2DO Before I Die

Juggling 'Working Life' with Work and Life

I started this “Working Life” column about 10 weeks ago, as a way to focus my mind about work and the process of trying to earn money doing what I love - a goal that crops up on a lot of people’s 2DO lists. Now I’m going to have to take a break from writing about work because ironically (in the Alanis Morissette sense) I suddenly have too much work to do.

My commitment to turning my passions into a career means that I often have to toil for little or no payment whilst I build up my CV and make contacts, but my commitment to living a comfortable life - and my choice to live in one of the world’s most expensive cities - London - means that I also have several other jobs to pay the bills. There’s quite a bit of juggling that goes on.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. I’d rather be struggling towards a dream than wasting away in a job that I hate or simply tolerate. It’s a real luxury to have the freedom to pursue what I want in life.

But if I’m undertaking odd jobs for money and doing the work I love for free, then I haven’t really got the balance right yet. The time has come for me to focus on actually making money from my talents and loves. That means that I need to take a step back from everything that doesn’t contribute directly to my goal. Perhaps with a few less balls in the air, I’ll finally be able to make my dreams a reality – and cross another item off my 2DO list.

So you’ll be seeing less of me on the blog for a while, but I’ll keep you posted with any major developments (or any work-related musings that need to be shared). In the meantime, best of luck with your own working life.

PS The image is from the website of the University of Oxford’s Juggling Club, which features a handy juggling tutorial.

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Thanks Gigi for all of your posts these past weeks. It's been great to have you on the blog again (see Gigi's previous column, 'Conquer My Fear of Nudity') and we look forward to your updates in the future. In the meantime, best of luck with work and life. One of these days, we must meet in person! Thanks again Gigi, all the best, Mike and Chris

TOMORROW: More adventures in the Peace Corps from guest blogger Stoney Schaffer...For free 2DO Before I Die blog updates - choose from either daily or weekly alerts sent directly to your email - please click here to subscribe.

Gigi's Recommended Reading - Tackling Procrastination

I'm in the middle of a great book called Make Your Creative Dreams Real, written and designed by 'Sark'. I bought if for the subtitle – “A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day.”

I’ve been accused of being a perfectionist, and I would certainly rather sleep all day; I'm also one of the world's best procrastinators (or should that be worst?).  So this is the perfect read for someone like me.  To tell you the truth, I procrastinated buying this book, and once I finally got it, I even procrastinated reading it.

But I eventually got around to cracking the spine, and I'm very glad I did.  Inside is a guide for anyone who harbours creative goals but doesn't know how to bring them to fruition. It contains a plan for fleshing out your dreams, identifying obstacles and strengths, developing a support network, surviving setbacks and handling and maintaining success once you’ve found it.  There are also inspiring stories from those who have made their goals a reality, and a heap of resources to keep you striving forward. (continues)

Weird and Wonderful Career Ideas

Would you like to be a pyrotechnician, a dental detective or maybe even an underwater bounty hunter? Or perhaps you’ve an interest in beekeeping, painting conservation or ostrich farming? Lucky for you, there is now a place you can go for advice on all these strange pursuits.

The BBC’s Follow Your Dream site features a great A to Z of unique career ideas complete with video clips of professionals in action. Each job comes with tips on how to get started, a list of necessary qualities and qualifications, trivia on the profession and a host of useful links.

For the media-minded, there are separate sections for careers in television and music. So have a look at those if you want the low-down on becoming a make-up artist, animator, tour promoter, record producer or journalist.

Or if you’re happy with your current job but want to pursue bizarre hobbies in your spare time, there’s a section featuring unusual pastimes like building rockets, using a metal detector or racing banger cars.

The Follow Your Dream site is packed with info but the layout can be a bit confusing. So be sure to click on How to get the most out of this site in the bottom right-hand corner of the homepage for a quick explanation.

PS If you’ve got an unusual career, I’d love to hear about it. So please drop a comment below to let me know what you do and how you got started.

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For alerts to Gigi's future posts, and our other guest writers, please click the following link for free updates sent direct to your email.

TOMORROW: More 'Postcards from the Peace Corps' from Stoney Schaffer in Thailand....

Perks Of The Job

If you’re looking for career satisfaction, sometimes where you work is as important as what you do. And I’m not just talking about your commuting distance.

Imagine getting to a meeting by swooping down a slide rather than taking the stairs. I know that would make my day. The lucky people who work for Red Bull can do just that - on the shiny carbon slide at their London headquarters. Their conference tables also double as ping pong courts. Clearly these folks know how to have fun, but this sort of quirky office design can also create a higher level of job satisfaction, which is ultimately good for the business as well as its employees.

Another company that embraces the relaxed and fun office atmosphere is Innocent (I mentioned the story of Innocent’s creation in an earlier post – perhaps I have secret desire to work there…) where meetings take place on beanbags, breakfast is provided every morning, and a drinks trolley stocked with beer and wine rolls around the office on Friday afternoons.

(For more great offices, see this list here of Top 7 Creative Work Spaces, including pics of Pixar, Lego, Mindlab and others.)

Little touches like these no doubt go a long way to soothing any work-related stress and make the company’s employees happier, more willing to go the extra mile and less likely to jump ship.

A new trend in the area of staff fulfilment is to allow employees to bring their pets to work. Animals in the workplace have been shown to reduce stress, increase productivity and even decrease absenteeism, which is probably why pet-friendly offices are on the increase. (continues)

Triumph Over Adversity

Ken Walters is getting a lot of press in the UK at the moment. He’s overcome a great deal of hardship to create a successful career as a digital artist. His tale begins rather bleakly with a forklift accident that fractured his spine, left him wheelchair-bound and put an end to his engineering career. Unemployment and a long depression followed, then two heart attacks and finally a stroke. But this last misfortune was actually a lucky break.

During his convalescence after the stroke, Walters began doodling and realised he had hidden artistic talents, despite never having had any interest in art before. 'I just started pencilling these abstract patterns,' he has said. 'I wasn't actually drawing anything, just letting my hands do whatever my brain was telling them. It was bizarre because before the stroke I'd never been the arty type. I hated it in school.'

His doctors suggested that these newfound skills were perhaps due to a rewiring of his brain after the stroke, and they encouraged Walters to give his drawing hand free reign. He transferred his drawings onto the computer and began selling his images online through sites like Second Life.

Soon Walters became an expert in digital imagery and went on to create his own software. With the recent sale, at the age of 51, of some of his work to gaming giant EA Games (for the online game Spore), his story attracted the interest of various local and national newspapers.

When I Grow Up...

On a bus this week, I overhead a mother trying to convince her pre-teen daughter to become a doctor. When the girl objected because “science isn’t fun”, her mother replied that most people don’t enjoy their jobs and nobody has any fun working. I wondered what secret career dreams the girl was harbouring that might now be entirely extinguished by her mother’s words. No doubt the mother thought she was being helpful by instilling a sense of practicality in her daughter, but she was really just encouraging her to think small and accept unhappiness as a fact of life. What a shame.

What did you want to be when you were little? I longed to be a truck driver. My family thought I would grow up to be a nun because the Sound of Music gave me the impression that nuns just sing all day. Neither desire was discouraged because I was raised by my parents to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be.

These days I no longer feel the call of the open road or the convent, but I'm glad that I was given the chance to dream and to think that those dreams might come true. That may be what gave me the courage to pursue a career in acting - a road that's been very challenging but where the rewards ultimately outweigh the heartbreak.

So many of us live within the idea that work can't be enjoyable, and often give up aspirations to settle for less than we deserve. To counter this depressing trend, I’ve been thinking about the things I enjoyed as a child and trying to incorporate some elements of those activities into my present life. I've recently taken singing lessons and started a nice little collection of nun dolls (though perhaps I should really don a habit and go for a long drive …).

It’s been great revisiting old passions, and I encourage you to do the same. It may be a case of pursuing an abandoned career dream or simply taking a class in something you used to enjoy. So drop me a comment and let me know what you wanted to be when you were growing up and how you’re going to recapture some of that fun now. (continues)

Starting A Business - What Does It Take?

If you’re considering starting your own business, you may be riddled with questions about where to begin. The early days of such an undertaking can be fraught with fears and concerns, and hearing the words of those who’ve trod the same path can be incredibly helpful.

Luckily I’ve just stumbled across a great resource. Another Girl At Play is a site where 29 (and counting) entrepreneurs share their tales of what it’s like to start a business, their strategies for success, and how they coped with frustrations and set-backs along the way. The site features writers, calligraphers, designers, musicians, photographers, jewellery makers and several other folks who’ve successfully turned their passions into businesses. The stories are inspiring and the advice is practical.

As the site’s name might suggest, the contributors are all women, but you men out there shouldn’t be shy about checking it out as the experiences and insights are pretty universal.

Those of you (male or female) based in the UK who are already running a small business might want to check out the O2 X Awards 2008. The top prize is £10,000 and awards are given to the best small businesses in the areas of Fashion, Music, Food & Drink, and Technology & Innovation. But you’d better move fast as the deadline is 1st September.

PS A wise soul pointed me towards a great article on what to do if you’re stuck in a career rut. Click here for some practical advice on how to turn things around.

The photo above is from Andrea Scher's Superhero Designs, one of the successful start-ups profiled at Another Girl At Play. For Andrea's story about starting her jewelry business, please go here. (In fact, completely coincidentally from Gigi's post and link, we met Andrea at a reading in San Francisco when we were touring the 2DO Book - and have nothing but nice to say things about Andrea or her site! - Mike and Chris)

For email alerts to Gigi Burgdorf's future posts, and our other guest writers, click the following link for free updates

TOMORROW: Join Stoney Schaffer for the next installment of his adventures in Thailand in Postcards from the Peace Corps...

A Winning Plan

As part of my ongoing search for work that I love, I’ve been ruminating on things I do well that are also useful enough to earn me some money. The two obvious choices – acting (my first love) and writing (a newer passion) – aren’t currently bringing in enough cash to pay all the bills. So I’ve been racking my brains to figure out what other talents I have that can fill in the gaps.

One of the less conventional items on my “Things I’m Good At” list is winning raffles. Seriously. I’m one of those people who always scoops the prize. This talent doesn’t indicate any obvious career path, but I’ve been thinking about how to use my special skill for financial gain. And I think I’ve come up with a plan.

I’m going to win the lottery. Or more precisely, I’m going to win the lottery jackpot. My goal is a payout big enough for me to live off the interest indefinitely, but anything over a million would suffice. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about those pesky bills (at least in the short term), and I could create my dream job by funding my own theatrical productions and financing my first book.

Some might not look on the lottery route as a sound career plan, but it seems to make sense to me. Over the past few months, I’ve been buying tickets on an ad-hoc basis, whenever the lucky feeling strikes me. I’ve had three minor wins so far – each less than £20, which is enough to offset the money I’ve been spending on tickets. So it seems that my raffle luck does extend to the lottery. Surely it’s only a matter of time until I score the big win.

I mention this not as an enticement to draw you into the shady world of gambling, but as an invitation to think outside the box when it comes to looking for skills that you can capitalise on to make a living. It may be that your natural talents aren’t what anyone else would recognise as a good basis for a glowing career, but you might just be able to spin them into the kind of work you’ve been looking for.

PS I realise that my lottery-winning idea isn’t exactly foolproof. Apparently my odds of scooping the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816, so I’ll still be pursuing other job ideas as doggedly as ever.

Links:

Click here to calculate your odds of winning the lottery (which may convince you that finding a job you love is a safer bet)

For email alerts to Gigi Burgdorf's future posts, and our other guest writers, click the following link for free updates

TOMORROW: Join Stoney Schaffer for his third installment of Postcards from the Peace Corps...

The 'Innocent' Road to Success

Many people’s dream jobs involve creative pursuits - writing, painting, design, dancing, etc. But for Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, the road to happiness at work involved something much simpler – a passion for fruit.

The story goes that these three university friends had a fervent desire to make it easy for people to get their daily intake of fruit, so they spent six months creating delicious recipes for natural smoothies. By the summer of 1998, they felt ready to start selling their creations but were still unsure if they should take the plunge and quit their fulltime jobs (in advertising and management consultancy).

So they bought £500 worth of fruit and sold smoothies from a stall at a music festival in London. Next to their stall they put up a sign asking ‘Should we quit our jobs to make these smoothies?’, and placed two bins marked ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. By the end of the weekend the ‘Yes’ bin was overflowing, so they handed in their resignations and started the Innocent drinks company.

Ten years later, Innocent is still going strong – with an annual turnover approaching £115m, a staff of over 200 in offices all over Europe and a raft of awards for their products and company ethics which are much greener and more altruistic than most big brands. They’ve even been named the best workplace in the UK by the Guardian and the National Business Awards, so they’re clearly sharing the opportunity for people to enjoy their jobs.

"Is It Time to Quit Your Job?" - 3rd of this week's new columnists

I love this shirt. If I wore t-shirts, I’d be sporting this one all the time, in the hopes that anyone considering leaving a dead-end job to do something they’ve always wanted to do would take it as a sign to finally make the leap.

“Find a job I love” seems to crop up a lot in people’s 2DO Before I Die lists (including mine). So what are we waiting for? I’m not saying we shouldn’t weigh up the pros and cons before taking any drastic action. Let’s be honest here – we all need to earn money (or most of us do). Many of us also rely on stability and routine. On the other hand, risk-takers are often rewarded with new opportunities and money from unsuspected places.

Whatever the circumstances, it can be hard to make a life-changing decision, especially when the pros and cons seem evenly weighted. People often need some sort of divine inspiration to have the courage to make a change.

So if you’re unhappy in your current employment and you’re hoping to abandon it to travel the world/write a novel/start a business/weave baskets out of human hair, then take this post - and the shirt’s message - as just the sign you’ve been waiting for. It is time to quit your job.

Unless, of course, you are one of those lucky souls who already love what you do. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling some folks who are in that fortunate position and exploring how they got there.

I’ll also be sharing some of the ups and downs of my own journey whilst I shift my time from working for money to working for love (and getting paid for it). And I hope you’ll send me your comments, links and tales of employment triumph and tribulation. If you’re living the dream, I want to hear about it. If not, then tell me whose working life inspires you and how you’re going to get some of that goodness for yourself.

PS I pinched the photo from zazzle. If you want to get your hands on one of these groovy shirts, that's the place to go.

For email alerts to Gigi Burgdorf's future posts, and our other guest writers, click the following link for free updates.

See also Gigi's previous guest posts about tackling one of her fears in her series, 'Conquer My Fear of Nudity'.

TOMORROW: Join Stoney Schaffer for his first installment of "Postcards from the Peace Corps"...!