Your work should be an extended hobby.
Richard Saul Wurman – Writer and Thinker
Entrepreneurship, ‘doing it your way’, is in. The startup dream is alive and well as attested by many who want to immigrate to the U.S. A new meritocracy is found inside and outside companies. You’re rewarded for your ideas, initiative, perseverance, performance, and results. Failure is tolerated as long as it’s part of the Work Lesson Earned. Organizational disruptors are seen as future leaders. Small business entrepreneurs are seen as job-creators, adders of value, creators, and business icons.
What’s the #1 tip for making it big in project, gig, or startup work? I like Wurman’s above quote. If you like project work and it’s what drives you, you’ll do great.
The second huge question is: what should you do if you can’t monetize an extended hobby? The internet has created many new opportunities where a person can leverage a business model and scale quickly. Millennial VUCANs are more inclined to take risks and challenge existing work and business paradigms.
What’s great about disruption is that lots of new and nichey opportunities are created. Your Plan B may be to: Fill a need. Scratch an itch. Reduce the pain. Answer a tough question. Eliminate critical risks. Do simple what’s hard. Make something cheaper, faster, of better.
Schumacher about 30 years ago wrote a simple and paradigm-busting book called Small is Beautiful. This was a breakthrough book when the business world was thinking big is better. Today, small means entrepreneurial, startup, paradigm busting, vibrant, lean, agile, customer-driven, free, sustainable and profitable. Big, slow, hindering, plodding, and corporate are dead.
VUCAN work rules have also changed. VUCANs can work at home or Starbuckies. VUCANs are blending work and family. They have a side-hustle that can become full time work.
Work Lesson Earned: I’m a huge believer on making my way as a small business owner and being the master of my destiny. Family-engaged, DIY, and small are the new work model for those who want to control their work futures, do good, have a balanced work-life. Look at the many big companies who are struggling mightily to shed their legacy systems, processes, and culture to be like a startup.