Live Debt Free

Pay off debt. Save. Give. Live your mission.

Find Work You Love

by //

Is it really possible to love your job? Despite what you may hear from your friends and co-workers, I know it’s possible. It just takes some time and understanding of who you are. The real key to successfully navigating a debt free adventure  is to find work for which you are passionate, engaged, and aligned.

By many accounts, too many of us have not achieved this goal. A 2010 Conference Board study showed only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their job. It’s clear too many of us are not happy in an important area of our lives, and it impacts our behavior in other ways.

While I advocate self-employment as the best way to find work you enjoy, not everyone agrees with me. In my recent article on working on your business, a reader commented that self-employment is not a suitable option for everyone. As much as I advocate working for yourself and having full control over your life and money, I do agree with this reader. For a variety of reasons, self-employment is not for everyone. If job satisfaction is so important, how can you achieve this goal? Consider two important factors as you are looking for meaningful and fulfilling work.

Passion and Purpose

Think of a time where you did not sense time passing. You were totally involved with what you were doing, and your focus was only on what you were doing. You suddenly look at your watch or cell phone and ask, “Where did the time go?” I’m guessing the event in your mind wasn’t your job. If I’m right, then you understand a lot of what affects us in our jobs. Few of us have the passion for our work that we have in other areas of our lives. I’m not saying that work has to be the primary focus of our lives. I continue to believe that we work to live and that we should fit our work into our lives. However, this does not mean work should be something we dread.

Two months ago, my grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. A mutual friend and I were catching up on old times, and she described her job and how passionate she was about what she did. I walked away from that conversation thinking how blessed she was to find work she enjoyed so much.

Your job must also serve a purpose in your life. My friend Jonathan Pool describes how what you do must fit your core purpose. This purpose has nothing to do with your job, but what you do must satisfy why you exist and how you want to best serve the world. My core purpose is to educate and inspire others to transform their ideas into plans of action. There are many ways I can do this, both inside and outside of work. Think about what makes you come alive and how you can turn that into work that matters to you.

Engagement and alignment

I just finished a great book called “We” by Rudy Karsan and Kevin Kruse. My biggest takeaway from the book was how you must be engaged in your work AND how your work must align with your passions and purpose. If you are not fully engaged in what you do, you will not bring your best self to what you do. If you think of your work as a paycheck or working for “the man”, you will not fully engage and what you’re doing. Your job performance and pay will likely demonstrate this lack of engagement.

What may be even more important than engagement is how your work aligns with your values, purpose, and ideal work environment. “We” has a companion website full of free information, and one free tool is a survey designed to identify your ideal workplace type. I took the assessment, and it identified my ideal workplace as a “revolutionary” workplace where freedom and creativity are highly valued. Unfortunately, many of my past jobs have been in companies that were anything but revolutionary. I worked for companies that valued order, structure, and conformity. I now know why I did not like working in those environments. The work environments were completely misaligned with how I enjoy working.

Finding work you love is a challenge. We all have unique gifts and life visions. The goal is to find the work that allows you to bring your best self every day. I look at my sister with envy, because she has found that work as a high school teacher. I could not picture her doing anything different, and she loves what she does. It is no wonder that she is also an outstanding teacher who is well respected by her administrators and community. We all need to find the passion and purpose to find work where we can become fully engaged and align our work with the rest of our lives.

Make Progress Every Day [Part 2]

by //

In my article from last week, I provided the first two steps any aspiring entrepreneur needs to make progress toward self-employment every day. Those two steps, working toward small victories and setting blocks of time to focus on one task, will give help you from becoming overwhelmed and give you the confidence that you are making progress. The next three steps are designed to keep you organized as you increase your workload and keep you motivated as you progress to achieving work you love to do.

Create lists and projects

When most people think of a to-do list, they think of listing everything they need to do in one big list. This will not work, because a long list with no structure or priority will overwhelm you. For those of you who use Microsoft Outlook to manage your tasks, you know exactly what I mean. Even though you can assign high or low importance to certain tasks, it’s very difficult to see how those tasks fit into what you really need to do.

The key to effective list and task management is to organize your list into projects. David Allen, creator of the Getting Things Done organizing system, defines a project as anything requiring more than one step to complete. If you must do three things to complete something, that’s a project. Writing an article is a project, because you must develop an idea, perform research, organize your thoughts, and write the article.

There is no shortage of tools to help you manage lists, tasks, and projects. I use a free and very simple application called Wunderlist, which is the first tool I’ve seen that balances ease of use with great organization. Wunderlist is available on the iPod/iPhone/iPad platform, Android, Mac OS, and PC systems as well as through the Internet. Wunderlist also allows me to create lists for any project as well as specific lists for article ideas or “backburner” items. If you tour the productivity app section in your phone’s marketplace, you will find plenty of options to help you stay organized.

Always have a way to record ideas

We are a mobile society. Whether we are working or doing personal tasks, being on the go is a staple of life. Ideas come at any time, so having a way to record ideas and “get them out of your head” is a critical factor to developing that next big thing for your business. It does not matter how you record your ideas, but you must develop a system that you will consistently perform. The goal is to not force yourself to remember ideas. If you cannot remember a seven-digit phone number more than a few moments (I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you since I can’t do this myself!), then have a way to capture those thoughts.

I use three things to help me remember ideas. I carry an Action Runner notebook from Behance, which is a 3 x 5 inch notebook with one side to record action items and another side to jot notes. I also use my iPod Touch’s voice recorded or a Roland R-05 digital recorder to record the thoughts that don’t go on paper.

Take time to celebrate your victories

Building a business is a long and difficult, but extremely rewarding and fulfilling process. Unless you are extremely lucky, you will not become an overnight success. As you build your business, you will have a series of small victories. You need to step back and celebrate those wins. Take your spouse to dinner. Buy the new smartphone you’ve wanted to buy. Take an evening off from building your business and sit on your deck with your drink of choice. Just take the time to sit back, reflect on what you did to make this achievement, and use it to motiviate yourself for future success.

Progress means moving forward. Even if that progress is not as fast or as big as you would like it to be, any progress means you are closer to your ultimate goal. It’s hard to not be overwhelmed as you make the leap from traditional jobs to self-employment. If you follow the five steps I’ve outlined in this post and part 1 of this series, you will face your journey with more confidence.

Hidden Value of Our Work

by //

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about my career and the value of my job. I know that the first thing that comes to mind in terms of value is my salary but I want to dig deeper than that. I don’t know about you but when I think about my job in terms of money, I end up feeling like a number. There’s gotta be more value than just the salary, right?

So, I sat back this weekend and did some brainstorming in regards to what I value within my job. As it turns out, there’s a lot more I value than just my salary! Here are the things I came up with and hopefully they will help you value your job a little more this week:

Complete Benefits Package

Most people don’t think about this benefit that adds so much value to their career. I didn’t until just recently when I had to get my teeth cleaned at the dentist. When I was walking about, I asked how much I owed for the service and I got a reply back, “sir, you owe nothing, your insurance paid for it.” What a blessing! The bill was a couple hundred dollars and not a penny came out of my pocket. I realized that a comprehensive health and dentist plan covered by an employer is a HUGE benefit and adds tremendous value to your career. Even looking down the line in my own life with a family and kids, insurance becomes that much more important.

And I can’t forget to mention 401k plans. Since most companies offer these retirement accounts, you can take advantage of employer matching (if yours offers) and get ahead in your retirement planning portfolio. You couldn’t do this without your employer. That’s another big value of working for someone. Speaking of which, I need to increase my contributions this week!

Matt’s note: You can do this without your employer, but employer sponsored plans are definitely a blessing to be used and appreciated.

Networking Opportunities

This is a massive value in my opinion.  We all know that most people end up changing companies at some point during their career.  You never know when you will need recommendations for job opportunities or need a contact about finding a new job.  We spend a considerable amount of time in the workplace and those relationships can last a lifetime.  Think about mentors you’ve had, great bosses, and fun co-workers.  These relationships add tremendous value to anyone’s careers and should not be minimized or taken for granted.

Making an Impact for Christ

This is something that I’ve begun to realize more and more as I work within the corporate world.  God has placed us in our career at a specific company for a specific reason.  I cannot begin to tell you about the amazing talks I’ve had with co workers and the opportunities to bring them to church with me – how amazing is that?!  God did not design us to be worker bees left with no purpose other than busy work.  He designed us to change the workplace for his glory.  I have found that this type of thinking not only adds great value to my career but keeps me inspired to get up for work in the morning even when I don’t feel like it.

Solid Work-Life Balance

For me, this balance ranks much higher than my salary.  If a company offered me $100,000 but expected 80 hours a week, I would tell the company to take a hike.  If a similar company offered me $75,000 but expected me to only work 40 hours a week, I’d take the latter of the two.  Work-life balance is huge in my book.  When I feel pressured to budge on this issue, I think about extremely rich people on their death beds with no friends or family to comfort them as they pass.  Remember folks, money is a fleeting thing and will never bring happiness.  Only Christ can fulfill our hearts desire, so don’t get trapped into the lie that money is more important than or your relationships with family, friends, and the Lord.

As you can see, salary is only a sliver of the total value of my career.  It’s critical that we think of our jobs as a total package and not just numbers.  It causes us to value our job significantly more which helps us have a better time at work.

Take some time this week and brainstorm some things you value about your career.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!