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Business New and Old and New Again
Disruption has become the norm in business. But this doesn't always mean massive and world-changing disruption. Sometimes, it just means that the world is a bit more open to conducting business the way you'd prefer to do it these days.
I'm writing these lines in a hotel room, but I could just as easily be staying in someone else's guest room, thanks to AirBNB.
Earlier today, I had a call with a woman who heads marketing for a software company. She chose the job so she could work from home, spend more time running, and not have to spend time in a cubicle. I referred a purple-haired girl who used to work at a reputable Canadian company for a freelance gig in Dallas where the young woman will be working at the kind of company that wouldn't normally hire someone with purple hair. But these days, they will.
Why? Because the freaks are about to inherit the earth.
Okay, What Does This Really Mean?
You picked up this book for one of a few reasons:
- You know me already and just want to see what I'm jabbering about this time.
- You want to know what a book about freaks is really about.
- You've felt like a freak (or like one that is in hiding) for much of your life and are wondering if I can offer any advice.
The premise of this book is really simple: How can I do business my way and be successful, when the way I think and the goals I have aren't in line with conventional thinking?
Does that resonate with you? Then you're in the right place. Not sure? Well, perhaps you should keep reading. If you love fitting in, doing what you're told, and being just like everybody else, you're going to have a bad time (http://hbway.com/badtime).
This book is designed to help you stop doing the things that aren't working for you, and start taking action with the things that will. It will enhance your confidence and understanding of who you really are, and help you determine how to develop an approach that works best for the people you intend to serve. That's one of the best thing about this book's message: In the old days, you had to conform. Now, you only need consider your choices and choose the options that feel most right to you.
Am I a Freak? Are You?
Are you a freak? Are you a misfit? A world dominator? A small army? I'll let you know right off the bat that I am a freak. I've always had to do things my own way. I don't usually fit in, at least not without having to make a lot of effort. I don't choose the easy route. If there's a difficult way to get something done, I'll choose that way. Case in point: I wrote this entire book twice because I didn't like the way it came out the first time. From an early age, I felt that the world at large seemed like it was running on autopilot. And I wanted to take the wheel.
What's your story? Maybe you are the CEO of your own cubicle, or an employeepreneur, a title coined by my friend James Altucher—never quite satisfied to toe the line, but instead, working hard from your corporate role to make the company far more amazing. Maybe you're the 61-year-old grandmother who is a rock vixen at heart, who can't get over the fact that you have grandkids, and who still wears leopard-print pants to the business mixers.
Or maybe you're a business owner who has never really done business the way the rules dictate that you should. Maybe this has worked great for a while, but now you're feeling pressured to do things “the regular way” to get through tough times. Perish the thought, I say. Stay the freak that you are! We'll figure out how to get through together.
Let's agree to this: You can call yourself whatever you like, but you're a freak if:
- You don't fit in without some serious effort.
- You are not a big fan of settling or compromising.
- You're looking for ways to allow your weirdness to be an asset, and not as the deficit that people have tried to convince you it is.
Is There Some Age Limit to Freaks?
People often wonder whether freaks are more frequently young people. But some of the most interesting freaks are older than you might imagine. Here's a story about one.
Many years ago, I worked in a nursing home. One of our residents was Helen. She was 104 years old. Her breakfast, every morning, was oatmeal with black licorice on top. I asked her about it one time. She said, “I can eat whatever I like at this age. Who will say a thing about it?”
Many older people tend to take a magical viewpoint as they age: They simply don't care if they don't fit in, Admittedly, this is a broad generalization, but it does beg the question: Why wait to be old to do what you want to? You can start deciding to be who you want to be—not caring what people think about it—whenever you choose. It's yours to explore.
But What Does This Have to Do with Business?
For quite some time, there has been only one mainstream method of operating in the modern business world: fit in, or get out. The industrial era encouraged the notion that we needed consistency, that there had to be regular hours of operation, that people had to conform to very specific and measurable modes and decisions. If you weren't willing to follow these standards, you were an outcast and business wasn't going to happen.
So many things have changed in recent times. For one, new opportunities for employment have surfaced. Let's say you have always wanted to work for a car company—but not any of the established ones. Nowadays, you can work with Local Motors (localmotors.com), and simply design your own car. Maybe you've always wanted to design every single texture used in a room of your house. That's an option now, thanks to 3-D printing (hbway.com/3droom).
You want to create and sell your art? Great. Mobile payment company Square makes that easy (squareup.com). Need a place to meet that isn't a coffee shop or hotel lobby? Breather can find you exactly the right space (breather.com, which happens to be run by my sometimes coauthor and all-times friend, Julien Smith). You want to rent out your place in New York so that you can travel the globe? Make money by putting your apartment up for rent on AirBNB (airbnb.com).
Opportunity abounds where there were never any before. For instance, I'm a magazine junkie. I love to read them, and I've had the pleasure to write for several great ones. But then I launched my own because, why not? (ownermag.com).
That's just it. The challenge for the past 100 years or so was to find a job and maybe a career. Today, you can choose the work you want to do and find a way to do it the way that makes the most sense for you and your buyers.
Marie Forleo found this out for herself early in life: “I used to work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That was my number-one job pick out of college and I loved it because there were no chairs. I had a lot of energy and I felt like, ‘This is the only kind of environment where I can be as crazy as I am and I'm going to match with everybody else.’ ”
But Marie soon came to see that the fit wasn't entirely there.
“[When I was on] Wall Street, I realized, ‘God, this isn't it—because my heart isn't in it.’ I kept having this intuitive gut feeling, ‘This is not where I'm supposed to be in life.’ The scary part was, I didn't know what else I should be doing because all the other job descriptions I'd been exposed to at that point sounded boring as hell.”
Marie went on to try out magazine publishing, starting out in ad sales and moving around a bit more. She then moved into the editorial side at Mademoiselle magazine, but it still didn't feel quite right. As she tells it:
I was on the Internet, probably when I shouldn't have been, and I stumbled across this article about a “new profession” at the time called life coaching. And I kid you not, something in me just [knew this was for me]. I was about 22 or 23 years old—and even though I knew it was ridiculous to think that anyone in their right mind would [hire me; after all], who would hire a 23-year-old life coach? I could not deny that something inside of my heart and my being was lighting up like nothing ever had lit up before.
So fast-forward a couple of months. I had signed up for a coach-training program. It was a pretty lengthy one, but I got a call from Condé Nast HR. They wanted to offer me a job at Vogue—the queen bee of fashion magazines. That was my fork in the road, [the moment] when I said to myself, “Okay, either you're going to take this job at Vogue, and continue on this kind of publishing career, or you're going to quit and start your own life-coaching business at 23.” So, of course, you know what I decided to do. I quit, started bartending at night, and began building my coaching business during the day. That's really where it all came from.
Marie is still writing her success story. But she crossed the seven-figure line in earnings for her business a few years ago and there's no end in sight. Marie Forleo definitely qualifies as a freak inheriting the earth. Her quirky humor and style shines through in everything sh...
