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Tag: dream

How To Prevent Being Discouraged

Question from Hustleburg’s Episode 2, Answering Listener Questions: How can the solopreneur who is trying to keep up with their 9-5 while also starting their side hustle keep from getting discouraged? How did you do it?

Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to ditch your 9-5 and embark on your entrepreneur journey, you need to keep giving 100% at work, but limit it to only 100%. You can’t give your day job free space in your head outside of the time you gave at the office. Outside the office, that space is for you and your dreams.

The Question, “Why?”

Then, think about why your side hustle is your passion. Why is this “it?” You’ll notice in the interviews on the Hustleburg podcast that I start each of them with “Why?” That’s because I want to know what drives the guest. When I consult with a potential client, I ask it as well. Repeatedly. It’s likely maddening in the moment, because they feel like they are answering an inquisitive 5-year-old who only has one question in his toolbox. In interviews and consultations, I have to know.

More importantly, YOU need to know what drives you, why you’re passionate about it, and you need to share that with yourself and others. Everything becomes about the mission of what you do. Why? Why? Why? It usually takes the third or fourth Why to truly understand your underlying meaning in doing this. This is your vision of the dream you have for yourself.

Make Your Vision Your Mission

When you make that vision the focus of everything that you do it makes all of your business decisions, it makes all of your conversations, all of the things that you do regarding your side hustle and eventually your business, about your why. When you can serve your why you’re not likely to get discouraged, because you have made that vision a mission. You’re not likely to get burned out, because you have a purpose.

Focus on Your Mission

You will always be focused on the real reason why you’re doing it. That’s how I did it. I started with asking why I needed to get rid of the nine to five so that I could help other people do exactly the same.

This listener question was a part of Hustleburg’s second episode. If you have a question you’d like to have answered, please join the community here.

How Millenials Will Save Your Business

I have led millennials in the workplace, and that experience makes me optimistic about how they will save your business… If you adapt it to becoming a more sustainable endeavor.

It’s 2019.

Three years ago, millennials became the largest generation in the American workforce, making up more than 35% of American workers. While you may see “hit pieces” on millennials, poking fun at them with stories about avocado toast, laziness and mooching, and participation trophies, these stereotypes don’t live up to my observations of the millennial generation.

The list of products, businesses, and industries millennials are “killing” grows with each writer and blogger’s need to put words to page. Any businessperson worth their salt will recognize that some of these killed items are simply the inevitable outcome of creative destruction, an economic idea that industries change for the better by destroying the old to bring about the new. It’s why we no longer have buggy whip makers in an age of automobiles.

I’m not a millennial, writing to defend my generation here. Even by the most generous timeline, I miss being one by about two weeks. I have, however, led millennials in the workplace, and that experience makes me optimistic about how they will save your business… If you adapt it to becoming a more sustainable endeavor.

Millennials take over as dominant generation

As millennials overtook Baby Boomers as the dominant generation at work, a Gallup poll found that only 34% of American workers are engaged at work. That means that nearly seven of the ten sitting just outside your office are likely not. This disengaged workforce certainly isn’t helping productivity, though there is hope, and it rests on the shoulders of our largest segment of the workforce, the millennial generation.

Luckily, I’m not alone in seeing the high-quality attributes of this cohort. Millennials excel when working as part of a team. They use the latest technology and adapt to innovations with ease. Most importantly, they want their efforts to have meaning and purpose. They value their work with as much or more importance as their family, when thinking about their dream. To not tap into this passion is a big mistake.

After decades of management practices focused on reports, endless meetings, and performance reviews, we find ourselves unable to tap that potential in this generation. They feel ground into dust by the aforementioned interactions with their boss. Their desire for meaning and purpose in their work requires that we move away from the WHAT that we do to focus on the WHY that motivates us to do it. If you’ve read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why,” you already have a head start on understanding how to lead your team, especially the youngest players on it.

Vision, Mission, and Purpose

By sharing, exemplifying, and leading the mission and purpose of the work, you motivate them to buy into the vision of your team, rather than seeing it as a quick stop on their journey to their ultimate career. Their buy-in leads to a stronger affective commitment to the organization. Couple that commitment with their blended work and social spheres and the skills they bring with them, and you can build a company swimming with talented millennials onboard for the long term. Their desire for the work they do to have meaning is met when you cast the vision of your mission.

Luckily, this desire for purpose goes beyond the workplace into purchase decisions. In addition to having your team unified behind your mission, you will also have an edge when marketing your brand to the millennial generation. Not only that, the rock star millennials on your team will also be your greatest evangelists. This is key to a demographic who doubts the advertisements they view and hear, preferring the recommendation of someone within their network.

So, when do we start outlining your mission and communicating that to your team?