Pursue Passion – Personal Excellence

Is It Realistic to Believe ‘Chase Your Passion and Money Will Follow’? (The Passion-Market-Skills Framework)

Celes — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 14:58:46 +0000

“Hi Celes, is it realistic to believe ‘chase your passion and the money will follow’? I don’t know what my passion is yet, but having worked more than my fair share of high paying professional jobs, I’m convinced that while it is very important for me to be paid well, I’m not motivated enough just by money to pursue the regular assortments of high paying careers. Yet despite knowing what I don’t like, I don’t know what else would be better for me and feel stuck. Is there any advice you can provide me? Thanks a lot!” – Miss B

Hi Miss B! It’s definitely realistic to believe that you can chase your passion and earn money from it. I’m living proof of that.

However, how this works is probably not what most people imagine it to be.

Firstly, it’s NOT realistic to think that one can just quit their job, pursue their passion, and earn big bucks right away. Many don’t succeed. Those who do only start seeing real results after a few years.
Secondly, it’s not realistic to think that one can earn money from pursuing their passion in a random way, without considering market needs.
Thirdly, it’s also not realistic to think that one can generate money from their passion right away with no related experience/skills. Just like you can’t expect to get a job right away when switching to a completely unrelated field, you can’t expect to take off in your passion career by “boldly” pursuing it, without any plan or strategy.

The reality is it’s not easy. BUT it’s not impossible. As long as you are ready to put in the hard work, are prepared for the possibility of no returns for the first few years, and are versatile enough to turn challenges into solutions, then I say you have a good chance of success.

But how does one create their dream career? I’ve shared a couple of frameworks before — my Mind-Body-Heart-Soul framework and Message-Medium framework — which I recommend you to check out.

Today I want to share a different model which I call the Passion-Market-Skills framework.

The Passion-Market-Skills Framework

The Passion-Market-Skills framework is a framework I created from my experience pursuing my passion. (I later found out that it’s the same as a model used in career coaching — amazing.) Here’s how it looks:

The 3 circles represent the different components of an ideal career.

Passion stands for what you’re passionate about; what excites you, energizes you
Market stands for what the market needs, wants
Skills stands for the skills you have; what you’re able to do

Let’s look at common scenarios in the job market today (or self-employment for that matter):

People with Market & Skills, but no Passion. These are people with marketable skills, which gets them a job that pays well. Miss B is in this category. However, without passion for their work, work becomes a dread. Even though someone can theoretically keep working their way up in such a career path, the job will eventually hollow them out. I was once in this category, and I subsequently quit to pursue my real passion to help others grow.
People with Passion & Skills, but no Market. These people have a passion for their work and are very skilled in what they do, but there is little market demand to make a good living. A good analogy is the “starving artist” archetype, where you see talented artists who are not able to make ends meet because there isn’t a big (job) market for their work. Because of that, there is a limit to how much they can earn. Money is constantly a constraint in their decision making and life.
People with Passion & Market, but no Skills. These people are better off than people in the first 2 categories in that they love what they do and they are in an industry with lots of opportunities. However, they don’t have the skills to land these opportunities. Note that by skills, I mean (1) skills relative to other players in the market, meaning you can be skilled but if there are plenty more skilled alternatives than you, the market will favor them, and (2) any skill required to succeed in your passion, such as skills in your craft (e.g., public speaking if you’re a speaker), skills in self-promoting, skills in networking, etc. Without competitive skills, these people struggle to land opportunities, sales, and good job offers.

Clearly, all 3 scenarios are not optimal.

While some may rationalize that having a job they hate is better than having no job (which is true), in the long run they’ll be miserable as they get hollowed out from doing something they hate each day.

While some may rationalize that they’d rather pursue a passion and earn little money than be in a job they hate with lots of money (which is true for people with no heavy financial needs), in the long run they’ll find themselves restricted in how they live their life and how they can pursue their goals.

As for the last scenario, people in this scenario start off happy and excited, but are clueless at what’s about to hit them. An example would be someone who quit their job to start their blog business or to create apps (both of which are supposedly thriving industries now), but they have no idea how competitive the field is and are forced to quit later on when they fail to get any sales, despite months of hard work.

To you,

1) Can you spot where you are in this diagram right now?

2) Which is the ideal spot?

If you answered that the ideal spot is the intersection between all 3 circles, you’re right! This is a career (1) you’re Passionate about; (2) where there’s a Market demand for it; and (3) which you have the Skills to thrive in. That’s the career you want to be in.

How to Achieve Passion-Market-Skills

So how do you get into this sweet spot?

First off, I want to highlight that getting to this spot is a process that can take years, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

For example, if you have no idea what your passion is and you’re just entering the workforce, then it’s obviously going to take a while before you get a career with all Passion-Market-Skills criteria. That’s because not only do you need time to figure out your passion, but you also need time to build your skills in it later — if it’s different from what you’ve been doing.

On the other hand, if you’ve been working for years in various highly skilled jobs, then all things being equal, even if you don’t know your passion right now, you already have some reference on what you may like / don’t like. Hence, you can better pinpoint what you want to do later. Not only that, working for so long would have given you some hard/soft skills that you can use for your passion journey later on vs. starting from scratch.

For me, it took me

A few months from the point I started to look for my passion/purpose to the point I discovered it. Note that in these few months, I was really DIGGING and SEARCHING to find my passion/purpose as opposed to playing lip service to the idea.
Before that, I was actively pursuing different goals and interests throughout my childhood and teens as I detailed here. You can count that as 15 years of “pre-work” before finding my purpose!
After discovering my passion/purpose, it took me another 2.5 years to pursue it. This would be December 2008, when I started this blog and my personal development business. Before this, I was working in a corporate job to gain as much experience as possible.
It would be another 3-4 months before I was generating a steady stream of income from my passion. This income quickly built up to sustain my needs, and subsequently exceeded my last drawn corporate salary in my 3rd year of business. It later on became a six-figure stream. (Money has never been my primary driver though; my focus has always been to give value and help others. That said, money is important to pursue our goals and bring our work to the next level — at least in this world we’re living in today — and this is something we need to recognize in any passion pursuit.)

This timeline obviously differs from person to person, but it gives you an idea of what things can look like. As long as you don’t expect some miracle result, as long as you keep working on your goals, you have nowhere to go but up. :)

So how do you achieve your Passion-Market-Skills career? I have 5 tips for you. :)

Step 1: Know your passion

The first thing you should understand about the Passion-Market-Skills framework is that these 3 circles are like moving parts of a whole — they can be nudged, to some extent, to form your ideal career. For example, if you’re in a job you’re not passionate about, you can always try to find something good about it. If you have a passion that doesn’t have a big market, you can look for ways to adapt your passion to the market. If you have no skills in what you’re pursuing, you can always build them.

However, the circle that’s least “nudgeable” is “Passion.” With “Market,” there are practically no limits to who you can reach today, thanks to the internet and globalization. With “Skills,” there’s nothing you can’t learn as long as you are willing to put in the time and effort, since human potential is basically limitless. However, you can’t make yourself love something if you dislike or even hate it.

Hence, “Passion” is actually the most definitive part of our ideal career, and the first thing you should work on uncovering. Even if you turn out to have zero skills in your passion and you have no idea how to pursue it (like me when I discovered my passion), you can, at that point, start taking baby steps to build your ideal career. Without knowing your passion though, you would be building random skills and building yourself up a particular career to earn more money, but you could well be leading your life to the wrong place.

As Stephen Covey said before, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

Now the question comes to, “How exactly do I find my passion?”

As I’ve already written a lot about finding your passion, I recommend reading the articles below. Doing this over the next few weeks will help you get closer to your passion, if not discover it:

How To Know What You Want To Do In Life
How To Find Your Life Purpose (series) — with my 30-minute exercise to discover your passion
How To Know If Your Life Purpose is For Life (And Not Short/Medium Term)
I Have Many Passions and Interests But I Don’t Know What to Pursue. What Should I Do?

There are some readers though who find difficulty in identifying their passion even after reading the articles and doing my purpose exercise. When I talk to them to understand the problem in detail, I realize that oftentimes, the issue isn’t with the exercise, but because they’ve not gathered enough experience about their likes, dislikes, and goals to actually know what they want.

Finding your passion comes as a result of having gone through several worthy goal pursuits. You can’t possibly know your real passion unless you’ve taken the step to get out of your comfort zone, worked on goals with meaning to you, and experienced the ups and downs of a serious goal pursuit.

Thus, I recommend giving yourself time to explore and experiment. Identify 2-3 things that you like (or you think you may like), and then spend 3-6 months dipping your toes in them. Take courses, start something on the side, read up, etc. (This can all happen while you are in a day job by the way!) Then, take stock. How do you feel about them after these few months? Are you still excited? If yes, great! Continue. If no, repeat with 2-3 different things for another 3-6 months. During this time, take note of what you like and don’t like, while re-reading my articles above to introspect on your lessons. At some point you’ll find something you feel really good about, that you’d like to seriously pursue as a career.

What if you’re in between jobs or you’re currently in a terrible job at the moment? You’re not alone because I have many clients and course participants who are in such predicaments. I recommend getting an interim job that you don’t hate, that you’d be okay working in for a year or two. This would be a job that’s an improvement over your previous/current job and gives you new things to learn, while bringing you money at the same time. This way, you’ll not be weighed down by the burden of financial instability and have some time to properly figure out what to do next.

Step 2: Study the market related to your passion

After you identify your passion or a potential passion area, the next step is to study the market related to your passion. This is where we look at the second circle, “Market.” There are 2 goals here. Firstly, you want to know exactly what you’re getting into, as opposed to jumping in half-cocked. Secondly, you want to know what’s happening in the market so that you craft your best plans later on.

What is the market like for your passion? Research it in this step.

During your research, you should answer these 5 questions:

What are the typical career options in this field?
What does each option entail? What are the requirements to enter this field? What are the criteria for success?
Do any of these career options interest you? (Or are there any aspects of a particular path that interest you?) What are they? What do you like about them?
Look beyond standard career paths. Who are the people thriving in this field today? What exactly do they do? Why are they so successful?
Is there anything you like about what they’re doing, that you’d like to emulate in your own path? What is it and why?

What if you don’t know anyone in this field? Well, with the internet and meetup groups, you can get lots of information even without knowing anyone… yet. For example, say you want to be a trainer, but you don’t know anyone in training. What can you do?

Firstly, research online. There are many trainers with online presences today, so you can easily google for trainer blogs to read up. Be sure to read from varied sources so that you get different perspectives.
Secondly, meet up with people who have been living and breathing training as their job. Not people who are just talking about it, but people who are out there doing it.
- Toastmasters is a great place to meet professional public speakers quickly, especially those serving as mentors or judges.
- Meetup.com has so many meetups including on public speaking and training. With 550,000 monthly meetups in 180 countries, it practically has meetups on all kinds of topics in every corner of the world! Chances are, it has something where you live too.
- Attend talks and workshops by professional trainers — it’s hard to meet trainers 1-1, but through these events you can easily meet them.
- When attending these events, don’t just watch in the background. Approach these people and mingle. Understand how they got started and ask them for advice as someone starting out. They’ll be able to give you some ideas, even if briefly. Brief ideas from many people will give you a good overall picture.
Thirdly, study world experts. You want to get both a global and local view of the industry. Who are the most renowned people in training today? What exactly do they do? Why are they so successful? While you probably won’t know these people personally, you can study their bios, interviews, and books to learn from them.

The general steps above pretty much apply to any career field. Simply replace “trainer/training” with the name of your field and follow the tips.

As you’re researching, take notes of what you like, don’t like. Understand what works, what doesn’t work in this field. This information will be crucial as you craft your passion plan in Step 3.

One watch out during your research

During your research, it’s possible that you realize this isn’t your passion at all. This has happened to some of my clients before.

For example, my client K came to me last year with a strong interest in corporate training. As she didn’t have prior experience in this field, I asked her to do a deep-dive into the industry, including cold contacting corporate trainers on LinkedIn, networking, reaching out to managerial contacts, and talking to her friends. After much research, she realized that corporate training isn’t a fit for her! That’s because her real passion is to help others express themselves and become their true selves, which is more of a life skill, while corporate training typically involves teaching industry-specific skills with life skills weaved into them. After deep thought, K realized that life coaching is a better fit for what she wants to achieve, and is now developing her coaching portfolio and taking on trial clients, among exploring other career mediums.

If you ask me, this is a great thing. Imagine if K hadn’t done this research: she would have wasted years trying to get the right qualifications for a corporate training career, only to realize that it’s not right for her! Even though this shift might have seemed like a detour at first, and she had spent 2 months researching before realizing it wasn’t right for her, these were necessary steps to discover her ideal path. And this is something you need to recognize too.

So if you happen to realize that what you thought was your passion isn’t your passion, don’t worry. It’s part of the learning process. :) Simply return to Step 1 to explore and find a new passion area. Then, return to Step 2 when you’re ready.

Step 3: Adapt your passion to serve the market

Once you do your research, let’s look at Step 3: adapt your passion to serve the market.

What does it mean to “adapt” your passion?

“Adapting” means to craft your passion in a way that’s relevant to the market. Even though you can pursue your passion without considering the world at large and be extremely happy doing so, you should convey your passion in a way that relates to others and adds value to their lives. Otherwise you are essentially pursuing your passion for your own benefit, independent of what others want, which is no different from pursuing it as a hobby. If your goal is to turn your passion into a sustainable career, you need to think beyond yourself and consider what the world wants, needs.

There are exceptions to this though, such as lifestyle bloggers and YouTube personalities who seem to make a good living just by living their lives and talking about themselves. Like I said, this is an exception, not the norm. Additionally, these individuals are actually giving value — knowingly or unknowingly — by what they do. This value can be entertainment value (bringing laughter to people), social value (making you feel emotionally rewarded by being connected with them), or educational value (helping you learn something).

This value can be a hit or miss though depending on what the market is looking for — for example, you could start a personal YouTube channel in hopes that people would be interested about you and your videos, but if your topics of interest aren’t things that people want to see, you’d be basically wasting your time (in terms of your career). Hence, it’s important to be deliberate about how you give value to others, because it ensures that you’ll definitely deliver the value your audience needs.

So how do you adapt your passion in a way that serves the market? 5 steps:

Start by identifying the message of your passion. This is the essence of your passion. Most people get confused with their message and medium, when it’s their message that’s the most important. For example, maybe your passion is in stand-up comedy, but your real passion is “to bring laughter to the world.” Maybe your passion is to start your organic restaurant, but your real passion is “to improve health and nutrition of people, through wholefoods and diet.” The former is a medium while the latter is your message. Being clear of your message will subsequently widen your career options. Read about message vs. medium here: How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium
Your message should both be (1) something you enjoy and (2) something that will bring a positive impact to others. Other examples of messages are, “To inspire people and help them step into their light,” “To empower women and help them succeed in dating, work, and life,” and “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (this is actually Google’s mission statement).
Identify who you want to reach out to with your passion. Next, identify your target audience (TA). This is the group you are going to reach out to, to impact through your passion. Your TA should be a group that (1) you are passionate about reaching and (2) isn’t too narrow (otherwise you’ll end up in a Passion, Skills, but no Market scenario). While your TA doesn’t have to be as broad as mine (my TA is the entire world!), it should not be too narrow. For example, wanting to reach out to only people of a certain race+age group+gender is probably too narrow, especially if they make up a very small number. Know that when you restrict your audience, you prevent more people from benefiting from your stuff. Target as many people as you can while not diluting your messaging.
Identify career mediums to best reach them. A medium is your vehicle to express your passion message and reach your TA. You should pick mediums that (1) you’re passionate about and (2) are readily used by your TA (you should have gotten some ideas during your research phase).
For example, my message is to help others achieve their highest potential and live their best life. The mediums I use are blogging, ebooks, online courses, and videos. These are the mediums that (1) I feel passionate about and (2) are popular in today’s world. Recently, I started a podcast (!), something I thought I’d never do, because I see podcasting as an increasingly important medium in reaching out to all of you today.

I recommend identifying at least 3 mediums so you have a variety of ways to reach out to your audience. Even if you are looking for a salaried job (not a business), you can still have different mediums, basically different career roles like a counselor, therapist, social worker, psychiatrist, trainer, and coach if your message is in self-help, personal growth. Even if you don’t have the right skills yet (which is normal), you can build your skills later if you decide that this is indeed the path you want to pursue. I write more on identifying your career mediums here: How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium
Identify the change you’re going to make in their lives. What is the change, the difference, your TA is going to experience when they come in touch with your work? This change can be anything, from an improvement in your audience’s happiness level, to an increase in their knowledge, to an improvement in their lifestyle. This should be a change that your TA is looking for and is relevant to their lives.
As opposed to sitting and hypothesizing what your audience wants, I recommend getting out there to talk to them directly. Get to know your TA. Understand them in person. Understand what they need and what will most benefit them. This way, there will be no guesswork.
Create your ideal career vision. Last but not least, create your ideal career vision. Based on all the info above, what is your ideal career like? Who would you be serving? Who would you be working with daily? How would you be reaching out to them? What would you be doing every day?

Notice how in each step, I kept asking you to think about what’s relevant to your TA, the market? That’s what it means to adapt your passion to the market. You want to ensure that you are doing something that will create an impact in others’ lives, while staying true to your passion.

Even if your passion is supposedly very niche, you can still create a relevant passion career — by detaching yourself from its form and focusing on your message. For example, maybe you love drawing but the industry for drawing is not big. Understand your motivation behind your passion in drawing: what is it? Perhaps it’s to express your creativity and yourself, and to help others do the same (so here, drawing is the medium to achieve this message). By being clear of your message, this suddenly opens up a new host of mediums (drawing, writing, music, graphic design, public speaking) for you to pursue this passion.

That said, there is a block you can face at this stage. This block is if you are only interested in salaried work vs. starting your business or venture. That’s because when you only look for jobs in employment, you limit yourself to the job vacancies in your country, which may or may not fit what you want. Not only that, you are subject to assessment of your potential employers (perhaps you are skilled enough but you lack formal qualifications, and because of that your employers pass up on your application). Even if you broaden your search to the region or entire WORLD, it may still be difficult to find something that matches what you want entirely.

This was what I discovered when I tried looking for jobs that would match my passion before starting PE, which I shared in my Passion or Money? article. After exhausting all options, even willing to move myself overseas with my own money AND getting a job with a severe pay cut (and still finding nothing), I realized that the solution to my ideal career didn’t lie in a job out there. Because my passion and vision were so unique, I realized that I needed to create my own business, my own vehicle, to make things happen. That’s why I created PE and the blog you are reading now.

While this was the case for me, it doesn’t have to be so for you. If you’re looking for a salaried job, I have these suggestions:

Study all the job openings in the market right now. Research job portals, talk to headhunters, and seek out job agencies.
Research each job. Is there any that resonates with you, that may be a fit with your career vision? Consider all aspects, from the job scope, to the company’s message and values, to the pay, to career development prospects.
If yes, that’s great! What do you need to do to considered for these positions? (Move to the next section on skills.)
If no, consider broadening your search criteria (expand your geography or check out related jobs) and continue your search for another 2 months. Are there any new job options that fit you?
If the answer is still no, the answer to your ideal career may well not lie in the employment world. This is where you either heavily revise your career vision to be more reflective of current market options, or consider freelancing / starting your business. I’ve a business interview series where I interview successful entrepreneurs and their startup experience: Successful Businesses Interview Series

Step 4: Equip yourself with the skills to succeed

Now that you have your vision in mind, it’s now time to build the skills to succeed in your passion career! This is where the third circle, “Skills,” comes in.

Depending on your past experience and education, you may be starting from scratch. Or perhaps you have direct experience in what you want to do next, in which case you can simply pursue your passion career right away. For most of you though, you probably don’t have much related experience in your passion career. To that, I say, not a problem. After all, I used to be in this situation myself!

When I discovered my passion, I was in my graduating year in business school. I had already signed a job contract to start work at a consumer goods company. Clearly, neither my studies nor my upcoming job had anything to do with my passion in coaching nor conscious living. I was dismayed at first, and felt lost and empty… for a few days. What got me out of my funk was when I realized that even though what I was about to do had no direct relevance to my mission, it didn’t matter as I could use this as a channel to build my personal skills before pursuing my passion.

Subsequently when I started pursuing my passion in December 2008, I had no specific experience in coaching and training. The web landscape was also totally different from how I remembered it back in the 1990s. Even though it was a little overwhelming, I knew it was about quickly developing myself so that I could quickly get down to the things that matter, which is reaching out to you guys and helping you grow. I share some of the steps I took in my Skills Development article so I won’t repeat them here, but my point is that even if there is a wide gap between where you are now and the skills you need to pursue your passion successfully, there’s no need to feel sad and dejected. It’s simply about taking the steps to gain those skills. If you consider that most people today needed to study a 2-4 year degree/diploma to get into their current job, you should also expect some lead time before you’re able to soar high in your passion.

For example, I have a friend who is a very prominent public speaking trainer and runs a very successful training business today. He only started his business about 3 years ago, so he has done extremely well in a relatively short amount of time, in a congested industry. While his achievements look smooth-sailing and it seems like his success has just come naturally, he was building his skills many, many years before he started his business. Previously, he was a regular participant at Toastmasters, having his speeches evaluated on a weekly basis, and participating in club and division contests month after month. He subsequently competed at many national and regional TM contests and became a 5-time Toastmasters champion! If this wasn’t enough, he competed in speech contests outside of Toastmasters organized by independent, credible organizations, in turn further raising his profile and expertise.

If you’re starting as a complete newbie, start with these simple steps:

Identify all the skills you need to excel in your ideal career.
Order them by priority. Out of these skills, which should you be working on first?
Do you have any transferable skills, past experience that you can draw on in your ideal career? Think about how to use them in your new passion career. (For me, I have graphic design and web development experience which I used to build PE website. I also have marketing / business management experience that I learned in my corporate job, which I used to quickly market my business and manage my work when I started.)
Create a plan to start addressing your skill gaps, and take action.

I recommend tracking your progress as you’re working on your skills. Have a regular skill-audit to evaluate how you’re doing (you can use some self-created metrics, such as rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in your skill, using meaningful attributes to track your progress, and so on). If you have the bandwidth, work on building 2-3 skills in one go, which can be helpful in drawing learning points across the board.

I’ve written more on skills development here:

Step 5: Execute and Fine Tune

Even though I label this as Step 5, it’s actually a step that can happen alongside Step 4 or even 3. As you’re building your skills, start to execute your ideal career plan. You shouldn’t wait until you feel 100% ready before you act. Why?

It’s very unlikely that you can take action and see perfect results right away. There’s usually a big gap between our plans and reality. This is where it’s better to take lousy, imperfect action now and fine tune along the way, such that your plan is more accurate to reality. On the other hand, fantasizing in a dream world of perfect conditions and executing right at the end will usually lead to a horrifying situation where you realize your plans do not match reality at all, which then leads to lots of rework and time wasted. I’ve seen so many people fail because they refuse to test their ideas right away, instead hiding in an impenetrable cave where they assume everything they’re doing is perfect and right — in the end wasting months and years of their life working on an idea or direction that the market doesn’t want.
You need time for the market to react. I call this the “lead time” for the market to respond to your efforts. For example, rarely do people get jobs right after sending their resume; usually they need to wait for companies to review the resumes, have internal discussions, and then arrange for an interview if they find you suitable. Rarely do businesses get customers right after launch; usually they need to market themselves, improve on their offering, and build trust before they get a solid customer base. For you, things like networking, marketing, researching, improvising, and engagement should happen earlier than later.
Growth is supposed to be ongoing. It’s not possible to be 10/10 in a skill. Why? Because every time you reach 10/10, you’ll notice something else to improve on! By waiting only until you feel everything is perfect before taking action, you may well never be able to take action. The feeling of “I’m a fraud” or “I’m not ready” is also known as the impostor syndrome, and I’ve written about it before: 7 Tips To Overcome Impostor Syndrome

Hence, no matter how far you’re from your ideal state, you can act on your plan NOW. Say you’re starting a business or freelancing. Look for opportunities. Network. Get your name out. Create a basic version of your product/service and test that with some people, for free. Get their feedback. Improve based on their feedback. Do this for a few iterations. Start charging a small fee when you feel your work is decent enough, and keep improving as you go along.

As I mentioned above, when I started my business, I had no past experience in coaching or training. I started my site after 1.5 months of in-depth research and self-learning, decided it was time to launch a “prototype” site/offering, and then fine tuned as I went along. As my readers and clients learned from my material, I was busy learning too: constantly talking to experts in the field to get their feedback, asking my own clients/readers for their thoughts on how I could improve, upgrading my knowledge, and improving my skills.

In the first year alone, I changed my layout countless times and changed my domain name, company name, logo, and brand colors. Even in my third year, I was still changing my domain name! This iterative process helped me build my business very quickly. If I had taken 1-2 years to strategize/plan in my magic cave, I think I would have wasted 1-2 years since I couldn’t have known what exactly people wanted or what I was doing “wrong” until I got to work with people directly.

Even if you’re seeking employment (not starting your business), you can start networking, applying for jobs, consulting experts, and attending recruitment fairs.

I once met someone at an event, Simone Brunozzi, who told me about how he landed his dream job at that time, the role of Technology Evangelist with Amazon — one of the largest companies in the tech world. What’s amazing is that: (1) He stumbled upon the job by chance, while he was checking out a job fair — without even knowing Amazon would be there; without even knowing a role like the Technology Evangelist existed. (2) He got the job despite being positioned “below the bar” (he worked and studied in a country town in Italy, which is poorly developed from a tech point of view).

After the fair, he went out of his way to illustrate his passion, commitment, and knowledge by looking up the hiring manager, and then spent over 30 hours creating and custom coding a program related to the role and sending it to him. Needless to say, the hiring manager was impressed, and after a dozen interviews, Simone was hired. He would then work in Amazon and do very well for 6 years, before quitting to join a different venture.

My point for sharing this story is to let you know that whether you’re looking for a salaried job, freelancing, or starting your business, there’s no “perfect time” to do it. Execute sooner than later. Then, fine tune as you go along.

Closing Note

I hope you’ve found this post helpful. :) I’ve made sure to pack it with practical tips and advice, and it ended up being 6,400 words long. All the best in your passion career!

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

(All Diagrams: Personal Excellence)

What To Do When You Have Too Many Passions

Celes — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 19:41:14 +0000

(Image)

“Hi Celes! I’m a student in high school. I am writing to you because I have no clue what to do… Since forever, I have a passion for knowledge. I am interested in EVERYTHING. I wanna learn more about things especially different religions, history, art, anthropology, why we are here, philosophy, science, etc. I start reading online about one thing and it never ends there.

This actually makes me very upset because I don’t know what to learn in order to make a living and I feel like I am nothing compared to the great people I read about. My parents just want me to make money and say I shouldn’t learn something that’s not “practical.” I wanna learn everything but also be active and create. So what should I learn? And if I learn, how can I make use of this knowledge, besides enjoying it?” — Nana

What do you do when you want to learn EVERYTHING? What do you pursue when you have many passions and interests in different things? I often get this question so I’d like to answer this in today’s post.

Gaming

First, let me share my passion story. When I was really young, like 7, my brother introduced me to video games. I still remember the first console our dad bought for us was Micro Genius, an 8-bit console. Ancient, I know — this was in 1991. One of the first games we played was Super Mario. We subsequently got newer consoles as they got released over the years, from Sega Genesis to Dreamcast to Playstation to PlayStation 2.

Micro Genius, now an obsolete console (Image)

My brother and I would play games together, though as we grew older, I became the one playing the games. From RPGs, to fighting games, to horror games, to action-adventure games, I played them ALL.

I didn’t just play as a casual gamer too — whenever I played a game, I would play it to the extreme where I would get absolute high scores, learn every Easter egg, unlock every bonus, and play it continuously ad nauseam. For the RPGs / story games, I could even retell the scene and the exact dialogue. And we’re talking about over 100 games in total!

Some of the many, many games I played growing up

My intense gaming would continue into my teens, all the way till I graduated from university.

Web Development

When I was 14 (1998-1999), the internet boom came. Almost everyone got a PC and my parents, with their limited savings, pooled money to get one for me too.

During this period, I learned to navigate the web, use IRC and ICQ (the most popular chat programs back then), and play LAN games. One day when chatting with an online friend, he told me about this guy from China who was running a popular website (that was in Chinese) on desktop enhancements like wallpapers, skins, screensavers, and the like — and supposedly making good money off it!

Intrigued, I thought, You can earn money just from making websites? If I could earn money and get started on my long-term goal to support my parents and do them proud, then I was all for it. So I looked up, “How to start a website.”

Within that week, I created my first site. Since I already knew that desktop enhancements were a tried and proven topic, I based my website on this topic but with my own style and content. Every day, I would rush home after school to build my site. From HTML coding, to web design, to graphic editing, to online marketing, to web administration, I learned everything needed to build a great site.

My first website, Celestine’s World. This screenshot is all I have left after all these years!

My site grew, fast. Because I was massively building the site, marketing it, and creating a lot of good content, I was gaining quick traffic. Within a year, I received over 100,000 visitors a month. My site had evolved into one of the largest portals online for desktop enhancements. I was sort of living a double life: in the day, I was this introverted kid in school; outside of school, I was the owner of this large web portal that many people around the world were visiting. Every day, I worked on my site tirelessly; every day, I updated it with new content. I was creating a lot of high-quality content on my blog and got immense satisfaction from doing so.

My site in 1999. By then I had gotten my domain and was on a private server.

New look in 2000. At this point my traffic was over 300,000 visitors/month!

By then, earning money was no longer the key to me. I was more enticed by what the web could offer — the ability to learn new skills, to create something of value, to meet talented webmasters online, and to make a difference to others.

So, I began to launch more sites. And by sites, I mean many of them:

I loved anime in my teens, so I created a fan site for Neon Genesis Evangelion, a wildly popular anime then

I also loved video games so I collaborated with a fellow webmaster to create a fan site for a popular PS2 game called The Bouncer

Voting sites were really popular then so I launched one for desktop enhancement sites

I also headed a webring for wallpaper sites as webrings were really popular then too

I also spearheaded a platform for wallpaper designers to connect and share ideas. It became very well-known and was the go-to place for wallpaper designers.

I created a site for Winamp skins as I loved making Winamp skins

I also had a personal site and blog. At that time, blogs were purely personal journals, nothing like the content sites they’ve become today.

By 2001, I had created 10 different websites, each with its unique content and layout. Each site became very popular and in total they had over half a million visitors a month! I was having all these visitors from around the world visiting my sites, sending endless requests, and leaving grateful feedback. This web experience was one of the best things in my teenage years and I remember feeling very happy and excited whenever I was working on my websites.

Web, Graphic Design

During this period, I also cultivated an interest in web and graphic design. While I started off with absolutely no knowledge in it — I was in the science stream and knew absolutely nothing about web/graphic design — I picked up the skills myself by randomly downloading graphic software, reading up online, and spending countless hours fiddling in it.

Design was fun in a way. I saw it as my way of connecting with seasoned wallpaper/skin creators online, who had been around and creating digital works long before I started my sites. I found it aspirational that everyone was creating such beautiful artwork and wanted to be great at my craft too. I constantly studied others’ materials to see what they were doing, and used them as benchmarks to get better at my work.

So be it ICQ skins, Winamp skins, wallpapers, web layouts, or digital artwork, I would spend many hours working in Photoshop and perfecting my creations daily. It was normal for me to work till the wee hours every day, like 3-5 am, and then wake up at 6:30 am and go to school like a zombie. I still remember my dad would rebuke me and ask me to sleep earlier, which obviously didn’t work. In total, I created nearly a thousand desktop enhancements during those years!

Some of the many wallpapers I created then:

Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion

Rinoa Heartilly from Final Fantasy 8

Motoko from Love Hina

Some Winamp skins I created:

Card Captor Sakura

Vivi Ornitier from Final Fantasy 9

Another one with Rei from Evangelion.

A couple of my digital artworks:

Digital Botany: What a plant would look like if it were grown digitally (in my view)

Imagination: Burst of light rays

Business, Marketing

By 2002, I began to drift away from the online space. Part of it was to focus on my real-life priorities; another part was because my webmaster friends were beginning to drift away for that very reason. One by one, I stopped renewing my domains; one by one, I shut down my sites. By 2005, all my sites were gone.

When it came to university in 2003, it was time to choose my course of study. With no strong passion for the available courses, I opted for Business Administration. It seemed like a good choice, one in alignment with my goal to earn a lot of money.

Over the next three years, I dedicated myself to making the best out of my university course. I soaked myself in everything that school had to offer, from the coursework, to classes, to case studies, to project work. To build up my leadership skills, I participated in core-curricular activities and case study competitions. I also started a graphic/web design business and did freelance graphic/web design, and became a private academic tutor (giving tuition three times a week) as part of leveraging my skills to earn money.

Finally, since I specialized in Marketing, I pitted myself against a thousand candidates for a highly coveted internship in a Fortune 50 company, which was essentially the dream job for marketers then. After multiple rigorous tests and interviews, I got the internship. I would eventually get a Marketing job offer after a grueling 2.5-month internship. I later graduated from my school as the top student in Marketing.

I would later discover my real passion and purpose — to grow and help others achieve their highest potential — which ironically had nothing to do with video games, web development, web or graphic design, business and marketing, or even making money.

I’ve since turned my passion into my career, from discovering my ideal vision, to quitting my day job, to pursuing my passion with no money, to earning my first passion dollar, to building my skills, to turning my blog into one of the top personal development blogs in the world, to hitting over $100,000 in annual revenue (I share the early steps of my passion journey in my passion series). It’s been seven years of doing this and I can’t imagine doing anything else for life.

5 Lessons I’ve Learned in My Journey

Now, why am I sharing this story? There are five lessons I want to highlight here:

#1. It’s okay to want to learn, do everything

I have a lot of readers who tell me they are interested in EVERYTHING and they want to learn and do EVERYTHING. They in turn freeze up and do nothing because they don’t know what they should pursue over others.

But, guess what? It’s okay to want to learn EVERYTHING. It’s also okay to want to try your hand at EVERYTHING. After all, if you don’t try, then how are you supposed to know what exactly you like?

During my passion journey, I was constantly learning and exploring different things. Firstly, there were the video games that I played intensely in my childhood and teens. Every time I played a game, I would immerse myself in its universe. With 100 games, it was as if I had been in 100 different universes. With anime, I would watch them intensely and be very wrapped up in everything about each show, from the characters to the plot.

When it came to web development, I soaked myself in everything I could find on the WWW. I started with WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) cookie-cutter site builders but quickly switched to coding HTML myself when I realized the limitations of such editors. I saw people creating fancy graphics and I wanted to create high-quality artwork just like them — and then started to learn graphic editing by myself. I created a website and felt it wasn’t enough — I ended up having 10 whole websites in less than 3 years because I wanted to try my hand at everything. In total, I created a total of 13 websites during my teen years!

Now some of you may say you don’t have time to do everything. Yet, trying everything doesn’t mean that you quit your job or studies to do things full time. It literally means what it says: Try. Dabble. Explore! For example,

Interested in becoming a YouTuber? Start a YouTube channel and post a couple of videos for fun.
Interested in drawing? Do some sketches and post them on Facebook for feedback; join a drawing club to meet other artists.
Interested in stand-up comedy? Practice a few stand-up routines by yourself, then try them out at your local comedy club.
Interested in cooking? Experiment with some recipes; start a food blog.
Interested in coaching? Read coaching books, join a weekend workshop to learn some basics, and offer to coach your friends for free.

What are your interests? Your passions? Your hobbies? Write them down, and then start pursuing them, perhaps one or a few at a time. Don’t restrict yourself or hold yourself back. Experiment and let yourself learn freely, like a child. Let yourself soak up everything the universe has to offer. Embrace everything with curiosity. :)

#2. As you learn/do, you’ll learn new things about yourself

The great thing about trying everything is that you’ll readily get insights into what you like and don’t like. Rather than wonder if X thing is right for you or not, you can get this answer by testing it out and seeing how you feel when doing so. The great thing is that you’ll probably get some good insights after a while without literally having to try everything.

Each time I pursued something to the nth degree, I would eventually realize something about myself or what I was doing. The realizations were never big aha’s — most of the time they were unconscious shifts — that contributed to me discovering my purpose later on. For example,

After playing the nth game and getting the top score for the nth time, I began to realize that I wasn’t getting much out of games. I realized that I was putting all this effort into gaming but getting nothing back in return. I realized that it made more sense for me to get out there, live my life, and create my adventures than to live vicariously through fictional characters. I subsequently distanced myself from games and worked on building my real life.
With web development, after making so many sites and bringing every one of them to success, I began to lose interest in web development as a whole. In retrospect, I was really passionate about what I was learning and creating and the people I was meeting through my sites, not web development per se. Websites were more like the proxy for me to build my skills, create content, and add value to others.
Same for web/graphic design — while I developed a good level of skills and even started a web/graphic design business, it was ultimately a proxy for me to grow, learn, and develop myself, vs. my true passion.

These insights slowly nudged me to my true purpose later on.

How long does it take to get such realizations?

Firstly, think of awareness as a gradual process. As opposed to thinking of it as you reaching sudden “enlightenment” one day, I’d like it’s more of a gradual shift — marked by several small revelation moments — where you become more aware day after day. This awareness is built up through experience. Constant self-reflection is also important to accelerate your self-discovery — and I share my exercise to discover your life purpose here: Discover Your Life Purpose in the Next 30 Minutes

Secondly, it depends on how far along you are in your growth journey. If you’re 16 and just getting started on your personal growth, your realization probably isn’t going to happen tomorrow. If you’re 30, have always stuck to what’s “safe,” and have never brought a goal to fruition, then there’s probably some work to be done too. If you’re 40 and have lived a busy life pursuing many goals, then it’s probably not long before you figure out what draws you.

With the things you like, continue doing more of them. With the things you dislike, cut down on them or drop them altogether. The goal here is to keep building on your likes while distancing from your dislikes. This will eventually lead you to your ideal path.

It is very important to note that “exploring” comprises 2 parts: exploring in breadth (variety) of interests and exploring in depth (intensity) of each interest. Some people say to me: “Hey I’ve been trying, exploring so many things; why is it that I don’t know my passion yet?”

My question back then is: “Well when you ‘explore,’ how exactly are you ‘exploring’? Are you just tapping and going at every single thing? Are you just searching Pinterest and checking things out on Google? Or are you rigorously bringing your goals to fruition?” Because while you should absolutely drop the goals that don’t interest you, ultimately you need to learn to see your goals through to their highest results. There are important learning points that come from doing so, such as developing a core competency, persistence, grit, hard work, critical thinking, and the ability to work through obstacles and overcome them. (For more on “breadth” and “depth,” read How To Know What You Want To Do In Life.)

The point here isn’t to turn your exploration into some race. You want to use this time to properly learn, explore, and pursue your interests to the highest level, as you figure out what you really want to do in life.

#3. All knowledge is applicable — just a matter of how you use it

In the opening, reader Nana asked what she can do about the things she wants to learn, such as philosophy, history, religion, and anthropology. Besides enjoying the knowledge, what can she do about it?

Well, this depends on the field. As I’m not directly familiar with these fields, I can’t comment on the above. Rather, I’ll put it this way:

When you learn, it doesn’t mean the knowledge must be applicable right away or at all. Applicable as in being put to practical use, say to earn money or get a job. Sometimes knowledge is meant to enrich, to help us understand more about the world, and to push us to think critically. These are a kind of application too.
Just because the knowledge can’t be applied right away in the practical sense doesn’t mean it’s useless. See #1.
Your newly acquired knowledge and heightened awareness will come into play, be it directly or indirectly, sometime down the road. It just depends on whether you’re able to synthesize the raw knowledge in your mind for the respective situation and whether you’re able to spot opportunities when they arise. Think of knowledge as an essence that’s formless and shapeless, and it’s up to you how you want to use this knowledge.

Example #1: Steve Jobs and Calligraphy

Most of us know Steve Jobs as one of the key shapers of today’s tech, but what’s surprising is that he actually studied calligraphy when in school. Actually, just one course, and he took it after he dropped out of college — because Jobs didn’t want to spend his parents’ money on expensive tuition as they weren’t rich. Despite dropping out, he spent the next 18 months dropping in on college classes that interested him, including a calligraphy course.

This calligraphy course proved to be monumental for Jobs would later use what he learned in the course and build that into the Mac.^[1][2]

“It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.” — Steve Jobs

As it turned out, what Jobs learned in the calligraphy course didn’t just influence the design of the Mac — it also influenced how he approached the creation of products at Apple. Apple products — MacBook, iPhone, iPad, and iPod — would become associated with a sense of artistry and sleek visual style that’s equally matched by functionality, something which subsequently set them apart from all their competitors.^[3]

Example #2: Natural Ecosystem and Architecture

Have you heard of a mall that can keep itself cool without air-conditioning? Well, Eastgate Shopping Centre does just that. It’s the first shopping center in the world with a natural cooling system — it can cool itself without air-conditioning, despite being located in Harare which can go up to 40°C / 104°F in the hottest season! How does it do that?

Its architect, Mick Pearce, got the idea from termite mounds. Termites can only survive when their environment has a constant temperature of 30°C / 86°F as that’s the temperature needed to grow fungus, which is their food.^[4] Termites cleverly keep their mounds at a constant temperature by regularly creating new vents and closing off old ones. Since warm air rises, convection air currents then draw the warm air through the openings and out of the mounds. The constant opening and closing of vents help maintain the heat and humidity inside the mound as well.

Yet, how would Pearce, who studied at an architectural school, know anything about this though? As it turns out, Pearce happens to have a passion for understanding natural ecosystems, a field that extends far outside of architecture.

By implementing this same design, Eastgate Centre is able to use only 10% of the energy than other buildings its size, leading to significant savings. In the first 5 years alone, the building’s owner was able to save $3.5 million from energy savings; Eastgate became a reference for architectural breakthroughs; and Pearce won many awards for his work with Eastgate.^[5][6] The design was subsequently used by the Portcullis House in London.

Suppose Pearce has always kept to studying only architecture and never ventured out in learning, exploring his interests in natural ecosystems. Then perhaps the idea of the natural cooling system wouldn’t have existed (or at least, not invented by Pearce).

Example #3: Web Development, Consumer Goods, Personal Development

When I learned web development, I didn’t anticipate that I would set up a web business in the future or that it would play such a big part in my business today. I just learned it because I was interested in it. Subsequently, when I decided to start my self-help business, I was able to leverage my past web knowledge to build my site. Not only that, but I also used ideas that I learned while working in my previous job to market my new business — even though my previous industry (consumer goods; skincare) is totally different from personal development.

Would PE be so online-centric if I hadn’t learned web development before? Maybe yes, maybe no. The thing is that we can never predict how the information we learn today can help us in the future. However, what we can do is to learn as much as we can and to explore enthusiastically, with a learning mind. When you gain mastery of the knowledge, you then become more aware of situations where this knowledge can be applied and how to best apply it.

#4. Develop Mastery

Many people ask me how to become great at something. How to start X and become successful. How to pursue Y and make it their living.

You got to keep at it. Build your skills. Build your experience. Level up. Earn your credits. There is no shortcut to expertise and success (except if you’re born into the rich/famous, but this is hardly our interest).

How do you choose what area to get good at? Well, you pursue your general areas of interest (see Lesson #2). Keep at the ones that excite you week after week while dropping the ones that don’t. The process of doing the same thing continuously will help you get good at it. Over time, you’ll find that you’ve moved from very lousy to okay. And then, from okay to good. After that, from good to better. Before you know it, you’ve become so good that you’re one of the best at what you do! The goal here is to devote yourself to mastery in what you spend time in.

Perhaps you are worried about developing yourself in a field that you eventually tire of. Perhaps you don’t want to invest your time and energy unless you’re sure it’s something you really like. But as I’ve shared in The Superstar Effect, when you achieve expert status at something, the path to success in other areas does become easier, even if they are unrelated fields. That’s because (1) there will always be soft and hard skills you can carry from one area over to another, and (2) in the process of building mastery in area X, you will likely build connections, credibility, and resources that can then be used for other goals.

So rather than ask “How can I earn money from X?” or “How can I turn X into a living?”, think about how you can become great at X first. When you become a master at something, the possibilities of what you can do with it will be boundless.

On developing mastery:

#5. Your ideal career is something you need to fight for

So you’re not doing work that’s in line with your passion. So you hate what you’re doing. So you wish to work in field X but you can’t find any opportunities.

Well, I can tell you that almost everyone starts off working at a place that’s not their ideal job. I was once in a jail-like job environment where I was required to stick tape all day long in exactly the same set of moves. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, look at my phone, or go to the loo except during stipulated five-minute breaks. I felt like I was going to die. I shared before in The Night I Cried that I was trapped in a dreadful job assignment and had a boss I really hated at that time. And before I started PE, I was in a job that I didn’t feel passionate about anymore and couldn’t be more different than what I’m doing now — I was working in an FMCG company (fast-moving consumer goods) and leading million-dollar business initiatives for a global skincare brand.

What do you do? Do you let yourself be run over by your situation? Heck no. You step up and make a difference. You fight for what you love and what you believe in.

When you’ve fully implemented Lessons #1, #2, and #4, you would have (1) good clarity of what domain you want to step into and (2) a portfolio of hard and soft skills that you can bring to the table. You are now ready to work towards your ideal career. I’ve written a lot on how to work towards your ideal career:

Endnote

To Nana and all of you who are cluttered by many passions and interests, remember to just get out there and try, do, and build your mastery. Awareness doesn’t come from sitting down, doing nothing, and feeling fearful/conflicted. Awareness comes from stepping forward to gain experience. I wish you all the best in your passion journey. ♥

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

(All website screenshots, Winamp skins, and wallpapers © Celestine Chua)

The Day I Quit My Job to Pursue My Passion: 6 Things to Do Before You Quit Your Job

Celes — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:02:44 +0000

My resignation letter to my ex-company. The envelope is all yellow now as it’s been nearly seven years! (Image: Personal Excellence)

Last year I was spring cleaning and found my resignation letter to my previous company. This was the same letter that officialized my departure from the corporate world and my pursuing my passion. Today, I thought to share it with you:

Dear ****** (my then-manager’s name),

I would like to inform you that I am resigning from my position as Assistant Brand Manager in P&G. My last day will be 30 Sep 2008.

Thank you for the professional and personal development you have assisted me with over the past year. I have always related with fervent passion to everyone that one of the key highlights of P&G is really its people — extremely intelligent, diverse, and assertive individuals who are at the same time spontaneous, positive, and growth-oriented — traits that I take personal pride in upholding as well. I consider just about everyone I have met here to be great friends of mine now, and I will truly miss you all.

My life purpose has taken a different turn in the past few years, between after I accepted my P&G placement offer and before I entered the company. (Celes: I discovered my life purpose in about May 2006 as I’ve shared in my purpose story. This was after I signed the job offer in Sep 2005 but before I joined the company in Sep 2006.) In light of the fork roads before me then, I decided to put my purpose on hold first and join P&G, to experience its critically acclaimed trainings, rich learnings, growth opportunities, and dynamic culture — that I received, and a whole lot more. It has truly been an eventful past 2 years for me. The challenges I have faced in the course of work have undoubtedly made me a stronger and better person and have definitely better prepared me for what is up ahead.

Now, I feel it is finally time for me to move on and devote myself to pursuing my purpose with the same fierce passion and conviction (if not more) that I have done for P&G in the past. It will be a challenging path ahead, but as Randy Pausch puts it, ‘Brick walls are there for a reason — they let us prove how badly we want things and to keep out others who do not want it enough.’

I wish you and everyone the best. I have no doubt that we will continue to stay in touch and hope that the team will continue to have wonderful times. :)

Sincerely,
Celes

I wrote this and handed it to my boss in Jul 2008. I was 24 then and had worked there for two years.

Informing my boss about my resignation was an emotional experience, with me bursting into tears and her tearing up (in a private meeting room of course). For me, my tears were due to sadness of leaving behind the great relationships I had formed in the company to pursue my real passion.

Yet, I knew this had to happen. This is my life purpose, my life. This is something I have to pursue no matter what.

So Sep 30, 2008, I left my job (right smack at the start of the 2008 Asian Financial Crisis no less) to pursue my purpose and passion in life: to help others achieve their highest potential in life and live their best lives.

Today, it’s been almost seven years on this path. PE is a leading authority in personal development with over a million pageviews a month. In fact, we just hit a new (daily) traffic record of ~~46K pageviews last Sunday~~ 58K pageviews today (July 13, 2015) and got featured on life hack giant Lifehacker earlier this week! In a domain like blogging where many blogs come and go, this is something that could only happen after relentless hard work and giving genuine value to others. Many bloggers I knew when I started PE are no longer running their blogs today, probably pursuing something else.

Personally, I’m extremely touched to have this opportunity to support you in your growth every day. To all of you, thank you for being here, be it by reading my articles, being on my newsletter, participating in PE courses, buying PE products, or allowing me to work with you through my coaching. I look forward to helping you achieve your highest goals, together. :)

Are You Thinking of Quitting Your Job?

Now, some of you may be at a crossroads currently about your job. Perhaps you’re feeling dissatisfied. Perhaps you’ve been contemplating quitting. Well, you’re not alone. Lately, many of my clients have been telling me how they’d like to quit their jobs, possibly to pursue something different. In fact, my client F just sent me this recently:

I’ve been doing this job for the past nine years but I don’t love it. I just make the best of it and I do love the people (most) I work with. I am so sick of my job that I’ve even started telling some people at work about wanting to leave. Part of me wonder, Am I doing this to push myself, so I can get out?

To stay or not to stay? How does one decide when to quit? Today, I share six things to do before you quit your job. These are the same pointers I applied before quitting my job. Don’t hand in your resignation letter just yet till you read this guide!

1. Think about what you want in your ideal career

(Image)

Some people quit due to bad bosses, difficult co-workers, or missed promotions. While valid reasons, I urge you to hold your horses first and focus on the big picture. The big picture being, “What is your ideal career? What do you really want to do in an ideal world?”

Because while quitting [due to existing issues] may give you quick relief (especially if you hate your job), this relief isn’t going to last. Soon you’ll face other issues, such as (1) lack of financial security and (2) the question of “What do I do now?”

I’ve seen people quit their jobs without a plan, only to “float” around and not know what to do next. They then get flustered when their cash reserves start depleting. At one point they hop onto a random job to safeguard their job security — only to feel unhappy again after a while. This cycle continues, only to have 5, 10 years pass them by without being closer to what they want (whatever it is).

Your dream job/career comes from knowing what you want first, not by being hasty. Get clarity on your career vision first as this will give you the direction to work toward. Even if you have absolutely no idea what to do, that’s normal — the key is to start thinking. Even if you’re very far away from your ideal career now, knowing what it is will still put you one step ahead.

For example, despite finding my life purpose early on, it took me two years to work out my ideal career based on this purpose. During this time, I focused on working in P&G while thinking how best to pursue my purpose. Subsequently, because I had given due thought to my ideal career, I could act swiftly and boldly when it was time to do so — hence achieving quick results in my passion (I was already getting over 1K pageviews/day and had secured clients and trainings within the first few months of my business).

Your ideal career can be anything, from a salaried job to starting your business. Here are my two exercises for you:

Message/Medium: What messages do you wish to drive in this world? What mediums do you wish to use to drive these messages? Your ideal career should be a perfect mesh of your ideal messages and mediums. Read: How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium
Mind-Body-Heart-Soul: What are the needs of your mind, body, heart, and soul? These determine your life needs. Your ideal career should perfectly match them. Read: Passion or Money? (Scroll to the middle of the article for the exercise)

(The first exercise is about identifying the “HOW” of your ideal career, while the second is to design your ideal career based on your life needs. Both should ultimately converge to the same answer.)

Say you have difficulty envisioning what you want. If so, identify what you don’t want to do first, including things you don’t like in your current/past jobs and things you already know you don’t want to do (e.g. perhaps you don’t like accounting and you know you don’t ever want to deal with accounts).

Then, use your answers to get a clue of what you do want. E.g., if you don’t like routine work, perhaps it’s because you like work that’s dynamic and constantly exposing you to something new. If you dislike unappreciative bosses, perhaps it’s because appreciation and recognition are important to you. List out your likes, then proceed to the two exercises above with these likes as your reference.

(Of course, if you’ve never pursued any major goals in life nor branched out of your comfort zone before, you may need to gain more experience to get a solid answer. Finding your ideal career is about both inward reflection and outward experience. Read: How To Know What You Want To Do In Life)

2. Evaluate your current job against your ideal career

With your ideal career formulated, evaluate your current job with these three questions:

Does this job align with your highest self? Your job should align with your values and beliefs. If it has messages you don’t stand for, like a company that sells tobacco when you are against smoking or a boss who scams people, then it’s clearly not a fit.
Will this job support you in realizing your ideal career? Even if your current job isn’t your ideal one, if it supports you in realizing your ideal path — be it directly or indirectly — then it has a role to play. Let’s say you want to start your business but you’re in a programming job. Perhaps you are learning useful programming skills that will help you in your business, which will likely be IT-related, next time. So even if your day job has no direct link with your ideal career, it does indirectly support you and hence can be leveraged as such.
Does this job match your current life priorities? Your job should align with your life priorities. Maybe your priority now is to earn money but your current job pays way below market rate for your skills. Even if it has a nice work environment, it’s clearly not a match because it’s not going to help you accumulate wealth quickly. Or perhaps one of your life priorities is family but your job has terrible work-life balance. If so, this is clearly not a fit either.

In an ideal world, your job should give a “yes” for all three questions. If not, you should take active steps to work towards your ideal path. If your current job gives a “no” for two or more questions, you should most definitely look into quitting soon as it’s clearly a bad fit.

For me, my previous job in P&G wasn’t a fit with my highest self. My life purpose is to help others achieve their highest consciousness, yet I felt the industry, which was fast-moving consumer goods, was very much linked to consumerism. Of course one can argue that consumer products improve people’s lives (I use products like shampoo and detergent after all), yet selling consumer goods and convincing people why product X is better than others just isn’t my ideal way of helping others.

Still, I joined as the job served a purpose — it was an excellent platform to develop myself. Like a little bird learning to fly, I had to build my skills first to pursue my purpose. So even though the job wasn’t a fit with my ideal path, it indirectly supported me in my ideal path by giving me the outlet to grow. The job also paid well, hence serving another of my then-priorities to save money. I figured this would be important for a rainy day.

By the end of two years, even though I was paid very well, had great career advancement opportunities, and got to travel often, these meant little to me. As I had already achieved my initial objectives to grow and save some money, the job no longer enabled me in my path. Like a bird that had strengthened its wings, I was ready to quit to pursue my passion. :)

3. Have a plan

Over the years, I’ve seen coaches, trainers, and bloggers glorify how they left their “boring 9-5 day jobs” to “live the free life” that gives them “5-figure monthly / 6-figure annual income” while “working only X hours/week” (and then proceed to promote their XYZ course on how to achieve this). I feel that this has caused people to recklessly quit their jobs, thinking they can just start a blog/business and earn lots of money just like that — which obviously isn’t true. You should NOT expect magic bullets in your career transition journey, especially if what you’re switching to a very different field. Read: Are You Looking For a Magic Bullet For Your Goals?

My decision to quit and pursue my passion was very deliberate and was in fact over two years in the making:

Before I joined P&G, I had already found my life purpose. I knew P&G wasn’t my final stop but joined as it’d support me in my ultimate vision (as I shared above).
The question then came to, How long to stay before quitting? I gave myself a 4- to 5- year time frame.
After one year of working (and while still in the company), I began to explore various ways to pursue my passion, even looking up jobs in NGOs. I eventually realized (as I shared in Passion or Money?) that to realize my purpose in the exact way I wanted, I needed to start my own business.
In my second year, I continued to focus on growing and excelling in my job. I also constantly thought about my ultimate vision for my passion, such as when I was out on business trips and alone in my hotel room at night.
After two years, I was ready to quit. I worked out a proper plan, set targets and deadlines, and started my blog. (I would relentlessly toil at PE for the next three years, never resting as I built new content and actively marketed the blog.)

As I tell my passive income course participants, success [in any business] comes from grit, hard work, strategy, and action. If you think you can just quit your job, “wing it” (in whatever you want to do), and then see massive results, you’re wrong. You need a plan, a plan that — at least — answers the following:

What is your ideal vision? What are your specific targets?
What is your plan to get there?
What are your specific action steps?
What is your timeline for these steps?
What if things don’t work out? What is your contingency plan? (See point #5 on contingency plan below.)

4. Build your bridge

(Image)

There are two ways to realize your ideal career. One is to quit your job right away and then work towards your ideal career from scratch. The other is to transit by building a “bridge” to link you from where you are currently to your ideal career, and then quit when you are ready.

For me, I quit and started my passion from scratch. That’s because (1) I already knew this is what I want to do for life, so it didn’t matter whether I saw initial results or not — I was going to make it happen, and (2) My previous job had very long hours and heavy workload. Since I was working literally every day till midnight, I had absolutely no time/energy for my passion. The best way to move forward was really to quit and devote myself to my new path.

While I chose to quit, I do not recommend that you do so unless you’ve a clear idea of what to do and an extremely clear plan of action. Quitting a job will create a host of other variables, namely loss of a financial source and opening an employment gap, which may create other problems if you’re not prepared for them. Rather, I recommend to build a path (your bridge) that transits you from where you are now to your end goal, and then quit when you’re ready. For example,

If you want a job with better pay / work-life balance / opportunities, secure such a job before quitting. Job search isn’t an overnight affair; it can take 3-6 months (or more) to get a good job. Read: 30 Tips To Ace Your Job Interview
If you want to start your business, do your due diligence first. Research, network, create a plan, set your targets, build your skills, get initial clients, and if possible get some income flowing in. This way, you can immediately step up your earnings once you switch to full time. This was what happened to my client from last year, who recently quit her job to pursue her passion. Before that, she focused on setting up her website, starting her training certification, gaining initial followers, and getting initial clients. As she has laid out her business foundation and already saw initial results, quitting means she can now create more results (more clients, more income) with her efforts, as opposed to dealing with the unpredictability of starting something new.
If you want to make a switch in career path, identify the gap between your current point and end point. For example, perhaps you need to acquire XYZ skills, gain some experience, or even go for further studies first. Then, work on these factors.

You know you are ready to quit when the opportunity cost of staying on in your job is higher than quitting (i.e. you’ve more to lose by staying on). That’s when it’s time to make the move. :)

5. Have a contingency plan

Some say you should burn all bridges with your past so that you would dash forward in your new goal. They say you shouldn’t have a plan B so you would fully focus on making your new goal work out.

I think it’s bollocks and terrible advice. Having a contingency plan is necessary because there is always a chance that things won’t work out. The intent here isn’t to be pessimistic, but to ensure that all your bases are covered and there is nothing that’ll stop you from achieving your vision.

When I quit my job, I had a contingency plan. Firstly, I was to pursue my passion fully for a year or so. (I had savings to last me at least three years, assuming conservative expenses.) I was not to worry about my revenue but simply to live my purpose fully.

Next, say I were to achieve zero results at the end of this (quite unlikely, because it’s not possible to achieve zero results if you work on something non-stop for a year). What would I do? Like I shared in this Ask Celes post, I would regroup, return to corporate to gain more skills and savings, and then return after another 1-2 years to pursue my passion. And I would do this over and over till I succeed.

Interestingly, after creating this plan, I stopped feeling fearful about “what if’s.” As opposed to wondering What if I fail?, I was able to fully concentrate on my path ahead. Because I had already anticipated the worst-case scenario and planned for it, I knew there was nothing to be afraid of. This lack of fear arguably helped me pursue my passion without reservations and achieve my best results in my given time frame.

Contingency planning is part of any smart goal planning, especially one with a potential downside. When you prepare for the worst, it means you don’t have to worry about it happening (as much), but instead concentrate on what you need to do.

Think about what you’d like to pursue and consider these questions:

What is the worst-case scenario?
How can you ensure this scenario doesn’t happen? (Then, incorporate these steps into your plan.)
What if this scenario happened anyway? What would you do? (Your solution shouldn’t be to “quit,” but to identify next steps that’ll move you toward your ultimate vision.)

6. Get your **** together

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Two to three years after I quit my job, I bumped into an associate director from P&G. She is a Japanese lady, and while we didn’t work directly with each other, we knew each other and said hello every once in a while.

After a few simple exchanges, she told me how everyone [in the company] was still talking about me with interest. Surprised, I asked, “Why?” She said, “Because you’re one of the few success stories of someone who quit to start her own thing and is actually doing very well. And by herself too, at such a young age.”

Surprised, I said, “Thank you.”

It was interesting to hear that because for me, what I had built didn’t come as a surprise. Rather, it was a natural result of deliberate planning and consistent action. Yet I would learn, after years of coaching, that many have trouble with just that — planning and taking action. And while the reasons are large and varied across people, they boil down to these consistent factors:

Fear of “what if’s”
Lack of self-belief
Lack of clarity of what the individual wants
Confusing list of internal priorities (linking to #3 about lack of clarity)

My questions to you are these: “How much do you want to make your vision happen? How much work are you willing to put in?” Because unless you’re committed to your vision and ready to put in the due work (and in the process sort out your own fears), you’d be in for a tough road ahead. You’d be constantly bouncing between being motivated and demotivated and grappling with an array of fears, in turn jeopardizing your own chances of success.

Here’s what I recommend: If you have unaddressed fears about what you want to do, work through them first. Identify what they are and tackle them one by one. If you’re financially strapped, stay on in your job first. Build your bridge (see point #4 above), then quit only when you’re financially able to. If you’re worried about failing, create a contingency plan ready (point #5). Build a solid plan (point #3), and then take action on it.

Sort through your ****. Be clear about what you want. Don’t take one step forward only to take two steps back; rather, stand still, work through your stuff, then take action. Because hey: when you are clear about what you want and follow up with relentless action, the universe will give you what you want. I know that because I’ve seen it happen, not just for me, but for countless of my clients, course participants, and readers. And I know it’s waiting to happen to you.

Check out as well:

How To Make Life’s Hardest Decisions: 3 Decision Making Methods
How To Deal With Uncertainty
How To Pursue Your Passion (series) — A large series of articles I’ve written over the years on how to pursue your passion and achieve success doing so

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

Is It Too Late to Pursue My Dreams? [Video]

Celes — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:34:16 +0000

Hey everyone! Today I’m excited to address reader Marie-Anne’s question on whether it’s too late to pursue her dreams. While Marie-Anne is 60, many people ask this same question in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Most people tend to assume that it’s too late to pursue what they want to do, especially if they’ve been working in an unrelated field.

So, is it too late? And if it’s not, what can we do? Watch my reply above.

Links related to the video:

What do you think of the video? What is a goal that you wish to pursue and a step you can start taking right away?

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

Affirmation Challenge Day 12 [Wealth]: ‘I’m financially abundant, and money comes to me naturally.’

Celes — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 14:13:28 +0000

This is Day 12 of the 15-Day Affirmation Challenge held in July 2014, where we practice positive affirmations for 15 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.

Dear everyone, welcome to Day 12 of our 15-Day Affirmation Challenge! :D

We’ve three more affirmation tasks till our challenge ends! As we’ll be having a break day between Days 14 and 15 (just like we had the break day between Days 7 and 8), we still have four more days before this challenge concludes. Let’s make the best out of these remaining four days, shall we? :D

Here is the overview of all the posts for the challenge so far:

Affirmation Challenge announcement and signup details: 15-Day Affirmation Challenge | 460 Participants!
Affirmation Challenge Day 1 [New Beginning] | 78 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 2 [Self-Love] | 79 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 3 [Ability] | 87 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 4 [Setbacks] | 55 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 5 [Gratitude] | 63 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 6 [Self-Worth] | 68 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 7 [Opportunities] | 78 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Week 1 Review | 38 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 8 [Physical Looks] | 61 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 9 [Relationships] | 31 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 10 [Love] | 34 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 11 [Career] | 9 Comments

Now, let’s move to today’s task, which is on…

Day 12: [Wealth]

Today’s affirmation: “I’m financially abundant, and money comes to me naturally.”

Have you ever had problems with money before? Some form of worry about money, even if in a little way?

Be it not having enough pocket money to buy your favorite stationery when you were in high school; to budgeting for a major goal like your apartment rental, wedding, or first house; to worrying about whether you have enough savings to pull you through for the next month, all of us have had our share of money concerns. For some of us, our money woes may have started from when we were young, from being born in a financially constrained household. For others, our money woes may have started as we grew older and started having needs that outweighed our financial earning prowess.

Because of the increasingly important role that money plays in our society today, it’s no wonder that so many of us have negative thoughts and emotions surrounding money — be it ad-hoc worries or general negativity towards money itself. For example, back in the 1970s, my mom could buy a bowl of Wanton mee for only 10 cents. People could also buy a four-room unit from HDB (Singapore’s Housing Development Board) for just $20,000 SGD. At that time, a graduate’s starting pay was about $1,000 per month. Well, today, merely 40 years later, a graduate’s starting pay has only doubled (for a typical graduate) to tripled (if you’re a strong contender), but Wanton mee and housing prices have increased by over 25 times (ouch)! Order a bowl of Wanton mee in a hawker center and it’ll easily cost you $2.50 to $3.00 (to over $4 if you eat at the food court), while a four-room resale unit in Serangoon area can easily cost you $500,000 (that’s half a million!). And I’m sure such rapid inflation can be observed in other countries too, especially developed areas.

Still, despite the increasing financial pressure on everyone, money is not at fault here. One thing that I teach in The Passive Income System (my passive income course) is that money is merely a neutral agent — a medium that we use to transact value. Inflation aside, in a world where everything is constant, we receive $X of money by virtue of X amount of value that we give to others. If we’re not receiving our ideal $X now, the issue isn’t really money itself, but our lack of means to earn this money (which can be tied to not having the right skills, not having figured out the mediums to earn this money, not offering value that people want, etc.)

Just like your ideal career, achieving financial abundance is a huge topic that can’t be covered in one simple affirmation task. Rather, today, I’m going to get you moving towards the goal of financial abundance: by identifying your self-limiting money beliefs, replacing them, and taking steps towards your financial goal. Now, let’s get started! :D

Your Task Today

Identify at least one self-limiting money beliefs that you have. Money is something that many of us have many deeply embedded (negative) beliefs about. Consider the following self-limiting money beliefs:
- I hate money.
- Money is the root of all evil.
- If I didn’t need to deal with money, my life would be stress-free.
- I don’t need a lot of money to live.
- I don’t want to be rich.
- I don’t know how to earn money.
Select whichever belief(s) that resonate with you; write more if you like.
Challenge these belief(s). All self-limiting beliefs have roots that support their existence. What are the roots for yours, and do they justify having such belief(s)? Chances are, the answer is “no.”
- For example, someone who always thinks, I hate money, may be doing so because he/she has always struggled with money as a kid and has never been able to keep his/her money in his possession. However, does it justify having such a belief though? Maybe the issue is his/her lack of good financial habits, not money itself!
Create new positive belief(s). What new positive belief(s) can you use to replace the one(s) from Step #1 with? It/They should support your financial goals (that you specified in Step #1 of yesterday’s task on ideal career). Continuing the above examples
- I hate money. -> I love money.
- Money is the root of all evil. -> Money is just a neutral agent; it is what we make out to be. It’s not evil.
- If I didn’t need to deal with money, my life would be stress-free. -> Money has nothing to do with my stress. If money is giving me stress, then it’s about learning to handle it objectively and well.
- I don’t need a lot of money to live. -> Regardless of my living needs, having more money allows me to make greater change in this world.
- I don’t want to be rich. -> I want to be rich (so that I can pursue all my goals and dreams with no constraints)!
- I don’t know how to earn money. -> Earning (a lot of) money is a skill that anyone, including me, can learn, starting today.
Identify one positive step you can take towards your financial goal. For example:
- Target to save 20% more than I usually do every month. (Frugality goal)
- Read books on self-made millionaires to learn their financial secrets and practices so that I can practicing them. (Financial literacy goal)
- Negotiate with my boss for a 10% raise as I’m currently being paid lesser than the industry average. (Income goal) — Note by Celes: In case this sounds crazy, PE reader and my personal friend Lizette has time and again negotiated for a higher pay from her company. How? By simply knowing her rights, knowing the industry standards, and knowing how to present her value artfully to her company. Here are some salary negotiation pieces that may help: How to Negotiate Your Salary @ Huffington Post | Forbes.
- Launch a new product/service X in my business that matches my audience’s top needs. (Wealth generation goal)
Say your new belief(s), along with today’s affirmation:

“I’m financially abundant, and money comes to me naturally.”

(If you think it’s silly to say them out loud, you can say them silently in your heart.)

I encourage you to write down your new belief(s) and today’s affirmation so that you can always see them and commit them to your heart. Repeat them every day to yourself, for as many times and as long as needed, until they become part of your default thinking.

PS: We’ve been doing a lot of mini-goal-setting for our life areas in the Affirmation Challenge. In Live a Better Life in 30 Days (30DLBL), the premium 30-day life transformation program at PE, you will get to work on LONG-TERM goal-setting: from envisioning your IDEAL life; to creating your life map filled with your five-year, three-year, and one-year goals; to creating your action plan to realize said goals. As opposed to the micro-life-planning which we’re doing in the Affirmation Challenge, 30DLBL is designed to help you plan out the macro-aspects of your life. If you don’t have 30DLBL yet, be sure to check it out!

Read: Live a Better Life in 30 Days

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Wealth]

Today’s affirmation wallpaper, for download:

Download (right click and save): [1366×768] [1600×900] [1920×1080]

Share Your Results!

Share your results, check out other participants’ responses, and interact with each other in the comments section! Remember, this challenge is a community effort: by openly engaging in the discussion, not only will you help others, you’ll also help yourself.

If you think today’s affirmation has benefited you, do share it with your friends and family.

Once you’re done, proceed to Day 13 here: Affirmation Challenge, Day 13 [Health]

(Images: Flower, Money notes)

Affirmation Challenge Day 11 [Career]: ‘I’m doing what I love, and earning lots of money doing it.’

Celes — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 13:47:11 +0000

This is Day 11 of the 15-Day Affirmation Challenge held in July 2014, where we practice positive affirmations for 15 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.

Dear everyone, welcome to Day 11 of our 15-Day Affirmation Challenge! :D

Here is the overview of all the posts for the challenge so far:

Affirmation Challenge announcement and signup details: 15-Day Affirmation Challenge | 460 Participants!
Affirmation Challenge Day 1 [New Beginning] | 78 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 2 [Self-Love] | 79 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 3 [Ability] | 87 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 4 [Setbacks] | 55 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 5 [Gratitude] | 63 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 6 [Self-Worth] | 68 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 7 [Opportunities] | 78 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Week 1 Review | 38 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 8 [Physical Looks] | 61 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 9 [Relationships] | 26 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 10 [Love] | 18 Comments

Now, let’s move to today’s task, which is on…

Day 11: [Career]

Today’s affirmation: “I’m doing what I love, and earning lots of money doing it.”

Work and money. These two areas of our life wheel are often intertwined. After all, for most of us, we work to earn money, and for more of us, we can’t earn money unless we work.

At least, that’s what we think.

I can understand this mentality, because it wasn’t too long ago when I was working in a day job, spending long hours daily doing work I didn’t love, and doing monthly salary budgeting just so I could save up enough money to “safely” to quit my job one day. Shortly after, I left my day job, and worked on turning my passion into a career. From first building awareness of my work, to building credibility about what I do, to getting my name out there, soon I was successfully earning a living from doing what I love.

And then subsequently, I decided that exchanging my time for money isn’t something I want to do forever, so I began to turn my business into a passive-income business. I identified ways in which I could deliver value to others passively, and then created those as passive-income streams. I identified the activities that were taking up my time, and worked on detaching myself from those activities, such as delegating and outsourcing, so that I wouldn’t be a cog in my business.

It took about four years after I quit my day job before I was able to declare myself as retired (at 28). Since then, I’ve pledged myself to a life doing only the things I want and I love, independent of monetary considerations. Sounds like a dream come true of course, but lest anyone tries to attribute this as the result of luck meeting opportunity and the like, I want to emphasize that it’s something that I worked hard every day over the period of four years to create for myself, out of nothing, where “no” visible opportunities existed, so that it could come true. And the thing is that it can happen for you too… if you want it to.

The process of successfully turning one’s passion into a career is by no means easy and requires many steps, one of which requires breaking many deeply embedded beliefs surrounding work, life, and money. It’s nothing short of me creating a six to eight module course just to adequately convey the lessons (and I do intend to create a Passion & Money course in the future).

Hence, my plan today isn’t to convince you that you can turn your passion into a (successful) career, as it’s way outside of the scope of this challenge. Rather, for today, I would like to get you thinking this question, What if it is possible for me to do what I love and earn money from it? and for those of you who are already doing so (congratulations!!!), the question to reflect on is, How can I earn lots of money doing so?

Now, let’s get started!

Your Task Today

Identify your ideal career. If I am to ask you, What is your ideal career?, what would it be? Would you be running your business or working as part of a company? What would you be doing? Who would you be serving (since every career has a customer or target audience whom you are addressing)? How much would you be earning? (Remember, I said “ideal,” not “realistic”! :) Don’t give a realistic figure but your ideal one!!)
Identify three things blocking you from pursuing your ideal career now. Every goal has obstacles, like we have learned in Day 4 on setbacks. As I mentioned in that day’s post, “the bigger your goals and dreams, the bigger your obstacles.” If your ideal career is a grandiose one, it likely has huge obstacles.
Well, what are three things blocking you from your ideal career now? List them. (If you only have one to two main obstacles blocking you in this goal, then you can just list these one to two obstacles!)
Identify solutions for these obstacles. How can you break the obstacles you listed in Step #2? Identify clear action steps.
Take action! Take action on the steps you have identified in Step #3! Include deadlines where applicable, and get working on them — starting today if possible!
Say today’s affirmation:

“I’m doing what I love, and earning lots of money doing it.”

(If you think it’s silly to say this out loud, you can say it silently in your heart.)

I encourage you to write down today’s affirmation so that you can always see it and commit it to your heart. Repeat it every day to yourself, for as many times and as long as needed, until it becomes part of your default thinking.

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Career]

Today’s affirmation wallpaper, for download:

Download (right click and save): [1366×768] [1600×900] [1920×1080]

Share Your Results!

If you think today’s affirmation has benefited you, do share it with your friends and family.

Once you’re done, proceed to Day 12 here: Affirmation Challenge, Day 12 [Wealth]

(Images: Flower, Dandelions)

Affirmation Challenge Day 7 [Opportunities]: ‘Opportunities are everywhere. It’s up to me to find (or create) them and make things happen.’

Celes — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 15:45:33 +0000

This is Day 7 of the 15-Day Affirmation Challenge held in July 2014, where we practice positive affirmations for 15 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.

Dear everyone, welcome to Day 7 of our 15-Day Affirmation Challenge! :D

Here is the overview of all the posts for the challenge so far:

Affirmation Challenge announcement and signup details: 15-Day Affirmation Challenge | 440 Participants!
Affirmation Challenge Day 1 [New Beginning] | 70 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 2 [Self-Love] | 70 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 3 [Ability] | 74 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 4 [Setbacks] | 42 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 5 [Gratitude] | 41 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 6 [Self-Worth] | 14 Comments

Now, let’s move to today’s task, which is on…

Day 7: [Opportunities]

Today’s affirmation: “Opportunities are everywhere. It’s up to me to find them (or create them) and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.”

About one year before I started PE, I remember looking for ways to pursue my passion to help others grow. This was between years 2007 and 2008. (The next four paragraphs are snippets from my article, Passion or Money?)

As personal development was at an infancy stage in Singapore (it still is actually), I couldn’t find any jobs in this area. (And I’m talking about proper jobs where you get remunerated, not be a “volunteer” coach and work long hours without compensation.) If I had told anyone I wanted to be a life coach, they would have gone, “Huh?” If anything, most people here see self-help as something kooky for people who have no life, who are neurotic, or have gone off the deep end. (I believe this perception is changing now.)

Since there were no opportunities in this domain, I then thought about seeking out a societal cause, since it’s within the scope of helping people too. I brainstormed on local non-profit organizations with socially responsible causes which I could join. I checked out the United Nations website to look for job opportunities. I expanded my search to international non-profit career portals and scouted for opportunities in NGOs, social enterprises and the like. It even got to the stage where I was willing to relocate myself overseas, using my own money, and work for any worthy enterprise that matched my purpose.

Bear in mind that in deciding to switch to a different field, particularly non-profit, I was prepared to get a pay cut of 50% (or even more), since such fields simply don’t offer the same competitive benefits as a career in brand management or consulting would (of which the former was what I was doing).

For each opportunity I came across, I always found myself having to battle against considerations such as 1) the pay and benefits not being anywhere close to what I was getting in my current job, 2) the causes of the organizations not being something I was 101% passionate about, 3) severe red tape issues in non-profit organizations, 4) lack of best-in-class practices in the non-profit world compared to profit-driven industries. My friends whose friends had trod the non-profit path would give me the same watchouts. I felt myself reaching a dead end.

It took me a while before I felt that something was amiss. Why am I trying to compromise on my own desires? I thought. Why am I limiting myself based on what’s out there?

I realized that I was simply boxing myself based on what I was seeing before me, and then I should no sooner break free of this mindset. I then got to work and identified my ideal vision for the pursuit of my passion, which includes being able to touch millions of lives around the world, using an arsenal of mediums to spread my message of growth, being location-free to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and earning more money than whatever I was earning before. I then sent in my resignation letter, created my game plan based on this vision, and got to work. The rest is history.

My reason for sharing this story is that the switching point that helped me to be where I am today is when I realized that there are literally opportunities everywhere in this world, and it’s up to me to create them and make things happen. While I was already a proactive person before (or I wouldn’t be thinking about how to pursue my passion and seeking related opportunities while having a lucrative job), I was still boxing myself in based on opportunities out there and trying to limit myself to these opportunities before me. It was only when I realized that opportunities are everywhere and the onus is on me to figure out what exactly I want and make them happen.

Because the universe ain’t gonna hand the good stuff to people on a platter. The universe makes the good stuff — from the ideal relationship, to the ideal job, to the ideal friendships, to financial abundance, to the perfect health, etc. — difficult to obtain so that the people who really want it, the people who really deserve it, will find a way to make them happen.

Today, your task is to identify an area where you’ve been feeling blocked in and create the opportunity to succeed in it!

Your Task Today

Identify an area of your life where you feel blocked by a lack of choices/opportunities. This can be something that you’ve already listed in the previous tasks or a completely new area you haven’t explored. For example:
- Friendships, where you feel you don’t have the opportunity to meet like-minded people
- Romantic relationships, where you feel you don’t have the opportunity to meet the right person
- Career, where you feel you don’t have the opportunity to be in your dream job
- Health, where you feel you frequently lack the opportunities to eat healthily, be it due to the lack of healthy eating options in your neighborhood or due to people around you offering you unhealthy food
- Finance, where you feel you don’t have the opportunity to be rich even though you are smart and talented
Ask yourself, “How can I create the opportunity to succeed in this area?” For example:
- Friendships: Look for meet-up groups with like-minded people on Meetup.com and join at least two meetups a week
- Romantic relationships: Open myself to singles events. Join more social activities and meetups which are opportunities to meet new people. Explore online dating.
- Career: Contact people working in the field you desire, and consult them for advice and tips. (Among other steps I’ve listed in Day 4’s career example.)
- Health: Take control of my diet and start preparing my own healthy meals, as opposed to eating based on the options in my environment
- Finance: Figure out what I’m really passionate about. Then, create ways — perhaps even start my own business — where I can add value to others based on this passion. Scale up from here. (Read: Million Dollar Tip Series and Successful Businesses Interview Series.)
Take action on what you’ve written in Step #2! Create specific action steps and commit them to your calendar. Remember, there’s no point planning without taking action, and there’s only so much I can do via the daily affirmation tasks. The onus is now on you to take action on them!
Say today’s affirmation. Close your eyes. For the next 10 to 15 seconds, imagine your ideal vision for this area where you ~~feel~~ felt blocked. Now, visualize yourself breaking through the obstacle(s) and paving the way to realize your ideal vision. Visualize yourself CREATING A PATH, WHERE THE PATH DIDN’T EXIST BEFORE, TO MAKE YOUR VISION COME TO LIFE. CONTINUE THIS VISUALIZATION FOR AS LONG AS YOU DESIRE, until the vision is fully etched in your mind.
Now, with the vision clear in your mind, say today’s affirmation:

“Opportunities are everywhere.
It’s up to me to find them (or create them) and
MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.”

(If you think it’s silly to say them out loud, you can say them silently in your heart.)

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Opportunities]

Today’s affirmation wallpaper, for download:

Download (right click and save): [1366×768] [1600×900] [1920×1080]

Share Your Results!

If you think today’s affirmation has benefited you, do share it with your friends and family.

Once you’re done, proceed to Affirmation Challenge Week 1 Review and Catchup!

(Images: Flower, Girl blowing bubbles)

Should You Start a High-Profit Business or Do Something You’re Passionate About But Isn’t Lucrative?

Celes — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:09:00 +0000

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“I’m earning well from an established business but I’m not passionate about it anymore. Should I continue with this business or start a new business which I’m passionate about but does not have the same money-making potential? The latter will be more enjoyable but will be a risk.” — Ash

Hi Ash, this sounds like our proverbial question of, “Should I pursue passion or money?” I have addressed this question before in my article Passion or Money?

Without repeating what I have written in there, my short answer is not to box yourself with an either money-only (A) or passion-only (B) scenario. Rather, create a Scenario C which has the best of both worlds — money AND passion. That’s because neither A nor B would not make you truly happy since you would lack something at the end of the day (lack of money in B scenario and lack of passion in A scenario).

So applying this to your situation, let’s say you were to continue on with your current, established business. Even though it would make you financially wealthy, it would make you emotionally and spiritually empty since it’s not something you enjoy. Here, this is Scenario A, the money-only scenario. On the other hand, let’s say you abandon your business for your passion — yet this doesn’t have as high a money-making potential as A. This would leave you unsatisfied since you’d not be as financially abundant compared to Scenario A. This then leads you to Scenario B, the passion-only scenario (somewhat).

Given that both scenarios pretty much suck since they don’t realize your full desires, you should look for a third path, Scenario C, that will give you the best of both worlds. How do you get there? Some possibilities:

Run your established business (X) while starting your new business (Y). This way, you can earn money through X while waiting for Y to gain traction. Transit to doing Y full time when it shows an adequate amount of money-making-ability, one you can quickly scale up when you do it full time.
If X is taking up all your time, delegate, outsource, or create systems in X to free time up for Y.
If your new business idea Y has fundamentally low money-making potential, improve on it to increase its profitability. Money is a function of the value you give, so as long as you deliver massive value, you should be able to generate massive revenue.
If you can’t generate much money from it, that means you aren’t giving value that people want. Return to the drawing board and create an idea that lets you do that. Read How To Get From Earning $6/hr to $1,000/hr and Million Dollar Tip Series.
Start a totally new business Z that (a) has high money-making potential and (b) is something you are passionate about.

My Example

Example #1: From Passion Or Money, to Passion AND Money

I used to be in a similar passion-or-money situation where I was in a well-paying job in a Fortune 100 firm which wasn’t my passion (this was before I started PE). I wanted to pursue my passion, my purpose to help others grow, by starting my own blog and personal development business of coaching/training. However, since I would be starting this business from scratch, without prior formal experience, my passion would likely not generate any revenue for me — for quite a while.

Not wanting to settle with either passion or money though, I quit my day job with the intent to pursue my passion and earn more than I used to. In the beginning when I had no income (since I had just quit my job and all), I gave private tuition so I would have some cash flow to offset my expenses. After I started generating revenue from my passion (which was within the 4th month of my business; earlier than expected), I stopped giving tuition. I then focused my efforts on growing the business, which then led to more revenue.

Today, my monthly revenue from PE is higher than my salary in my previous job. While it sounds like a dream come true, this could happen because I first created the vision — a path with passion AND money. Say if I were to accept that I could have passion or money only — what’s going to happen? Under this paradigm of thought, I wouldn’t have formulated a vision of passion and money. How could I, if I didn’t even think that this scenario existed? Given that, I most certainly not have taken actions to make it happen. Here, the ironic concept of self-fulfilling prophecy would play out where I would take actions that’d give me passion or money only and hence create the very scenario of passion or money only.

(I have detailed the early phases of my passion journey here: Passion or Money?, How To Overcome Fear Of Loss And Pursue Your Dreams, How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium, Pursuing Your Passion With No Money, and Passion Paycheck.)

Example #2: Using Money to Expand on Passion

I’ve built PE to the point where it’s generating passive income each month, from Google Adsense (advertising), to my e-books, to e-courses, to royalty fees of my products, not including active income that I earn from coaching and training.

Given that PE is earning me passive income, technically I could do nothing and relax every day. I could also just do the exact same thing I’ve been doing in the past few years — write articles, do 1–1 coaching, and conduct online courses. In this scenario, I would most definitely secure good and stable money.

Yet, this is a path which I wouldn’t feel immense passion for. I’m not saying that I don’t like writing articles, coaching, or running courses — I love them and I see them as staples in my business till I die. However, I wouldn’t feel crazily excited if my current routine of business activities was to stay exactly the same for the next 50 years. That’s because I wouldn’t feel like I was innovating, stretching myself, and hence doing my utmost best to help others. Rather, I would much prefer to constantly be trying new things, experimenting with new projects, and taking on new activities that allow me to help more people and in a greater capacity, all while doing what I already love (the writing and coaching).

This brings me to my original point about not settling for an either-or, A or B situation, but to go for a Scenario C that consists of the best of both worlds — passion and money.

So given that I now have the benefit of a business with a high reach (over a million pageviews a month) and ongoing income, this means I don’t need to worry too much about doing only things with a ROI (rate of return). Rather, I can be more liberal in how I spend my time (and money) to create better, more fulfilling workdays:

Hiring an assistant. When I started, I did everything myself to reduce costs. However, after earning steady income with my business, I started outsourcing and hiring contractors between 2012 and 2014. As of 2015, I have an assistant who does an array of tasks for me, from administrative tasks to simple graphic work. Here, I’m using money to help me create more effective and enjoyable workdays by cutting out the admin work (which I don’t really enjoy) and doing the stuff that I’m good at and enjoy.
Creating video content. My blog started off being articles-based and recently I’m looking to create videos as a way of increasing engagement with my audience. Even though videos don’t really earn me money AND video equipment is expensive (I’ve spent several grand procuring video gear), I’m able to do this because the other parts of my business generates the revenue. Here, I’m working on videos out of passion, without worry about money.
Travel freely. Between 2011 and 2013, I spent almost 50% of my time overseas, traveling across different places in United States, Europe, India, and South Africa. These trips weren’t really for business but more for personal growth and exploration which is becoming a better person. Because my business generates automated-revenue and I had gracious readers housing me in many of my destinations (which removed accommodation costs), I didn’t need to worry about travel expenses or earning money and could focus on maximizing my travels.
More new projects. This is a random thought but something I’m considering for the future is perhaps to start a foundation or some kind of free-hang-out where people can meet other PE readers, get social support, and free help/consultation. I’ve no idea how exactly I’m going to realize either but this is a long-term idea that I may look into in the future. And in either case, money wouldn’t be the key focus — passion is. If anything, I may likely need to use money from my core business to fund this project.

As you can see, given that my business is generating steady revenue, it gives me more liberty to embark on new projects and make decisions based on passion/desire, without overt worries about money. So here, I’m creating a Scenario C of passion and money by leveraging my money inflow to create more passion.

Endnote

The long and the short is not to box yourself with either money or passion only. Identify that Scenario C that lets you achieve everything you want. (Day 2 of Live a Better Life in 30 Days is about setting the vision for your ideal life.)

Obviously, Scenario C will not happen overnight or over-month just by virtue of you identifying it, but the point is to form the vision, create a solid plan, and then take action.

Even if you’re not able to take action towards Scenario C at the moment, then pick the better path between A and B in the short term, while taking baby steps towards C.

Because by boxing yourself between A and B and choosing only one of the 2, you will never be truly happy. You will be faced with an either-or situation which will only leave you mildly satisfied at best and immensely unhappy at worst, since you are not getting the best out of your life in this scenario.

Remember, you were not born to compromise. You were not born to “make do” with what you have. You were born to live your greatest life of all. This is something you have to create for yourself, with your own hands, because no one is going to hand that to you.

Good luck, and I wish you all the best in your new business / job / whatever you decide to do. :)

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium

Celes — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:48:08 +0000

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Last Saturday, I conducted a workshop on “How To Discover Your Right Career” for 50 participants. During the workshop, I shared what it takes to discover a career that you want to do for life.

The truth is, the channels we use to express ourselves are often temporary. These channels are the careers we take on, our jobs, our societal roles, and so on. The message we want to deliver to the world though, is permanent. So if we focus on our message instead of our medium, it leaves us with endless outlets we can use to express our message. By message, I’m really referring to our life purpose; what we want to achieve and bring to this world through our existence on Earth.

For example, my life message is “To touch others’ lives, help them achieve their highest potential and live their best lives; To achieve my highest potential and live consciously and freely in truth, love, and power.” Consequently, I use all kinds of mediums around me to express this message. I use my blog to write articles to help others grow. I coach 1-1 to bring the best out of others. I train and speak to move others to their best lives. These are the three mediums I’ve identified as most compatible with my message back before I first started pursuing my passion years ago.

At the same time, mediums aren’t permanent. At any point when a medium becomes incompatible with my message, I’ll shed it away. In the past year as I grew and developed myself in all three mediums, I found the greatest affinity with blogging. I love speaking and I experience tremendous joy in knowing new people and connecting with them during my workshops, but speaking/training is not as effective a medium compared to blogging where I can reach out to a large number of people at one time. Also with speaking, I have to be physically present in every training and speech, and a good amount of preparation time is required to develop content and material — it’s a direct trade of my time with money. I enjoy speaking and I plan to continue to speak, just not at the frequency I’m doing now.

For coaching, I enjoy 1-1 coaching. Working with others on a 1-1 basis has given me many insights into their lives, and seeing them grow every step of the way is a very rewarding experience. It’s a great complement to what I do. I’ve gotten to know a lot of amazing people through my 1-1 coaching and I continue to remain in touch with many of my past clients. However, the 1-1 nature of coaching requires a high investment of time and effort and isn’t effective because I can only help one person at any point in time. Again, I like 1-1 coaching and the experiences it has given me, just that I plan to decrease the time I set aside for it moving forward.

On the other hand, blogging is a great fit with my values. I have a big thing for flexibility and effectiveness, and blogging gives me exactly that. Flexibility because blogging doesn’t require me to be geographically situated in a place. I can blog anytime, anywhere I want. I can blog while I’m on a plane, in Hong Kong, in New York, in a cafe in Singapore — pretty much anywhere with an internet connection.

Blogging is also highly effective, in that it’s a one-to-many medium. It allows me to reach out to many people through just one channel. It also enables me to reach out to the world and connect with anyone with an internet connection. It’s a boundless medium. Not only that, but the articles I write will remain here for everyone to read. Anyone can read the articles while I’m sleeping, traveling, eating, or away from the computer, and they can benefit from them just fine. My physical presence is not required for others to gain value from my past writings. All it requires is for me to invest X hours or days in the writing of the article, and everyone, both current and future readers, can benefit from it after I publish it online.

Hence moving forward, I’m scaling down the time I spend on training and 1-1 coaching, and dedicating that time to blogging. I’m only taking on training that aligns with my personal and professional goals (in the past I used to take on career training, which isn’t in line with the core of my work which is personal development). With 1-1 coaching, I’ve revised it to a 1-1 consultation format where I share all my advice/expertise with the client in a 1-session consultation, and have taken away four-session / eight-session packages which are more exploratory in nature.

For those who aren’t able to afford 1-1 consultations, there are all my free articles and resources available on the blog. Much of the advice and information I share on PE easily cost tons of money in any self-help course or book. There is also the life-changing 30DLBL course, which is hugely underpriced for what it offers.

Given my preference for effectiveness, I’m also going to explore other mediums, probably scale-based that lets me reach out to tons of people out there through a channel — potentially audio and video. I’m going to continue blogging and building different projects through the blog. The Sept 2010 run of 30DLBL marked my first foray into online group coaching, and it was a huge success. The Dec 2010 run of 30DLBL (and the recent 21DHL challenge) continued to do extremely well, so I’m going to continue with online group coaching as a medium to reach out to others. The next 30DLBL will be April 1, 2011 — if you have a copy of the book, you’ll be duly notified of the upcoming challenge in mid-March.

Be loyal to your message, not the medium

If you notice what’s happening here, I’m most loyal to my message, not my mediums (with the exception of perhaps blogging, because it’s the backbone of what I do and the versatility of the medium matches my needs very well).

My loyalty to my message, not my medium, opens me to many different ways of expressing my message. I don’t vigilantly stick to certain mediums just because I’ve been using them. I’m constantly looking at my message and asking myself: “What is the medium that can let me best achieve my life purpose? What is the medium that will let me reach out to the largest number of people possible, and give them the best value they can get in their life?“

In doing so, it constantly gives me new ideas to do my job better. It’s from asking these questions that gave me the idea of blogging/writing to reach out to others in the beginning; it’s from asking these questions that gave me the idea of using TV/video as a potential medium to reach out to others. And I’ll continue to explore many other mediums in the future.

Unfortunately, many of us are loyal to the medium but not the message. We look at our current jobs/roles, and we get rigidly stuck to that. We wonder how to progress beyond this current medium, and we can’t find any way forward. That’s because your medium has already expired in its ability to express your message. Mediums expire, messages don’t. If you keep thinking within the scope of an expired medium, you will not get any feasible solution. It’s like you’re trying to get to a location with an outdated map. You’re not going to get to where you want to go, since the map is already defunct! Whatever path it presents to you is not going to correspond to your reality.

Your message and medium are separate

Your message is your message, and your current medium is a medium. They are entirely separate things. Don’t confuse them as one thing.

One simple analogy is this: Imagine a glass of water. Is the water the same thing as the glass? No, it’s not. How can they be the same? Obviously the water is water; the glass is a glass. The relationship between the water and the glass is that the glass is a temporary means to hold the water.

Likewise, your current career/job is just a temporary means to express your message to the world. Rather than be overly concerned about the status of your current career and how to make it work out, your key question should be whether this career is letting you express your life message in the best manner possible. Mediums come and go; messages don’t. It’s possible for one to start off with a seemingly suitable medium at the beginning, only to outgrow it later on.

If your current medium is indeed a poor fit for you, it will leave you feeling unfulfilled. See yourself as a fountain that’s overflowing with water. That’s your message yearning to spread itself to others. If at any point you don’t have the right channels/outlets in place to deliver your message to the world, you’ll feel unfulfilled, like something is missing and you don’t quite know what.

This was how I felt back when I was in my ex-company doing brand management. Things just didn’t feel right, even though theoretically I was in a company whose motto was to improve the lives of others. Undoubtedly the overall presence of the company has improved the lives of many and will continue to do so (given it’s a consumer goods company selling daily necessities), but I just didn’t see these as means I want to use to express my message to the world. I’m most passionate about helping others grow by directly working on the core that was/is life and living consciously, not via a proxy. This was why I eventually quit to pursue my passion as you see today, via the mediums which I had the most passion for (blogging, speaking, and 1-1 coaching as I mentioned above, and now blogging and other scale-based mediums).

Finding a medium that fits your message

To identify a medium(s) that fit your message, I’ve come up with 6 simple steps for you to follow through. These are the exact same steps I did before I pursued my passion, and it was following these steps that eventually helped me to carve out what I’m doing now. Today, I truly feel fulfilled and happier than I ever can be. The thing is, you can do that too by following these 6 steps.

1) Define your message first

To live a truly fulfilling life of your creation, you need to start thinking about the message you want to bring to this world first — whether it’s to grow and be at your highest potential, to express your full creative talents, to create and nurture, to help others grow, etc. — then the mediums you want to use to express that. Having a clear message defined will help you get clarity on what to do next.

I’ve already written in detail about discovering one’s message which you can read here: How to Discover Your Real Purpose in Life.

2) Evaluate if your current medium is a fit for your message

What is the career/job/role you’re in right now? This is the medium you are currently using to express yourself to the world. Here’s a simple checklist to see if this medium is a right fit for you:

Does this medium allow you to express your message/passion/interests?
Does this medium match your personality? E.g., if you enjoy working with people, is this medium letting you work with people?
Do you look forward to doing this every day?
Do you see yourself doing this every day for the rest of your life?
Can you think of other things you’d rather do than this?

If you answered Yes to Q1-4 and No to Q5, then you’re on the right track. If you answered No to Q1-4 and Yes to Q5, then perhaps it’s time to rethink this medium. It’s probably not a good fit for what you want to deliver to this world. And if it isn’t, there’s nothing to fret about. Maybe you’re a customer service officer but you have a passion for design. Maybe you’re an accountant but you have a passion for cooking. Maybe you’re an engineer but you have a passion for photography. It’s perfectly normal — we outgrow our mediums all the time. What may seem like a perfect outlet in the past, may well expire after a while.

Remember that you’re not alone — I experienced the same too. My ex-company was a great outlet for me to grow when I first joined the company, but it stopped being a fit for what I want to accomplish in this world after two years on the job. Even with training and 1-1 coaching, I decided that they are not what I want to do on a large scale after 1.5 years of doing them. Rather than continue on in this ill-fitted medium, it’s about finding new mediums, new outlets that let you express your message to the world.

3) Brainstorm on all the mediums you can use

The next step is to identify all the possible mediums you can use to express your message. Think about your message. How do you want to deliver your message to the rest of the world? Come up with a full list of all the possible mediums you can use to express your message. Here’s a short list of possible mediums you can start off with:

Acting
Blogging
Coaching
Composing
Consulting
Counseling
Dancing
Designing
Directing
Drawing
Entrepreneurship
Events
Filming
Hosting
Investing
Managing
Mentoring
Photography
Podcasting
Producing
Singing
Speaking
Supervising
Teaching
Training
Video casting
Writing
YouTubing (Vlogging, Video How-To’s)
Others (What other mediums are you interested to explore?)

Note that for all the “mediums” I’ve written above, I’ve conveyed them as the method of expression, such as writing, teaching, etc vs. specific jobs like teacher or teacher. That’s because there are many specific mediums that can be derived from a particular method — for example, with writing, you can be a journalist, a travel writer, a book author, a ghostwriter, a copywriter, an editor, and so on. Rather than narrow yourself to that level, first define your preferred methods of expression. You can then zoom down to the specific channels later on. Specific channels are also dependent on other factors like technology. Some mediums that existed in the past may not exist today; mediums that exist today may not exist in the future.

Since we’re talking about mediums that let you express your message to the world, each mode of expression involves an action where you provide something to others, be it content, or ideas — something that adds value to people’s lives. Something like “sleeping” or “resting” isn’t valid as it doesn’t add any value to others nor does it help you convey your message.

The list above is by no means exhaustive. Beyond referring to the list, think about people out there in the world whom you look up to; who are living the life that you want to lead. What are they doing? How are they expressing their message? Are they running businesses? What businesses are they running? Are they releasing books? Creating albums? Producing videos? Write them all down. With so many people in this world, chances are there’s at least someone out there who is already doing what you want to do and found a way to do that. Just by looking out there, you can get tons of ideas on what you can do too.

4) Pick the medium(s) that best fit you and your message

Now, pick the medium(s) that best fit how you and your message. Consider your personality and your values. What is your personality like? What do you value? Do you like to work with people up-close and personal? Do you prefer sitting behind a computer? Do you like to be on the go? Do you prefer to be at the same spot? Do you like stable, fixed working hours? Do you prefer to work as and when you want to? Answering these questions will help you select the appropriate mediums.

Since I love flexibility, a no-frills approach, and effectiveness, blogging is clearly a winner for me. However, someone who doesn’t like technology or the computer might not like that. He/she might find other mediums like 1-1 coaching and teaching more suitable.

5) Paint your ideal scenario

Think about the ideal scenario where you express your message to the fullest. Use the mediums you highlighted in #4 as reference points. This is the scenario where you can truly look at and say to yourself “This is the best life I can ever live“. What would you be doing in this scenario? How would you be expressing your message? What channels would you be using? How successful would you be? For example, if you want to be a writer, how many books would you have published? How many copies would you have sold? How much money would you be earning every month? How proficient would you be in your work?

In the Passion or Money article, I shared an exercise on designing your ideal life via our four key needs — Mind, Body, Heart, and Soul. I highly recommend you check that out to design your ideal life in this step.

6) Create your action plan and get started

With your ideal scenario painted, now create your action plan and get started. Break down your end goal into mini-goals and identify your key action steps so you can get started.

Now, put all your energy toward bringing your plan to life. Focus on achieving your first milestone, then get started on the next. If you selected more than one medium in Step 4, develop your top medium of choice. When you establish yourself in one medium, you’re not just building your expertise in that medium — you’re also developing expertise in your message as well. This makes it easy for you to take on other mediums subsequently.

Moving Forward

I’ve included as much as I can on this topic without over-stretching the post (it’s already at 3,100 words!), so hopefully this will help you get started.

The last note I want to leave with you is to focus on fully aligning yourself with your message at every moment as you act on your plan. Just like water, your message is omnipresent, boundless, and limitless, and can be expressed even within your current outlets. See the world as having an endless number of pockets and channels where your message can fill out, and ask yourself how you can live true to your message starting right now. This is how you live a truly empowered life because you are not deferring it to an arbitrary point in the future.

Good luck and I know you have it in you to achieve everything you want to do, and more. :D

Be sure to check out my podcast episode: What is the Message of Your Goal? [Podcast]

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

How To Know What You Want To Do In Life

Celes — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:59:10 +0000

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“Hi Celes, I have no idea what I want to do. I wish I am strong enough to concentrate on one single thing and do everything to be the best at it. I believe it is the only way of attaining something. My problem is that the variety of decisions make my head spin. I envy those who from their early days know what they’ll be and what they’ll do. Please help.” — M

Getting clarity on what to do is one of the most common questions I get from readers and clients alike. For some of my clients, they feel they are entering a period of their life where they should have clarity in what they want to do. Hence, not knowing what they want to do makes them feel frustrated. They feel that if they can quickly discover what they want to do, they can get started on it right away, rather than waste time doing seemingly unrelated things.

Here’s the thing though. To get an idea of what you want to do, you have to first base it off a reference point. This reference point is based on your past experiences. If you have not accumulated a set amount of experiences, you can’t possibly generate a meaningful answer in that regard.

For example, let’s say you want to buy a mobile phone. However, you have never used a mobile phone in your life. You don’t know how a mobile phone is like or what kind of functions it has, much less all the brands out there and the differences between the models.

What gives?

Will you:

Sit at home and mull over what mobile phone you should buy, waiting for the answer would pop in at some point. Maybe an eureka will strike, maybe it won’t ever, but either way you don’t plan to do anything until the answer comes. OR
Get to know what a mobile phone is. Go out there and explore the different mobile phones available. If possible, you want to try them out too, say by using your friends’ mobiles and visiting the phone shops.

Which option will help you make progress in your dilemma? Which option will give you new insights, new information, and new data points for you to base your decision on? Which option is a more reliable method to get you what you want?

If you are thinking option 2, we are thinking the same thing.

You see where I’m getting at with this?

The fog in your mind

For you to know what you want to do, you have to have some kind of experience you can refer to. Now, if you have never been out there getting into the thick of things, there’s not going to be a lot of things to reference with in your mind. There’s a fog in your mind, and the fog exists because you have never ventured much beyond your current point.

It’s like asking what’s your favorite sport when you’ve never exercised in your life. Or what’s your favorite book when you only read less than a book a year. Or what’s your favorite restaurant when you don’t eat out at all.

The fog will remain as long as you stay still. It’ll still be uncertain, hazy, possibly confusing and disempowering. To clear out the fog, you need to explore. You need to get out there and start trying out different things. You need to gain experience, to pick up new knowledge, to get into new situations. By building up as many of these experiences as possible, you create a baseline reference point in your mind. The more experiences you get, the more knowledgeable you become, the clearer you are of what you don’t like and what you do like, and the more you discover what you don’t want to do and what you DO want to do.

How I discovered what I truly want to do in life

One of the key things that helped me discover my purpose back in 2006 was because I went all out in all my goal pursuits and in pursuing my interests before that. It wasn’t like I had complete clarity of what I wanted to do in life previously. All I knew (as a kid) was I wanted to make the best out of my life and be a person of value to the society, and that meant doing my best and achieving my highest potential.

And that was what I did. I went all out to pursue my goals. I would put my heart and soul in everything I did. Whatever my goals were, from achievement goals, to academia goals, to business goals (I had a graphic design business last time, and ran a network of successful internet sites back when I was in secondary school), I would set my eyes on the top prize and go all out for them. Whatever my interests were, from making desktop wallpapers, to computer skins, to web/graphic design, to fashion/cosmetics, to gaming, I pursued them fervently. I never held back.

The whole process of setting goals, strategizing, planning, taking action, reviewing the results and readjusting my plans, and finally achieving the results, was eye opening. Every step of the journey, I learned something new about the world and myself. I grew as a person, and I became more self-aware. Learned more about myself, my strengths, my blind spots, my values, what I liked, what I didn’t like. I realized that things I used to think were important to me were actually not what I wanted. I came to realizations I never saw coming.

I would never have realized any single one of these things if I had never fervently pursued my growth, goals, and interests. With the kind of energy I put in my pursuits, it exposed me to an extremely wide range of situations and experiences. It was then a matter of time before I finally realized what I wanted to do.

Gaining Experience: Breadth and Depth

Hence, the key to know what you want to do is to get out there and gain as much experience as you can – both (1) Breadth of experiences (2) Depth of experiences.

Breadth of experiences refers to the variety of things you do. Say if you have only studied engineering and worked as an engineer all your life, it’s time to start something new, that’s different from engineering. It can be anything – from dancing, drawing, finance, marketing, business, food & beverage, music, painting, etc. The more new things you try, the greater the breadth of experiences you build up.
Depth of experiences refers to the intensity of how much you have done something. If you have always viewed engineering with a lackluster attitude, never putting in the extra time to know it better, and just doing what’s necessary to scrap by in the subject, you’d be building an average level of experience with it. Whereas if you have intensely strove to be the top engineer, studying top engineers, taking on all new projects that emerge and reading the best engineering texts, your depth of experience is going to be way more in comparison. The depth of your experiences in the subject can increase by an increased time spent on it, as well as just increasing your focus and energy when you are doing it.

Where to start off?

At this point you must be wondering where to start first, since there are so many different possibilities. My recommendation will be to start off by doing the things you already have some interest in. (whether it’s interest to try or interest to pursue further). Here’s a 5-step process to get you started on finding what you want to do.

Take out a piece of pen and paper. For the next 30 minutes, please write out a list of all the things you have always wanted to try, but have never tried. Also, write down the things you would want to try today. Don’t overthink it. Don’t think about the feasibility. Don’t think about how you are going to act on it. The point of this step is to know your WHAT first before devising your HOW. Just write.
After you are done, look back at the list. What are the things you are interested to try today? Circle them. It can be a few, it can be some, it can even be all.
Now, rank them. What is the thing you want to try out first? Label that as number 1. Then, move on to the thing you want to try next. Label that as number 2. And so on and so forth, until you get to the very last item you circled.
Now, it’s time to think about the HOW. How can you start trying the first few items you circled? Some of you may experience fear when trying new things. That’s because you overcomplicate the process in your mind. You don’t have to quit your job, stop your studies, or denounce whatever you are doing. You can continue what you are currently doing and try out something new, all at the same time. Just start off with little steps. Taking a course. Volunteering at a related organization. Consulting someone who is experienced in this area. Reading up on it. Draw up a plan to get working on the items on your list. Get up close with personal.
As you gain an increase breadth and depth of experiences, you will start getting a clearer idea of what you don’t want to do, and what you do want to do.

Key Step: Take action

At the end of the day, it’s all about taking action to gain new experiences. Go ahead and try everything you want. Seek externally. Regroup periodically by introspecting and checking if you are moving in the right track. And as you gain a critical mass of experiences – both the breadth and the depth, the answer will be clear to you.

The most important thing of all is to maximize every experience you are in, give yourself fully to every moment and not to forget to live life to the fullest every step of the way. I gather the reason why you want to know what to do in life is because you want to make the most out of life, so it’ll be ironic to miss out on living in the process of trying to find what you want to do. Knowing the answer wouldn’t make a difference if you are not even living in the present. Soak in the life you have now and appreciate everything you get to experience, good or bad, ups or downs. That’s when you truly live life to the fullest.

Be sure to read Meaning of Life: Discover Your Purpose, 7-part series on how to discover your purpose.

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

Passion Paycheck

Celes — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:00:27 +0000

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(Posted in May 2009, five months after I started Personal Excellence)

For those of you who are working, you are probably used to getting your paycheck every month. However, have you received a passion paycheck before?

A passion paycheck is the paycheck you get from pursuing something of your truest passion. This paycheck isn’t limited to the dictionary definition of a paycheck — it can be cash payment, a cheque, etc., as long as there is some form of monetary value in it.

For me, it’s already been seven months since I quit my ex-company in Oct ’08, and also seven months since I last drew a monthly income.

First Few Months of Pursuing My Passion

After quitting my job in Oct ’08, I wasn’t earning any revenue from my personal development work in the first four months. I spent the first month, Oct ’08, relaxing and took a spiritual retreat in Chengdu (China). Nov ’08 was when I crystallized my vision for my personal development work and solidified my goals, strategies and plans.

In Dec ’08, I started the first pillar of my personal development work, which was my blog. I focused my efforts on content building and traffic generation, rather than on revenue generation. There were three reasons behind this.

Firstly, my base assumption was that I would be returning to corporate world after a few months, so earning money in the meantime wasn’t exactly an issue. Of course, that changed four months later in March 2009 when I decided not to return to corporate work.

Secondly, it was important for me to focus on the fundamentals such as traffic and web presence first, before trying to earn the money. Trying to do otherwise seemed like putting the cart before the horse to me.

Thirdly, value creation – helping others be their best – was my top priority and I wanted to single-mindedly focus it. I did not want to be side-tracked with money objectives in the process. I was also not hard up anyway to earn revenue, due to the assumption that I was returning to work.

Thus, for the first two months of my site launch, I purely focused on value creation and did nothing in terms of revenue generation. I was tapping into my savings and was genuinely, extremely happy. However, I understood this wasn’t a sustainable model, and made plans for monetization.

My First Source of Revenue: My First 5 Cents

In Feb ’09, with my web traffic increasing to a somewhat sizable figure of a few thousand unique visitors per day, I thought it was a good time to start placing some advertising to start earning some revenue from my personal development work.

I signed up for an account on Google Adsense. Upon being approved as an advertiser, I inserted some basic text ad links on the sidebar as a test run. With that, I went on with my daily activities while excitedly anticipating the performance of the ads.

To be honest, I was half-expecting nothing to come out of it since 1) it was a very basic, unoptimized ad placement 2) my traffic at that point comprised of a higher percentage of one-time visitors (from social bookmarking sites) who tend to quickly glance through websites and surf away immediately afterward.

Regardless, the next morning, I logged in and checked my Adsense account with abated breath.

And what did I see?

A grand total of $0.05 staring back at me on the Adsense reporting page!!

$0.05!!!!

As much as it was just a negligible amount of 5 cents, it got me really psyched up! :D This excitement wasn’t so much surrounding the amount in question per se as it was evidence that I had my first pillar of revenue generation established.

Take for example, building a water pipe connecting the main water supply to the tap in the sink. Being able to see just one drop of water dripping from the tap in your sink is a form of evidence that the water pipe is functional. This 5 cents was precisely (and almost literally) the first drop of water. This 5 cents I received was official proof that I had the basics in place to at least generate 5 cents in what I was doing. This 5 cents was my first payoff for all the hard work I was putting in my personal development work in the past few months. It was absolutely the beginning of more 5 cents to come.

My Passion Paycheck

Fast forward to two months later, which is now — May ’09. Since then, I have started including different revenue streams, such as Donations, Coaching services and Speaking services.

Last month, April ’09, was when I’m generating actual, proper revenue for my personal development work. A quick run-down of my revenue streams up till the month of Apr ’09:

Google Adsense: Generated $109.62 USD since I’ve set it up two months ago. These would be the google ads you see around the site. Please check out the ads and take some time to visit my sponsors’ sites if you are interested.
Amazon: The Amazon affiliate links has generated $0.72 USD thus far. I’m fine with this and never expected Amazon to be a big contributor in my revenue. My intention for putting up the Amazon links is really to promote books I personally recommend, vs. earning money, since affiliate marketing through books is known to generate weak revenue with the low commission rates and books being low ticket items (low prices).
Coaching: April marks the month where I shifted from pro bono coaching to charging for my coaching services, to address the huge demand in coaching requests due to the media coverage a month back. So far, I have received $433.33 USD for my coaching, with more to come soon. (To all my coachees, thank you very much for being so gracious with your donation fees :) )
Others: In terms of other revenue sources, I have received donations amounting to $74 USD from readers, who do so in appreciation of all the work I put into writing my articles and pursuing my passion. (Thank you so much to all of you who have donated to me; you know who you are! I really appreciate your kind gesture, no matter what the amount is).
Speaking: I’m engaged for a few upcoming speeches – but as payments for speeches only come about after the rendering of the service, I will count this as $0 for now.

In total, my income in the past 2 months has amounted to to $617.67 USD.

This comes across as a small amount to many. An average paycheck easily amounts to $2,000 USD, and this is less than 1-third of it. Factor in how much I was earning in my previous company (almost $50,000 USD/yr), and this easily pales in comparison. In the past, $616.67 USD was an amount I could easily finish spending during my shopping trips in Bangkok or Taipei.

On a per-hour basis, I’m earning less than $4 USD/hour. I spend substantial hours on my personal development work. For example, for each article I write on the blog, I easily spend 5-10 hours, because I want to be sure I’m putting up only the best possible content here. Many readers and coachees have told me they get a lot of personal insights and revelations from reading my articles. It’s not by accident that the articles come across as that. Much time has been invested in the conscious crafting, designing and writing of them. My most lengthy and in-depth articles and series take several days to write up. Another example would be my coaching. For my coaching sessions, the work doesn’t just span within the coaching session – I spend extra time doing preparation work before and after the sessions to ensure my coachee gets the best out of the coaching. I can earn more working at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut.

But hey – you know what?

It isn’t about the amount of money.

This paycheck is hands down, the most satisfying, meaningful and impactful paycheck than any paycheck I have ever received before in my life – whether it was when I was teaching tuition during university, when I was running my graphic/web design business, or even when I was in my brand management career.

For one, it’s reciprocation for my hard work. It’s money which I have painstakingly earned through hours of real, hard work. I’m dedicated to doing my best in everything I do, and my personal development work is no different. All the hours spent writing articles, working on my site, researching on blogging/writing/marketing, reading up on personal development to improve myself, marketing my articles, coaching, preparing for coaching, promoting my blog. All the time I invested in setting up my business, running it and pushing it to greater grounds.

It’s also a paycheck of deep love. I fervently pursue my life purpose and passion in helping others to grow. I dedicate myself towards ensuring I’m creating and giving the best value I can towards my cause. I do everything with deepest love. As I give out these pure intentions of love, I know I’m constantly receiving the love back in other forms – the growth of the people whose lives I’ve touched, their feedback/emails/messages, their positive energies, the mysterious ways of the universe – and also, this paycheck. This paycheck is a representation of the value I am receiving, because of the value I’m giving to the world for pursuing my cause.

It is also a source of affirmation. This affirmation comes from two places.

First, it’s affirmation from people around me – people who recognizes the value I’m offering. They return this recognition in the form of money, since money is a commonly established form of value in the society. The higher the money involved, the higher they regard the value I am giving to the society. I use the amount of money as a loose indicator of how much value I’m providing and to strive to increase the value I’m giving to others.

Second, it’s affirmation from the universe. This paycheck is like one of the universe’s many ways of telling me its aware of what I’m doing and wanting to affirm my actions. It’s as if it is saying, “Hey Celes! I know you are living your passion and I want to support you in full force! Here’s some money to keep you going for now; please continue with the great work and we will get more money for you in due time!”

It’s a paycheck of opportunities. Opportunities to continue on with what I’m doing. Opportunities to continue on in my work and impact even more people’s lives. In the course of my work in the past few months, I have received multitudes of feedback from my readers and coachees on how their lives have improved and changed from reading my articles and/or my coaching; Feedback which has touched me deeply. Changes such as quitting their jobs to pursue their passion, getting over disappointments, taking action in their lives, rediscovering meaning in living, finding their life purpose, or even simple acts such as decluttering their room and making it an inspirational haven and creating a life handbook. This paycheck represents me the ability to continue on what I’m doing and the opportunity to help even more people grow and embrace better lives. One of my long-term visions is to set up a life development school and this passion paycheck will be the first building chip towards that.

This is the power of a passion paycheck. A paycheck earned from truly, fully pursuing your dreams; your highest goals; your deepest passion. The magic behind a passion paycheck goes beyond the amount it comes in. The magic lies in the intention and meaning behind the amount. It’s a paycheck with meaning so deep that it can’t be found in any other paychecks.

Other paychecks simply represent money to most people. Probably a means to acquire things they want – things which will allow them to be happy, to be free, to feel better. But these gratifications come from the money itself, which can be derived from exchanging their labor for any other job. To some, paychecks act as a form of recognition and appreciation for their hard work. But again, this hard work is something that can come with anything they do – it is definitely not exclusive to what they are doing.

A passion paycheck brings a whole new level of depth, meaning, resonance, love, excitement, fulfillment and reverberance inside of you which cannot be brought about with any other paychecks. These meanings and emotions only exist if you hold fervent passion towards your work. Without such passion, your paychecks essentially become soulless paychecks – paychecks which you just get for the monetary value. Nothing more, nothing less.

I may be receiving less than 1/5 of the paycheck I used to receive. But the satisfaction and exuberance I am getting from this paycheck is way more — it’s 5, or even 10 times more — than the paychecks I used to get.

And it’s not going to just end here. There are going to be more passion paychecks to come, and I know it’s simply going to be even better each time. I know this feeling of resonance is going to get even stronger as I align myself more and more with my purpose. It’s the start of many more great things to come. :D I’ll be setting greater revenue goals as I start accumulating money for future plans (e.g. to set up a school). At some point I envision I will earn way more than the amount I used to earn in the past.

How about you? Are you getting passion paychecks every month? Or are you just getting soulless paychecks?

What are the things which you are passionate about? What can you start doing in them to start getting your passion paychecks? How can you start getting your first passion paycheck in? What can you do to start creating more passion paychecks, to the point where you only get passion paychecks for the rest of your life?

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

Pursuing Your Passion With No Money

Celes — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:49:08 +0000

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Hi Celes, I read your article about how you left your job to pursue your dreams. I did the same for a simpler reason – I had enough of being an employee (it’s been 10 years). However, with no income at all, I’m beginning to regret my decision at times. What is your opinion on this? – gabybali

Hey gabybali, thanks for your question :) Let us take a closer look at your situation.

Your current issue is you have no source of income. It’s not explicitly mentioned in your question, but I’m going to assume that this lack of income is starting to affect your physiological/security-related needs (such as living expenses including food, shelter), for it to become a concern. To a certain extent it is probably affecting your material needs as well.

When Money Becomes An Interference

When you have to worry about security needs, you enter into a survival, instinctual mode where you have to constantly worry about your every day livelihood and every single expenditure you make. And when you are constantly worrying, your connections to both the cognitive part of your brain and your intuition get shut down. You become constrained and set back by your lower-level needs. You can’t pursue your passion properly if you can’t tap into your full prowess. I ran into this situation for a short period of time after I quit my job last year and it was not a very optimal scenario to operate in.

Prolonged exposure to this circumstance worsens the situation. People who have not developed a strong connection to their passions will start questioning it and whether they made the right decision. They may start to regret their decision and belittle themselves and their passions.

If you are starting to develop self-doubting thoughts, put a brake on them immediately. When you took action to start pursuing your passion (assuming it was your true passion and not a lower-level whim), it marked the point when you listened to your heart and your intuition. That was when you deepened the connection with your higher self. That was when you moved up to a higher consciousness level, towards Courage. To doubt this would be to recede into lower conscious levels like Desire/Fear/Pride, where your thoughts and concerns become very much rooted from your ego.

This is a classic situation where many self proclaimed ‘realists’ will be quick to jump on. They constantly cite it as an example to justify (to themselves or others) why they are staying on in a passionless job they do not feel strongly about. They keep lauding about earning money, having to pay bills, living up to responsibilities, etc without any seeming end point. They harp on how they are not pursuing their passion because it will lead to nowhere. They advocate staying on in their current path as the ‘safer’, ‘more practical’ route.

Except that the issue is nothing to do with your passion or the pursuit of your passion. Living a life of your passion should always be your end point. The key question should instead be – How should you achieve that passion?

Since money is the issue here, let’s look at how to get the money. There are a few ways to go about doing this.

Route A: Waiting For Your Passion To Generate Revenue

The first way is to pump every single bit of your resources (time, money, energy) into your passion and expect it to churn out revenue at a certain stage. You dedicate all of yourself into pursuing your passion and ignore the issue of no income, refusing to let it bother you.

The problem with this scenario is your original issue of not having sufficient money for security needs remains a glaring concern. It’s something that will not get resolved and will continue to shout at you every day until you start earning actual revenue.

This means you start hinging on your passion to generate you money, which in turn means your passion becomes wrapped with a certain level of desperation, anxiety, and fear. You become dependent on the probability that your venture will earn you money at X period of time, which may or may not take place. This is highly risky.

Many people who start out with new ventures fall into this pit. They jump straight into the thick of things, invest all their money into it, slough off from day and night and become increasingly desperate when things don’t map out the way they want. Their increased anxiety leads them to make poor decisions of which the consequences ripple out into everything they do. In the end, when their ventures do not take off, things end up crashing and burning.

There’s a difference between jumping off the plane screaming and yelling without a parachute, and jumping off with a parachute secured on your back. Unless you are highly confident that you can generate revenue with your venture in your expected time period, route A falls under the first scenario. The second scenario applies to route B.

Route B: Seeking Alternative Sources of Income

Route B is to seek alternative sources of revenue. It can be a full-time job, part-time, freelancing, an investment etc. The objective is to earn sufficient money such that security concerns stop becoming a nag at your back and you can dedicate yourself to fully pursue your passion outside of that.

These sources of income should be stable and ideally non-time consuming so you can get the money concern off your back. This means the jobs you get yourself into should require minimal commitment – i.e. no overtime hours, not requiring you to pick up totally new skills just to get the job (e.g. moving into graphic design when you have no background in designing at all). The best case is if the side job you find matches as much of your values and desires as possible.

This should be an interim solution and not a final solution. When you have the money issue out of the way, quickly orientate yourself to pursuing what you want to do. Identify plans to get out of the situation ASAP. Find ways to quickly generate revenue with your passion.

This was in fact what I was doing previously in my personal development business. I wasn’t earning anything a few months ago. I was giving free coaching. I had speaking engagements lined up for the upcoming months but they would only generate me revenue when the engagement was complete. I had advertising on my blog which wasn’t generating significant revenue to sustain me.

Hence, I started brainstorming on alternative sources of revenue outside of my business. I thought of returning to full-time corporate work, but that was a full-fledged commitment which encompassed traveling and investment of extra hours outside of the 9-6 regime. It was a More with More Path that could get me to where I wanted eventually, but it was not the ideal way. This was why I decided against it eventually.

I brainstormed for a More with Less Path. I thought about a series of possibilities, from becoming a part-time waitress, working at Starbucks, going back into graphic design (I was a freelance graphic designer in the past), among others.

After some consideration, I decided on tuition (academic coaching) to school students. Tuition is a very popular part-time job in Singapore, especially since academic excellence is a very key focus area here. When I was studying as an undergraduate, I was working as a tutor as well, so it’s something I’m already familiar with. I just needed to quickly look through the new syllabus to get right back into the hang of it. Apart from that, giving tuition was a low commitment job (about 2-3 hours required per student per week) that gave me decent amount of money to get by. It also utilized an aspect of coaching and comes under a subset of ‘helping others to achieve their highest potential’, so it was really a perfect alternative income source for me.

With my monetary concerns out of the way, I was able to focus on my personal development work fully (when I was not giving tuition). I continued to ensure I was investing sufficient time every day to work on my business, particularly the revenue generation pieces so the money could start coming in sooner than later. And today, that has come into fruition, especially after the media coverage in local media which drew in new coaching and speaking opportunities. :D

What can you do to get revenue rolling in while still being able to pursue your passion? What is the More For Less Path or 80-20 route in your scenario? Keep your end objective in mind and don’t get deviated by a temporal issue such as money. This will be just one out of the many other challenges that will face you along the way and you need to stay strong. If money is a barrier stopping you from getting what you want, then find ways to get the money first. Once you get your lower-level needs resolved, you will be able to get back into pursuing your passion again. :)

Check out my How To Pursue Your Passion series for more articles on pursuing your passion.

Pursue Passion – Personal Excellence

Is It Realistic to Believe ‘Chase Your Passion and Money Will Follow’? (The Passion-Market-Skills Framework)

The Passion-Market-Skills Framework

1) Can you spot where you are in this diagram right now?

2) Which is the ideal spot?

How to Achieve Passion-Market-Skills

Step 1: Know your passion

Step 2: Study the market related to your passion

One watch out during your research

Step 3: Adapt your passion to serve the market

Step 4: Equip yourself with the skills to succeed

Step 5: Execute and Fine Tune

Closing Note

What To Do When You Have Too Many Passions

Gaming

Web Development

Web, Graphic Design

Business, Marketing

5 Lessons I’ve Learned in My Journey

#1. It’s okay to want to learn, do everything

#2. As you learn/do, you’ll learn new things about yourself

#3. All knowledge is applicable — just a matter of how you use it

Example #1: Steve Jobs and Calligraphy

Example #2: Natural Ecosystem and Architecture

Example #3: Web Development, Consumer Goods, Personal Development

#4. Develop Mastery

#5. Your ideal career is something you need to fight for

Endnote

The Day I Quit My Job to Pursue My Passion: 6 Things to Do Before You Quit Your Job

Are You Thinking of Quitting Your Job?

1. Think about what you want in your ideal career

2. Evaluate your current job against your ideal career

3. Have a plan

4. Build your bridge

5. Have a contingency plan

6. Get your **** together

Is It Too Late to Pursue My Dreams? [Video]

Affirmation Challenge Day 12 [Wealth]: ‘I’m financially abundant, and money comes to me naturally.’

Day 12: [Wealth]

Your Task Today

“I’m financially abundant, and money comes to me naturally.”

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Wealth]

Further Reading

Share Your Results!

Affirmation Challenge Day 11 [Career]: ‘I’m doing what I love, and earning lots of money doing it.’

Day 11: [Career]

Your Task Today

“I’m doing what I love, and earning lots of money doing it.”

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Career]

Further Reading

Share Your Results!

Affirmation Challenge Day 7 [Opportunities]: ‘Opportunities are everywhere. It’s up to me to find (or create) them and make things happen.’

Day 7: [Opportunities]

Your Task Today

“Opportunities are everywhere.It’s up to me to find them (or create them) andMAKE THINGS HAPPEN.”

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Opportunities]

Further Reading

Share Your Results!

Should You Start a High-Profit Business or Do Something You’re Passionate About But Isn’t Lucrative?

My Example

Example #1: From Passion Or Money, to Passion AND Money

Example #2: Using Money to Expand on Passion

Endnote

How To Discover Your Ideal Career: Your Message and Your Medium

Be loyal to your message, not the medium

Your message and medium are separate

Finding a medium that fits your message

1) Define your message first

2) Evaluate if your current medium is a fit for your message

3) Brainstorm on all the mediums you can use

4) Pick the medium(s) that best fit you and your message

5) Paint your ideal scenario

6) Create your action plan and get started

Moving Forward

How To Know What You Want To Do In Life

The fog in your mind

How I discovered what I truly want to do in life

Gaining Experience: Breadth and Depth

Where to start off?

Key Step: Take action

“Opportunities are everywhere.
It’s up to me to find them (or create them) and
MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.”