Live the Life You Were Meant to, Part 2: Be Your Own Boss

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This is the second installment in a series titled “5 Ways to Live the Life You Were Meant to”:

• Part 1: Get Motivated from Blog of Impossible Things
• Part 2: Be Your Own Boss from yours truly
• Part 3: Live the Dream from Lifestyle Ignition
• Part 4: Build Your Own Tribe from Heroic Destiny
• Part 5: Find the Company that Lets You be You from Skool of Life

NOTE: If you are reading this immediately after it has been posted, parts 3-5 will not be live yet. They will go live within the next 2 days. Please refer back here for links or go to those blogs & subscribe to be notified when their posts go live.

One of the most difficult problems any of us deal with when wishing we had a different job, we could change our lives, take up a new business idea, or just dreaming of something better is that we often feel we lack something necessary to change. One of the most crippling of those is that many of us need someone to tell us what to do. We need that parent, boss, overseer, government, etc that has lorded over many of our decisions and actions all of our lives.

“My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said get a job. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married. I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.” Tyler Durden, Fight Club

If you’ve ever listened to a famous entrepreneur (think Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, etc), they frequently say that they didn’t really know what they were doing when they started out. They just knew that they had a need to do something, so they started working and figured out along the way what was right and wrong, what needed to be tweaked, and what had to be completely thrown away or added in.

You can, and should, be the same. You can take charge, be your own boss, and have the power to grab opportunities.

If you’ve been dreaming of something bigger and better, you don’t have to know exactly how you’re going to get there. You just have to have some idea of your goal.

Maybe, you want a job with more responsibility, more pay, and more prestige. You don’t need to wait for someone to kick you in the butt and tell you that you have to look for a different job. You can take control of your situation and have the power to say yes or no to what comes along.

If I were starting out with that goal today, I would follow these steps:

• Determine what field I want to be in. For me, I would stay in the same field, marketing, but I might be hoping to move up faster.
• Audit my online footprint to determine if there is anything out there that could stand in the way of me reaching my goal: embarrassing pictures, bad stories, etc.
• Remove anything that needs to be. If you’re really committed to your goal, keep in mind that any one of your connections could copy anything you keep “private” and make it public somewhere else. Rule of thumb: If it’s online, it’s public.
• If you don’t have control over some of this (a bad story someone wrote about you, pictures on someone’s blog, etc), crowd them out of search results by creating high-value content that will show up in the search results above this other bad content. This is part of the next few steps.
• Polish all of your online profiles: Linkedin, Facebook, Google Profile, Twitter, and more. Engage a copy writer on elance if you need compelling descriptions and bios of yourself, and get a few professional headshots if you can’t do them at home.
• Connect to anyone and everyone you can through Linkedin, write meaningful recommendations for those you can, and ask for substantive recommendations from people who can give them to you. Focus on giving and getting recommendations that are relevant to where you want to go, not where you’ve been.
• Use Technorati, Google, & Alltop to find the top blogs in your vertical. Subscribe to them in Google Reader. When you have something valuable to add to them, leave a comment, bookmark it in Delicious, and return back every other day or so to see how the conversation develops. You can thank David Crandall for that little idea. This begins to get your name in front of people in your space.
• Use Twitter’s Find People, Wefollow, and other search services to find similar people on Twitter, follow them, pay attention to what they say and care about, and respond appropriately. Remember, talk about what you have in common and what is important to them…not what is important to you.
• Go to WordPress.com, get yourself a free blog, post your polished description/bio on the about page, put up links to where people can find more about you or contact you, and begin blogging on your subject. Many beginning bloggers struggle with ideas, so take a page from Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion, & write down 50 questions that customers/clients ask about all of the drawbacks to what you sell or offer. Blog about those. This will differentiate you from many other people because customers and clients don’t want you to tell them that your product works for everyone. They want to know IF it will work for them, and they want to be able to make that decision themselves. Over time, this will transform you into a thought leader in your vertical.
• Read, listen, and work your butt off. Don’t waste time. Get yourself more of it by being efficient. Subscribe to podcasts. Listen to these when you’re commuting and exercising. Write responses to their subject matter on your blog. Read books, PDFs, ebooks, etc and write a review or synopsis of every one for your blog. Go to meetups, research the people that will be there, and engage them in a mutually beneficial conversation. Stop going though if the right people aren’t there. Finally, take internships and volunteer gigs that improve your knowledge and maybe even add skills and experiences to your resume.

This does not have to be threatening to your current employers.

In fact, many of them would probably like you to be improving your knowledge and skill set as long as you can make a case for spending time on it. If you feel comfortable, you can even ask them to endorse your actions and show their support.

If you undertake this course of action, you have become your own boss.

You’ve taken the reigns and begin to lead yourself where you want to go rather than waiting for someone to tell you where you have to go. Improving your knowledge, skill set, and prominence within your field gives you the power to say yes or no to opportunities rather than just taking what comes along. Additionally, by publicly demonstrating on other blogs, your blog, in person, etc that you are highly valuable, more opportunities begin to come your way, which allows you to have a choice about how to get to that goal you’d been dreaming about in the first place.

After all, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to really get ahead, reach that dream goal, and achieve everything you want if you don’t learn how to be your own boss.

This is Part 2 of a 5 part series, please don’t forget to take a look at the rest of the series (links above).