream job may not always be the best decision financially. Sometimes your
hobbies are best kept as projects in your spare time for fun (which is great!).
If you do want to try to turn your passion into a
full-time job, these tips can help you get started the
right way.
Improve Something You Already Do
A great place to start is with ideas that
improve your life. If you need help brainstorming ideas, start by writing down
all of your daily activities for a month. I'm talking about everything from
your first cup of coffee to the morning commute to responding to emails to
ordering lunch. Record everything.
You'll quickly pick up on a list recurring
trends and activities you want to enhance.
For example,
you may realize that you are fascinated by your daily commute experience, so you document it on Instagram. You might be unhappy with your
landlord situation, so you create a site to improve the rental experience.
The ideas will start flowing very quickly.
From this point, you need to dive deeper and
ask questions about how these tasks you do every day could be better.
Is there a niche no one has fully utilized
yet? Could you come up with a better experience for a service you already use
frequently?
After this, you should have a list of good
ideas. The next step is to focus on the most important part of any business.
Money.
Figuring Out Who To Sell To
Now you have your list of ideas, and you
are trying to figure out which makes the most sense to take to the next level.
For each idea, see if there is an existing
company that does something similar. Use this to get a quick sense of how much
people are already paying for the service.
My
startup, Due, started from the need to improve the process of freelancers getting
paid. We started with an invoicing solution and are currently growing our
payments solution for businesses.
The next step is where a lot of people
struggle. Gathering un-bias user feedback. A good way to go about this is to
base your decision on data or revenue. If people buy your product or signup to
be notified about when it's available, it will always mean more than convincing
someone how great your idea is.
Diving deep into customer needs will help you
stand out from others providing a similar service. Once you get data, talk with
users for an enhanced view of their needs. Just make sure you are not forcing
positive reviews.
Negative feedback is always more valuable
than positive feedback because it will teach you what your business needs to
scale.
How to Get Others on Board With Your Passion
When you're passionate about a hobby, don't
keep it to yourself. Share it as much as possible with others.
A blog or newsletter is an excellent way to
start sharing your thoughts right away. People who have similar interests
will want to learn more and will feed off of your excitement.
Katie Weber quit her day job in order to
focus on turning her feng shui hobby into a consulting business. Her first step
was to launch an e-mail newsletter, called the Red Lotus Letter: Feng Shui for
Wealth.
"People would forward my e-mails and I'd
get new sign-ups," Weber says. "And at meetings, I could offer free
content to anyone I met." Weber started with just 22 names in September
2001 and had since grown to more than 15,000 subscribers, along with earning
her $200,000 in 2012.
How to Stay Happy With What You Do
Your passion can quickly become a job that
you loathe after the daily tasks of running a business absorbs your initial
excitement. Thankfully, there are easy and convenient ways for you to stay
happy.
One of the first places to start is by hiring
other people to do the tasks that you can't stand. "It's easy for a
passion project to quickly turn into just another job if you are forced to
perform tasks you don't enjoy every day," says Griffin Thall.
He identified the chores that he enjoys
doing, and outsourced the rest. "It's about whether you want to learn all
the tech skills you need from scratch or hire an agency to help you." Your
business will greatly benefit by putting people into roles they will strive in
and enjoy on a daily basis.
BY CHALMERS BROWN
http://www.inc.com/chalmers-brown/how-to-turn-your-passion-into-your-everyday-dream-job.html?cid=em01016week28a
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