Consider that virtually every career expert and entrepreneur says you must have passion for your work in order to be self-directed. This means your dream work probably started as a hobby at some point, or might have been something you studied in school. Whatever this activity is, it stimulated you to engage in it with little or no regard for immediate return on your investment. This is what builds passion for your work and, not incidentally, notifies those close to you that you're making a significant personal investment in your subject.
Through this process, you acquire specialized knowledge that may prompt others in your field to seek your advice, thus the consulting route.
Additional skills in management, plus access to resources, might take you another step ahead toward buying a business. An option along the same lines, also requiring management and organizational skills, is to purchase a franchise.
Yet another notch up in creativity, plus management abilities, is starting your own business. And at the top of the heap is creating a business in which your personal creativity and charisma are the driving forces.
Discipline, but Freedom
There are two great lessons in understanding this progression:
1. A fantastic career and business idea is expansive in nature; the more you think about it, the grander it gets. Yet it can best be realized one step at a time. We must muster the discipline to reduce the idea to its essential elements of activity, in order. That's when the action starts: when we can see the first step.
"Every business I've ever started (there have been several) has started out of my house," says Gary Grappo. "And I've never put more than about $200 into a new venture." Here's an example: When Gary was closing down his job-fair business in Miami during the 1991 recession, he was scrambling for income. Discussing this one night with a friend visiting his house (again) for supper, the friend said, "You know, Gary, you're really a great cook, and I love eating here instead of cooking for myself! You could make money doing this for somebody."
Gary's pilot light went on; in fact, the burners were lit. He printed up a flyer billing himself as a private chef, took it to the swankiest apartment buildings in Miami and presented it to doormen, offering a $50 commission for every dinner party he could do as a result of the doormen's referrals. Gary grossed $3000 the first month and kept it up for six months until his next, more substantial opportunity arose.
2. You don't have to figure it out all at once. This sounds contradictory to the first lesson, but it's actually a happy byproduct of it. Because you're taking only one step, you don't have to figure out exactly where all the other steps are. You might have a few ideas about them, but it won't be too late for a mid-step correction.
This second lesson also is often expressed as, "Getting in motion is the main thing. It's much easier to alter the course of a moving object than to get one off dead center."
Jim Callihan, a self-employed marketing consultant in Peterborough, New Hampshire, puts it this way, "I don't care what you do, just do something. Don't sit back and worry about it. Just put out energy and when you put out energy, something comes back."
In my own experience, realizing that I didn't have to figure it out all at once was a revelation-and a huge relief. I'd spent some time trying to decide what things I would try if I went on my own. There were lots of ideas; someone suggested I develop a mini-business plan for each one to help select the best opportunities. But before I got too far in that process, a couple of the opportunities came looking for me, and I thought, "Well, it won't cost me anything to try these and see how I like them. Then I'll revise my long-range plan accordingly." I didn't have to figure it out all at once! This was the responsible thing to do: not figure it all out.
It carried over into my start-up phase: I didn't need every piece of state-of-the-art computer equipment immediately, just the basics. I could wait for a good deal on the right chair for my office. I decided to delay shopping for health insurance right away, taking advantage of my previous employer's obligation to continue me at its group rate. Just because I'm in business for myself doesn't mean I have to sign in blood a detailed plan of activities for years to come. In fact, the more I limit the outlay, the greater the flexibility. Paul Hawken says, "The self-owned, self-operated business is the free-est life in the world."
