Passion and Profession
I want to remind my friends, family and associates to pair your passion with a profession. If I’m putting money in anyone’s pocket for a service, product or cause, I want it to be my people first – my family, my friends, my tribe.
You want to put on your people, especially when you know people with talent, and trust me I know the most people with the most talent of anyone! BELIEVE ME, BELIEVE ME!
My message to my circles is don’t stop plugging your ideas and creations. Tell co-workers and strangers you have a Youtube channel or a website. Online, post from your business page every time you talk about your business. If you don’t have social media accounts for your business or hobby-that-should-be-a-business, why the hell not?! That’s free marketing. Advertisers are gladly paying FB, IG, Snapchat, so you can drop links and pics and vids all day on their dime. They pay, you gain. Social Media is literally the new word of mouth that will sell or promote your product for you – actually, let’s call it Word of Click. Sure, there are certain types of services where you might need your own web presence like a blog, photo hosting, vlogging, merchandising, etc., but I’m not getting deep into advertising here. My point is that putting yourself out there, open for business, shows that you put value in your work.
You Believe First
It’s crucial you understand that no one will value what you have to offer until you do – write that down. Promise. Put price tags on your work. Treat your time as a currency. If you ever wondered if something you do well can be profitable, the answer is yes.
Here’s the twist: Even if money comes and is enough for you to prosper, that’s not the reward! Money is a by-product. The reward is doing what you’re passionate about. And there’s nothing more attractive to an onlooker, listener, reader or buyer than passion. That’s the savory sauce that gets people’s feet in the door and what gets clicks and emails opened. People love to see you care about your thing.
The Three Levels of the Caring About Your Work
There are three conditions that apply to our view of the work we do for a living, and I’m listing them by the degree of compromise inherent in each – where the first requires the least amount of compromise and the third the greatest:
- You write the mission statement – Creating a job (or company) that makes your goals the priority
- You believe in the mission statement – Using your gifts to build on the goals of a person/company/cause you believe in
- You accept or don’t know the mission statement – Doing a job that serves someone else’s goals and doesn’t use your gifts
You’ll figure out where you land within these three. If at this moment the third condition applies to you, I hope it’s temporary. I hope you’re working on an exit strategy, because – for lack of a more eloquent term – THAT SUCKS. It causes stress and resentment that just linger there. It’s worth trying to set yourself up for getting more LIFE out of the work you do.
Cheerleading
The people in your circle like me that genuinely want to see you thrive, want to know what you’re good at. We want to know what you love to do. We want to know where your passion is so we can nudge, inspire, promote or hire you. Cause we’re here to see you crush it.
I want to see my people winning during the prime of their lives. For us working people, our professions play too big of a part in our one life to settle for jobs that don’t give anything back. If you’ve ever wondered if you would regret not going after the kind of work that fulfills you, the answer to that too is yes.
Do you for you. I’ll help.
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