Take Charge of your Monetization

I’m thinking about getting a job.

Financial gurus and new-wave monetization experts are not supposed to admit to jobs. Jobs are evil. Jobs are addictive. Jobs are for suckers.

Actually, that’s mostly true. If you’re taking a job because you’re too frightened to start a business, or because you think it’s the best or safest way to make money, it’s probably a bad idea. And for most people, it’s probably safe to assume that they’re getting a job for that reason.

But jobs do have uses. They are one of the quickest ways to get money. And depending on the job, they can be one of the cheapest education sources around — I don’t know of any other school that will pay you.

The fundamental question is, are you doing this because you want to impress someone? Because you think it’s a smart way to make money? Because you are afraid to tell your friends that you’re unemployed?

Or because you’ve examined your situation, and you’ve decided that having a job would be greatest help for your current monetization mix?

The Point Is, Do It On Purpose

Planning your monetization is something we’re never taught in school, partially because they assume you’re going to get a job, and partially because our school system was designed — if you trace it back to its source — by military leaders who didn’t want their subordinates to learn bad habits like thinking for themselves. So we’re taught to act like we don’t have control over our financial lives, that we’re at the mercy of our boss and the economy.

And it’s true, of course, that outside forces can affect your monetization capability. That’s why the first step of annual planning is examining the external situation. But you can then — and this is the bit most people miss — choose what you’re going to do in response to those external circumstances.

Monetizing yourself is anything that causes you to get money, whether it’s a business, a job, a website, or panhandling on the street. In Freakonomics, the authors discuss successful gang lords and drug dealers, who — it turns out — run their gangs as businesses, keeping records, handling customer relations, improving distribution, and so on. And I recommend that you run yourself as a business, regardless of what monetization method you’re currently using.

In an earlier post, I discussed changes in the economic environment that affect your monetization options. Even if you have a job, it makes sense to think of yourself as a business with one employee, leasing yourself out for 3-5 year contracts.

What do you do now?
What is your current monetization mix? Does all or most of your income come from one source? What are you providing of value to acquire that income?

What do you want to do?
What can you provide of value? What would it take to monetize those things? What will you need to do to get those skills and capital?

If getting a job will help you acquire skills, capital, or some other benefit to achieving your goals, by all means go for it. My boyfriend and I are considering consolidating our two-part-time jobs into one full-time job, freeing the other person to work on their business full-time.

Just remember that you’re using it to achieve your goals, not because you’re destined to stay in one job or one industry for the rest of your life.

I Still Don’t Know What To Do

The last 3 posts have been part of a series aimed towards developing a modern vision quest: a way to figure out what your talents and mission are, so you can become an active, productive adult member of society.

I’ve told you why I think it’s necessary, how to start identifying your talents, and how to start establishing a mission. But odds are pretty good that you still feel lost and confused.

The problem is, we’re not describing something that is quantifiable. I can’t tell you how to measure your mathematical capability, or your spacial reckoning, or your athleticism. And even if each skill were measurable, I couldn’t tell you which skills to measure, for there are an infinite number of possible skills and talents. So even though I’ve asked you to write them down, they aren’t actually the kind of thing you can really write down.

So unlike the annual planning series, you won’t leave this one feeling like you really know what you’re doing. But at least you’ll be thinking about the right things, and moving in the right direction.

Let’s start a conversation about what else needs to be included. What have you found helpful in your search for a mission?

What Do You Want From Life?

This post is part of a series aimed towards creating a modern vision quest: how to develop your unique talents, circumstances, and personality into a role for yourself as an adult in society.

Two days after I started writing this series, a friend gifted to me a book called The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day With Passion & Purpose. The book begins by pointing out the quiet desperation with which most of us live our lives, and argues that the way to avoid that lifestyle is to become the best possible version of yourself.

Early on, the author tells the story of speaking to a class of high school seniors before they graduated. He looked out at the class, full of eager, hopeful faces, ready to go out into the great big world and become part of it, and asked them, “What do you want from life?” He got in response:

• Uncertainty as to whether the question was rhetorical,

• Vague answers probably instilled by society rather than from actual desire, like “I want a million dollars” or “I want a beautiful wife.”
• Some pretty good answers like, “I want to be a doctor so I can help people, reduce suffering, and make money.”
• One really good, fully-thought-out answer, from a young man who hoped to be president, and had a plan laid out for college, law school, military service, local campaign involvement, and internships on Capitol Hill.

Most of us have no clear answer to that question. And so you end up living a Jimmy Buffet song:

“It seems I have a problem in my present-day career:
My ship she has a rudder, but I don’t know where to steer.”

Of course we feel lost and confused; we are lost.

What does that have to do with my work?

During her year-long happiness project, Gretchen Rubin discovered a principle she labeled the first splendid truth: To be happy, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” People like to make progress; we don’t like to do things that don’t accomplish anything. But one of the most common reasons for feeling like you’re not making progress is that you haven’t defined what constitutes “progress”.

And it’s not a quick and easy answer; success is different for each person.

Example 1
I recently spoke to a software engineer describing a conflict within his company: marketing wants them to build on successful past projects, developing new material for programs that they know sell. Operations wants to build brand-new stuff with inspiration and elegance. Marketing says, “I just want to make you guys rich.” And it’s a compelling argument, because following that advice would make all the programmers rich.

But for most of the programmers, being rich doesn’t count as success. Oh, they’d all like to be rich, and they’re certainly hoping to find a middle road that will allow them to be rich. But almost none of them, if they’d gotten rich by re-hashing old material, would feel successful. They know they can do better work than that, and they would be ashamed to sell anything less than their best.

Example 2
I’m about as introverted as you can get, and am fully satisfied with the circle of friends that I have. I’ve no objection to meeting new people, but I don’t feel any particular urge to seek it out. But I just spent the weekend with some friends who love people. They love to meet people, to learn about people, to spend time with people. And I believe that if, on their deathbeds, they could look back at their lives and say, “I made as many friends as possible” they would count themselves as successful.

There’s nothing wrong with being rich, or having a beautiful wife, or being a CEO. But please don’t believe that those things will automatically make you successful. Only you can define what will make you successful.

OK…So Now What?

Chapter 2 of The Rhythm of Life ends thusly:

Put this book aside now — and before you read on, spend five minutes or five hours answering the question for yourself. What do you want from life?
Maybe you have already thought long and hard about this question but have never written it down. On the other hand, if you have never taken the time to seriously address the question, don’t pretend that you have. Take the time. Think it over. Write it down.
There are no right or wrong answers. Write quickly. Don’t think too much. Don’t analyze or edit yourself as you make your list. Write everything down, even the ones you feel are foolish. Your answers don’t have to be definitive. They will change over time. That’s okay. In fact, some of them will probably change by the time you finish this book. But it is still important to write them down now. It will help you as you read through the rest of this book, and as you venture through the rest of your life. So write your list, and when you are done, date it.
….
Stop reading. Put the book down. What you are about to write on that paper is infinitely more important than anything else I have to say in this book.

Like defining your talents, this is not a one-shot, no-problem exercise. In fact, like every other part of the vision quest, this is an ongoing, never-ending exercise. Start now. You’ll never be done, but you still need to start.

Resources for Further Reading
The Power of Clarity
A refinement of my happiness formula
The Rhythm of Life

Talents and Skills

Many times on this site, in discussions of how to decide on a business or what you want to do with your life, I talk about your talents and skills. Since most people use these terms interchangeably, I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss what I mean by them.

Talents

I use talents in the same sense as First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, and StrengthsFinder 2.0. That is, a talent is an inborn ability or tendency to respond in a given way. (Actually, they say, your talents are set at a young age. But since I assume anyone reading this post is more than 5 years old, you can think of them as innate.) Some people, faced with someone else’s distress, will automatically try to calm them down; these people should go into medicine or counseling. Some people, faced with someone else’s distress, will automatically tell them to quit whining and get back to work; these people should go into coaching or the military. Getting these two groups of people mixed up will do no one any good: the “coach”‘s patients will feel terrible and the “therapist”‘s platoon will be ineffective.

In this sense of the word, we obviously all have talents — it’s not just restricted to artists and athletes. And since talents are not trainable, it’s important to make sure that your talents are matched up with the job you’re doing. You may have dozens of talents to a greater or lesser degree, but you probably have 3-5 that really stand out, things that you do or handle or learn much better than most people.

My talents, for example, are

• understanding relationships between things
• memorizing data (especially what I’ve heard, as opposed to what I’ve seen or read)
• communication

Skills

Skills, in contrast, are things that you have learned. Although they will often complement your talents, they aren’t things that you were born knowing how to do. You had to learn them, and you could probably figure out how to teach them to others.

Almost any talent can be learned as a skill, although some are more difficult than others. My cousin is enthusiastic as a talent: given a situation, she will automatically start looking for reasons it’s good, and for ways she can jump in and participate. I’m learning it as a skill, by practicing every day, in every situation, to ask myself “Why is this a good thing? What can I do to be part of this?” My boyfriend has adaptability as a talent; he just isn’t bothered by even dramatic changes. I’m slowly learning it as a skill, building contingency plans into my strategies and reminding myself that nothing is set in stone.

And some skills aren’t talents for anyone. Nobody’s born knowing how to ride a bike or balance a checkbook. A talent for athleticism or precision may help you learn them faster, but you still have to be taught.

For example, I have skills in using Microsoft Excel (greatly assisted by my talent for understanding relationships), test taking (aided by my talent for memorization, public speaking (aided by my talent for communication) and building a business (not particularly related to any of my talents).

Knowledge Skills

Knowledge skills are a special category of skills, things that you “know” rather than things that you “know how to do”. The primary difference is that knowledge skills are easily transferable. For example:

If you know how many free throws Michael Jordan has successfully made in his career, you can easily put that knowledge in my head: you tell me the number, and now I know it. That’s a knowledge skill.

If you know how to successfully shoot a free throw, it’s much harder to put that knowledge in m head. Actually, you can’t do it directly at all. You can help me discover it on my own, by making recommendations on my technique and advice as you watch me try, but you can’t put “how to shoot a free throw” in my head. That’s a skill.

Knowledge skills are things that you know that you could write down or easily communicate to other people. They’re encompassed more in data or information than in how-tos or understanding.

Most skills have a host of related knowledge skills that come along with them. So most people who know how to create a trial statement of cash flows can also tell you what a cash flow statement is. But someone who knows what a cash flow statement is doesn’t necessarily know how to make one.

So what?

There are several ways that knowing your skills and talents can help you. The first and most boring is in applying for jobs. Although most HR departments want a traditional resume rather than a list of talents and skills, knowing your talents and skills can help you to communicate them more clearly to the hiring manager. And knowing what your talents are (and are not) can help you avoid jobs that you’ll hate.

Knowing your talents is also helpful in starting your own job, or starting a business. In order to succeed, you’ll need to offer something of value, preferably in a way that your competitors can’t duplicate. And your talents are a great source of non-duplicable value; by definition, they are something that you do better than most other people, and so they point towards things that others cannot or will not do for themselves.

Having a current list of your talents and skills is also helpful in planning for the future or deciding what course to take. What do you want to do with your life? Your talents point towards things that you’re likely to enjoy and be good at. Once you’ve selected something you might like to do, determine what skills would be needed. Any skills that you need but don’t have, start work on acquiring them.

What Next?

Unfortunately, life doesn’t have a source code where you can go to get a list of your talents and skills. There are lots of sources for coming up with ideas, but ultimately you’ll have to decide what terms and definitions fit you best.

The Talents and Skills Worksheet can help you get started. Sit down and brainstorm areas where you have natural talent, and related skills that go with them. Go through past resumes and professional certifications for ideas on your skills; look for repeating themes in your skills and your work history to get an idea of your talents. Sit down with trusted friends, family members, or coworkers and ask their opinions.

Keep this sheet handy, and jot down ideas as they occur to you. Over weeks, months, and years, you’ll start to get a feel for what you have to offer.

Resources for Further Reading
Multiple Intelligence Theory
Disc Communication Styles
Is Your Genius At Work

A Modern Vision Quest

I had a conversation with a friend last year about the life stages of a human being. Although every person is obviously different, most people, we observed, will go through these stages at approximately these ages:

• Childhood (0 – 7 or 8 ) In this stage, a person is new to this whole gig, and is just trying to learn about everything that’s going on. They’re overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, and don’t have the time, experience, or spare processing power to do much analysis of what is happening.

  My friend says that in jungle cultures, children are first allowed to wield a machete at age 7 or 8. In the Catholic church, children are considered mature enough to understand and take communion around 7 or 8. In US culture, although we have no formal rituals, 7 or 8 is about the time most kids are assigned chores of their own, and the earliest most parents would consider letting their kids have a pet.

• Adolescence (7 or 8 – 30 or 33) In this stage, people continue to learn about the world, but their focus is now more on figuring out how they fit into it. Exploration of skills and talents, pushing your limits to see where they are, and trying out new things are the primary activities. Towards the later years, skills and talents should hopefully be clear, and focus is on how best to use those skills and talents to do something useful in the community.

  I realize that my age range here is controversial, because most places define “adult” now at age 18 or 21. But if you look at people who have changed the world, from Jesus & Buddha to Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, the turning point in their lives, when they began to affect others and to devote themselves to their lives’ work, came closer to age 30 than age 20.

• Adult (30 or 33 – ?60 or 65?) This is the period when most of your life’s work will be done, whether it’s ending racial injustice or raising great kids.

  Please note that this is unrelated to success in other areas; it is obviously possible for an adolescent to release a hit album, become a basketball start, or start a multi-million-dollar business in their dorm room. And all of those successes are awesome, and worthwhile. But they’re usually not the sort of thing that a person would count as their “life’s work”; most people who achieve all that will start looking for something more.

  What it means to you

  Here’s the main problem with our culture (and if you live in a place that hasn’t fully imported US culture, watch out for this pitfall): we don’t teach people how to be adults.

  The mechanisms of our culture do a very poor job of helping us figure out what our strengths are and how to use them, what our weaknesses are and how to compensate for them, and what unique value we can offer to the world.

  In the industrial age, this wasn’t such a big deal. The world had pre-defined slots, and you were going to be hammered into one whether you liked it or not. So if you never found your unique set of talents, it didn’t matter much.

  But now we’re in the information age, and you’re going to be self-employed one way or another. You need to offer something unique if you’re going to get ahead, and knowing your individual talents, skills, knowledges, and capability is critical for success.

  I don’t have an easy answer for you. But I have struggled with this for the last 10 years, and I have come across some things that can help. So the next few posts will cover ideas on how to find your niche in the world.

The Danger of Multi-tasking

When Multi-tasking goes awry

The Old Sailor

There was once an old sailor my grandfather knew
Who had so many things which he wanted to do
That, whenever he thought it was time to begin,
He couldn’t because of the state he was in.

He was shipwrecked, and lived on an island for weeks,
And he wanted a hat, and he wanted some breeks;
And he wanted some nets, or a line and some hooks
For the turtles and things which you read of in books.

And, thinking of this, he remembered a thing
Which he wanted (for water) and that was a spring;
And he thought that to talk to he’d look for and, keep
(If he found it) a goat, or some chickens and sheep.

He began on a needle, but he thought as he worked,
That, if this was an island where savages lurked,
Sitting safe in his hut he’d have nothing to fear,
Whereas now they might suddenly breathe in his ear!

So he thought of his hut… and he thought of his boat,
And his hat and his breeks, and his chickens and goat,
And his hooks (for his food), and the spring (for his thirst)…
But he never could think which he ought to do first.

And so in the end he did nothing at at all,
But basked on the shingle wrapped up in a shawl.
And I think it was dreadful the way he behaved –
He did nothing but basking until he was saved!

– A. A. Milne
Now We Are Six

I’m not a focus-nazi who insists that you can never have more than one project going at a time. But multi-tasking can go too far.

Simple is Good

Robert Fulghum has a story about a church board meeting where they needed to figure out how to

a) Fill in the potholes on the entrance side of the church driveway
b) Slow down drivers on the exit side of the driveway to keep the children safe
c) Do all that without too much expense.

The best proposal? Leave the potholes on the entrance side. Dig new potholes on the exit side. Seal them all up to prevent further deterioration. One of the church members volunteered to do it for free.

But that was too simple. Instead the board debated for hours and hours about paving and building speed bumps and posting signs and how to fund it and when to do it and who to hire… and it never did get done.

I’m not quite sure where it comes from, this urge to “complify” things. Maybe Hollywood, with its intricate strategies and dramatic unveilings. Maybe too many big corporations, with their 5-year plans and elegantly-worded mission statements. Maybe it’s still a remnant of aristocratic traditions from royal courts, sneaking its way in after more than two centuries of anti-nobility attitudes.

But but I think most often we reject solutions that are simple, elegant, and effective, in favor of “solutions” that are complex, difficult, and risky…..so that we can justify saying “I can’t do it, it’s too risky.” It’s a sneaky way of avoiding what you fear without ever having to say “I quit” out loud.

Simple solutions are often very effective. You should give them a try sometime.

Many thanks to DM at Heart To Heart for posting this story.

The New Concept of Marketing

Once upon a time, when I was a kid growing up in the 80s, mass production was the rule. The economics looked something like this:

• My local cobbler can make a pair of shoes that fits me perfectly. It costs $50.

• My local Payless Shoes can provide me with a pair of shoes that fit OK. They cost $20.

By ignoring their customers’ needs, and focusing on what will turn out the most shoes in the least time, manufacturers were able to drastically reduce the cost of shoes. In turn, we all got used to ignoring our own needs, in order to get lower prices.

The 4 Ps of marketing, then looked like this:

Price (as low as possible) ->
Product (whatever we can make cheaply) ->
Promotion (make people think they want our product) ->
Place (wherever we tell them to go)

In other words, you made what you wanted to make, and then spent money to convince people to buy it.

The new rules

I admit that shoes are still pretty much produced the same way. But your local shoe store has many more options, and there are thousands more online. Whatever your requirements, you can find a shoe that meets them.

There are several driving forces for this, but the long and the short of it is that power has shifted. We no longer have to settle for a product that’s good enough. We can almost certainly find a product that’s ideal.

Many, many companies have yet to realize this. But the intelligent ones have shifted their focus from internal to external. A 5th P has been added, to look like this:

Participation (Talk to people, find out what they like and what they want) ->
Product (Whatever the market wants) ->
Price (as low as the market will bear) ->
Promotion/Participation (let people know that you have what they want) ->
Place (wherever is convenient for your customers)

That is, you make what people want to buy, and then let them know it’s available.

What it means to you

The good news: you no longer have to be a conniving, deceptive weasel to be successful in business. Marketing is no longer about manipulating people into buying stuff they don’t want or need.

The bad news: you can no longer make what you want and manipulate people into buying it. You have to make what other people want.

This brings us back to the venn diagram of happiness in business:

You have to find something that overlaps between what you want to make and what people want to buy.

But at least you don’t have to be a lying scumbag.

Resources for Further Reading
Happiness In Business Diagram
The Price Is Right

Your Monetization Is Not Your Business

What is a “business”? Google defines it as “the activity of providing goods and services involving financial and commercial and industrial aspects.”

That’s still accurate, but the underlying methods for accomplishing financial goals have changed significantly in the past 10 years. It used to be that the “providing goods and services” and the “financial and commercial aspects” were closely related. The value you provided was to (for example) sell cars. People gave you money in return for cars.

But today, just about every product in the world is a commodity. There are more than a million websites where you can buy a Mercedes Benz. So providing me a Mercedes no longer counts as “providing value”. You have to give me extra value, to entice me to buy it from you.

What Business is Amazon In?

Amazon.com makes money selling books, everyone knows that. But that’s really not their value. I can get most of those same books from my friendly local bookstore, or from Barnes&Noble.com, or from Better World Books. And yet Amazon is far and away the #1 bookseller on the web. Why?

Because Amazon provides information. If I need a new book, I don’t have to browse randomly through a genre hoping to find something I like. Amazon will pull out and show me books it thinks I might like. If I’m interested enough to take a look, it will give me ratings of the book, ratings of the author, reviews from readers, and “people who bought this book also bought”. All of that allows me to more quickly find books that I like, including some new stuff I might never have found in my random-genre-browsing method. And, despite the excellent service at my friendly local bookstore, I can’t get all that information from anywhere except Amazon.

If Amazon.com decided to stop selling books, they could still monetize their information: they could sell ads to related products & services, they could join an affiliate program with other booksellers, they could charge a membership fee for anyone who wanted access to the information, or a per-book lookup of $.25 per review, or $1 to get a personalized recommendation list. They could forget about dead-tree books and push hard for the use of their Kindle. There are lots of ways to make money on the information, because it’s valuable information.

But…
If Amazon.com decided to eliminate the information part of their site, they would quickly lose their book sales as well. There would be no reasons to choose them over BarnesAndNoble.com or my local Barnes & Noble. And most people, given the option, would rather support their friendly local bookseller and get their book immediately.

Amazon is not in the book-selling business. They are in the book-information business.

Your Monetization Is Not Your Business

Let’s look at the top 25 websites (according to Alexa.com):

Assorted Googles
Value: make it easy for you to find content on the web
Make money by: selling ads to people who want to sell to you

Facebook
Value: make it easy for you to keep in touch with friends and family, yet also easy to ignore Uncle Arnie’s repeated invitations to Farmville.
Make money by: selling ads to people who want to sell to you

YouTube
Value: entertainment (some education)
Make money by: selling out to Google

Yahoo!
Value: make it easy for you to find content on the web
Make money by: selling ads to people who want to sell to you

Windows Live
Value: make it easy for you to find content on the web
Make money by: selling ads to people who want to sell to you

Wikipedia
Value: easy-to-find information that’s as reliable as the Britannica on basic academic topics, and far more reliable on pop culture topics.
Make money by: asking for donations

That’s the first one on the list — at #6 — that even comes close to asking you to pay for the value they provide. And they’re still not using the traditional business model of selling you the information. You can have the information whether you pay or not.

The next one that even comes close to making you pay is #25 — ebay.com. And ebay doesn’t charge you for its major value: helping buyers & sellers find each other. It doesn’t charge you for browsing auctions to determine the fair market value of an item you may have. It only charges you a tiny fee to actually sell the product.

This is the new model of business: provide value, but don’t charge for it. Figure out who your audience is, and what they would pay money for. Find a way to get a piece of that action. Repeat.

Your Value Is Your Business

Provide value for people. It’s not an afterthought to your business, it is your business. If you provide value, I can help you monetize it. But if all you have is a monetization method, I can’t help you create value.

What Does It Mean to Be Unemployed?

My coworker (who keeps track of celebrity marriages and such), told me the story of Kenny Chesney bringing his then-girlfriend home to meet his parents. Like me, his parents evidently don’t keep track of Hollywood celebrities, and so Mr. Chesney Sr. didn’t recognize the girlfriend as Renee Zellweger, actress of (among other things) Bridget Jones’ Diary. So he politely inquired as to her line of work.

She happened to be between films at the time, so she sweetly replied, “I’m unemployed.”

What Does “Unemployed” mean to you?

Many of us are raised with the idea that having a job is the only worthwhile way to live. Unemployment means shame, means not putting food on the table, means taking charity, means not being good enough.

That makes it really scary to contemplate alternative monetization methods. After all, this whole website is about not having a job… and not having a job is bad.

Who is counted as unemployed?

Actually, most of the people that Americans use as role models… are not employed.

• Actors are not employed… even when they’re shooting. They are independent contractors paid a specified amount for labor on a particular project.
• Athletes are semi-employed: they have a contract for a specified duration and specific pay for that period; during that period they are considered employees of their team.
• Bill Gates is not employed, he is the employer.

About the only public figures who count as employees are politicians, and, well, do you really want your kids using politicians as role models? And many of them don’t get their primary income from the government anyway.. they own a business or investment that brings in more money than their alleged “job.”

Obviously I don’t recommend losing your job and failing to support your family. Unemployment can mean all of those things we usually associate with it.

But it can mean the height of success.