Reposition Your New Career
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Art Decker of New York self storage
“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” This occurred to me during a recent move, but I was skeptical. I was moving from Chicago, where all my friends and family lived, where all my work contacts were located, to San Francisco. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but I did not know anyone and my cost of living was about to skyrocket.
All my thoughts were consumed with discouraging statistics: Groceries in San Francisco are 14 percent more than in Chicago, health care was going to cost me 8 percent more, and my housing was slated to increase roughly 108 percent. Not only was I going to have to adjust to a new city and find new friends, but I was confronting the reality of a significant downsize. I was not thrilled and even the lemonade in San Francisco seemed expensive!
Though I wasn’t in the mood for making lemonade out of my lemons, it seemed more refreshing than sipping lemon juice at a pity party. Here’s what I did to embrace my new adventure.
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One Sentence Work Journal
You must find a way to do what excites you. That means understanding what makes you feel engaged, upset and happy.
Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project gave me the idea of keeping a one sentence journal. I think this habit will help you understand more about who you are and what you need to be happy within your business.
I usually write two sentences instead of just one because I like to write about what happened in my day and how I felt about it. I focus on the most emotionally powerful event. This helps me stay focused and not let the journal get too jumbled.
Download the One Sentence Work Journal PDF
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Chunk Your Way to Success
You may have heard of the idea of chunking. If not, the idea is simple. Let’s say you want to create a website for your business, but you don’t know where to start. All you see is this giant pile content, programming, and designing before you, so instead of getting to work you decide to watch an episode of your favorite TV show.
The day goes by and you accomplish nothing. The week goes by and still nothing.
Now your motivation is dwindling. That website that would have helped so many people is becoming an after thought.
You blew up your motivation into tiny pieces because you didn’t create a strategy that felt achievable.
Download the Chunk Your Way to Success PDF
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Pay Close Attention to Who You Really Are
Every now and again, I like to bring you interviews to give you a new perspective on work happiness. During my study of work happiness I have found that there are many paths to the same goal. Some people believe that loving what you do is a must, while other people believe that relationships are vital to enjoying the work that we do. Interviews are a great way to get out of your own perspective and see what other people are doing to develop their superpowers and live their passions.
When I read the title of Peter Buffett’s book Life Is What You Make It, I knew that I had to read it. A big part of my younger day’s struggles was believing that I deserved to have better jobs without earning it. I’ll be putting the review up next week, but right now I want to introduce you to Peter Buffett.
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How to Harness Your Superpowers
Starting a small business will force you to figure out what your superpowers are very quickly. I learned this the hard way.
I started up my business with what I thought was a good understanding of my superpowers, but holy cow was I wrong.
I thought I was fairly organized. Nope. My kryptonite.
I thought I was good at cold calling. Nope. More kryptonite.
It wasn’t until I began to keep track of my progress that my success and happiness began to change.
I forced myself to assess my progress every day, month and year. I created time for reflection to make sure that I wasn’t blindly hoping for the best. I was actually eliminating the habits that weren’t making me happy and adding habits that were making me happy.
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Depends on What Your Definition of Success Is
Every now and again, I like to bring you interviews to give you a new perspective on work happiness. During my study of work happiness I have found that there are many paths to the same goal. Some people believe that loving what you do is a must, while other people believe that relationships are vital to enjoying the work that we do. Interviews are a great way to get out of your own perspective and see what other people are doing to develop their superpowers and live their passions.
Adam Baker is a man on a mission that’s why I am highlighting him here. His mantra is beautiful – Sell your crap. Pay off your debt. Do what you love.
Every person who loves what they do has a deep belief in a mission. Adam is no different. His blog Man vs. Debt. talks about his trials of building a business that allows him the freedom to create the life of his dreams.
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Time Management is a Waste of Time
There are important things and then there are really important things.
Know the difference.
Stop getting caught up in trying to schedule every thirty minutes of your day. You know what needs to get done. The other stuff can wait.
Amazing results will not happen because you have an amazingly organized schedule. Amazing results are what happens when you focus on doing the really important stuff.
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Why Take the Risk of Being Successful in Unhappiness?
Every now and again, I like to bring you short interviews to give you a new perspective on work happiness. During my study of work happiness I have found that there are many paths to the same goal. Some people believe that loving what you do is a must, while other people believe that relationships are vital to enjoying the work that we do. Interviews are a great way to get out of your own perspective and see what other people are doing to develop their strengths and live their passions.
If you have never visited I Can Has CheezBurger you are missing out. It is simply one of the funniest websites around. People add comments to pictures of cats doing something weird. I borrowed one from the site. It’s in the upper left hand corner of this post. It’s a wonderful break from a tedious task. Ben Huh is the brilliant mind behind this website. I was lucky to have met him at SXSW this past month and he agreed to do an interview.
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How to Use Your Skills and Passion to Create Success
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Sara Lopez
You never quite realize how much your job affects your happiness until you have had a truly terrible job, or a truly phenomenal job. Just think about it, you spend 2/3 of your awake time at a place, surrounded by certain people, working for a specific cause– this is called your career.
My name is Sara Lopez and I am the Brand Ambassador and Social Media Strategist for 8th Continent Soymilk. I quite possibly have the best job in the world, however it was not always this way.
At one point I worked for a consulting firm in San Francisco that was so unappreciative I would trudge home considering where I went wrong on my career path and how I would ever fix it. I dreaded going in to work in the morning because I knew my skills were not utilized, nor did my employer notice them.
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An Itch You Can’t Scratch
(Click here to view video at Work Happy Now)
We all have itches we can’t scratch. The question is…How do you deal with it? This video post discusses how to deal with your itch and figure out a way to indirectly scratch it, so you feel satisfied and ready to scratch that itch when the time is right.
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