4 Big Lies You Need to Stop Believing If You Grew Up Lower or Middle Class and Want to Succeed — #2 You Need to Look for a Job
Last week I talked about lie #1, entitlement and this assumption that People Owe You. I also mentioned how we grow up within this culture that follows the same pattern for everyone.
The Soul-sucking Narrative
- Go to school and get good grades.
- Get good grades so you can get into a good college.
- Go to a good college so you can get a good job.
- Work it until you have enough money to retire.
- Die.
That’s really our narrative. Spend your entire life trying to build enough money so that you can live comfortably after the age of 60. What a bunch of bullshit, right?
Like so many, I was completely disillusioned by this seemingly inevitable path to a fairly meaningless life. So I did the college thing, but then went abroad and spent nearly a decade traveling the world.
We Don’t Need Jobs
Even then, with all my amazing experiences and immersion into different perspectives, I still couldn’t really break that mindset.
Working a job, making money largely for other people, doing something you’re not passionate about, it is all completely wrong.
We don’t need to look for jobs. We need to look for opportunity. If you get out of college and can’t find a job, create your own. If you get fired or laid off, don’t look for another shitty job with another company that will restructure in a year, or with an inept boss who got there because his parents could afford to pay for his Ivy League education.
Growing up, I was always a bit of an opportunist, but it was still in a restricted way. I worked harder than others and always found a way to move up.
Living abroad was no different. I didn’t want to be one of the 55 year-old teachers still complaining about school management and just surviving, but now surviving in a foreign land rather than back home.
Create Your Own Opportunities
So I became a teacher trainer and then, later, a school director. I didn’t do that by waiting for someone to notice me. I didn’t do it by paying to get additional certifications. So how did I do it?
I did it by creating opportunities. If you want a more in-depth look at that, read my story in EFL Magazine, “Teacher to Manager: Making the Move.”
I would volunteer to run school-wide trainings and then add it to my resume. I sought out schools where I knew there would be openings soon and built relationships, so I could apply for that spot when it opened. And it worked.
But I still hadn’t really made the ultimate connection. Case in point, I built one of the most successful teaching blogs in Europe and the Middle East at the time. It was read by the biggest names in the field as well as by teachers from around the world.
At the same time, I built my first Twitter influencer platform, though we didn’t call people influencers back then. I started getting invited to speak at conferences around the Mediterranean and, when I’d go, people would know who I was from as far away as Japan.
All That Work and Then I Walked Away
So I had all this reach and all these great relationships and I did nothing with it. My brother once asked me, “Why don’t you monetize the blog?” My response was, “I’m not doing it for the money.”
Then I moved to China, behind the Great Firewall, and just let everything go defunct. The amount of time and effort I put into making amazing content for that blog, the time to build the relationships, the free speaking sessions I gave. I’m proud of all that, but, looking back, I could have done so much more.
Instead, I gave it all away and continued looking for jobs.
As I’ll talk about more in the next post, I was also still caught up in another one of our big lies, that profit is dirty and should never be a motive for anything.
The biggest problem was that I wasn’t looking for opportunity. Why? Because I had a job. You know, one of those things that provides a stable paycheck and health insurance.
Moving back to the US after almost a decade abroad, it still took me another 2 years to really start to look for opportunities, not jobs.
The Entrepreneurial Shift — Opportunity is Everywhere
I launched my digital marketing agency this year and I would never go back. I already make more money than I ever did working for someone else, plus I have the flexibility to take on projects I’m passionate about, like early childhood education reform. And, of course, the best thing of all, having the time to be with my daughter.
Now I see opportunity everywhere. I drive to my office and there are gigantic warehouses, all started by someone who decided to build a company, not a job. And, you know what, they all need marketing services, which I can provide for them. These companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing a year.
Once you really become an entrepreneur, you start to see problems, which are actually your opportunities. People wasting thousands of dollars on Google Ads here because they don’t get it, or hiring staff member at 35K a year just to post to Twitter and Facebook there, or maybe it’s schools that can’t find students. These are all problems my company can solve.
You start to think, “What other problems do people have that I can solve? Where else are there gaps?”
That’s why serial entrepreneurship has become a thing. Once you shift your mindset, you just get it. Making money by pursuing your passions becomes almost easy in a way. Don’t get me wrong, entrepreneurship is a constant challenge, but you just have this confidence that, even if everything goes south, there are always more problems out there and you can solve them, because now you know how to look.
If you really want to know how to start, market, and grow a business, then you need to join my private Facebook Group. This group is for those focused on building something larger than themselves. We’re a bunch of bootstrappers that are going to change the world through tried and true business principals, not gimmicks. We’re just getting started, so now’s the time to get in. Click on the picture to join.
Nick Jaworski is the Owner and Chief Digital Community Builder for Circle Social Inc., a Strategic Social Media Marketing & Web Development Agency in Indianapolis. He writes on the future trends and shifting landscape of our digital world. He is also devoted father of a beautiful little girl that speaks Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, and English. Twitter & Snapchat: @NBJaworski
