Blog | screw work let's play

Mythbusting: “I’ll get lonely working for myself”

This is a guest post from Marianne Cantwell of Free Range Humans who is collaborating with me on some very exciting projects around Screw Work Let’s Play to be revealed soon.

**Why working for yourself doesn’t mean working by yourself**

You’re a people person. You don’t want to be holed up at home everyday, with only a mewling cat for company. You don’t want to trade in office social life for watching Judge Judy at lunchtime.

You’d quite like to throw in the commute, and get the chance to create a really playful work-life (rather than fruitlessly waiting for it to be handed to you in the form of a job)… but being self employed just sounds too lonely.

You may know other self-employed people who have that lonely solo-lifestyle, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact…

Working for myself has been the most social time of my life.

Here’s why:

1. Once you’ve branched out on your own doing what you love, you choose who you spend time with

Unlike the employed worker, as a player your ‘people’ are not just those who work in your office building. They are incredible people you meet in more places than you can currently imagine.

You’re no longer saddled with people who you wouldn’t otherwise spend 40+ hours a week with. Think about it, you already choose your friends, in a player’s life you get to choose who you see, and you get to choose that every day.

2. When you enter the world of playful self-employment, you have a huge new community – online & face to face.

More and more creative self-employed people are coming together, and they are easier to find than ever before. It’s just up to you to get things going.

When I started working for myself all my friends were in regular employment. I knew no one who was free to be where they chose during the day (except a few journalist friends with odd schedules). Now, most people I spend time with are office-free. We meet for coffee, we chat, and we meet more people.

I’ve made more amazing contacts and friends than I’d ever have met stuck in an office 9-5.

3. You choose your colleagues (or, how to make competitors into collaborators)

It’s not all about just having coffee while others are stuck in regular jobs – you can also make up informal ‘teams’ to come together for different projects you work on… meaning you have colleagues without the hassle of hiring people, or the hassle of forming official ‘partnerships’ or companies.

For example, John and I (along with Selina, another resident play guru at ScrewWorkLetsPlay.com) have formed an informal team. We work on each other’s projects, support each others’ work, and come together to run workshops and courses.

That ‘team’ wasn’t planned in advance, it was played out. Our new little team was born after informally meeting up every week, because we enjoyed each other’s company and views.

Within months we went from being each other’s biggest competitors to being colleagues who spur each other on in the up-times, troubleshoot any down days, and love to play with new projects together. Best of all, we chose each other, so we know we get on and can draw on each other’s strengths. Now we find that some of the tasks that felt like hard work when attempted solo, become fun when done in collaboration with our colleagues.

Where can you find your new colleagues?

Places to start are:

Twitter (FULL of people working for themselves who’d love to chat or meet up),
Your local Jelly (an informal working group where people meet up to work for a day at someone’s house or a café), or
A co-working space: for example John and I are members of the The Hub in King’s Cross, London, where members can pop in with our laptops and work (and chat) alongside others anytime.
You can also email another solo player whose business you admire, someone you just think ‘I bet they’d be interesting to chat with’.
Be as friendly and sincere as you really are, and you’ll find the person behind the brand is not an anonymous competitor, but someone in a similar situation to you who (if they have any sense!) would most likely love to chat to another player who understands their world.

Soon, the old idea of spending your day only with people who happen to work in your office building will seem really restrictive. In your new life, the possibilities are endless for having people around you, supporting you, making your days even brighter than before.

Extra tip for beginners

Don’t get hung up on finding your new colleagues before you start – start first, then when you have something going, you have something to talk about, and you can more easily find like-minded people.

The difference from employment is that your new social work-life doesn’t come to you until you build it – but once you’ve built it, you’ll have more people around than ever before… and the satisfaction of knowing you chose them and they chose you.

What’s stopping you now? We’d love to know…

Do you know that you want to escape the life of the 9-5 worker, and launch something on your terms doing something you love? Are you still hesitating? What’s holding you back from making that dream into a reality ? We’d love to know. Complete the 20 second form below to tell us – your response will be completely anonymous.

We’ll try to address your stumbling block in a future blog post and it will also help us (Marianne & John) with the exciting, as yet secret, Screw Work Let’s Play projects to help you get paid to play.

As a thank you, you will receive a free chapter of Screw Work Let’s Play plus a free toolkit to help you get paid to play. You will also receive weekly updates with articles on similar subjects. You can unsubscribe at any time with one click. We will never give your address to anyone else and you will never be spammed. Guaranteed.

(If you’ve already downloaded the chapter & toolkit and you receive our updates, you can leave your response as a comment on this post instead – just name yourself 9to5er if you want to be anonymous)

Tell us what you’re stuck on with this quick form

Posted by Marianne on August 23rd, 2010

The best 424 words on writing I’ve ever read

One of my favourite pieces of writing on writing that I have ever read is by Paul Graham. Paul is a fascinating entrepreneur. He designed the algorithm used by most anti-spam software around the world and he now runs Y Combinator, a seed funder for startups. He is also a superb essayist.

In this short essay, which he says he wrote accidently while answering an email, he gives his best advice on writing. (The bold selections are mine and represent some points I know from my own experience to be very powerful.)

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong…

Read the remaining 283 words here.

Posted by John on August 16th, 2010

Fear of failure? It’s a myth!

At every step of your journey to getting paid to do what you love, you will be taking a risk – daring to do something new that is a stretch, that you haven’t done before.

You’ll be striding up to an important contact, perhaps even someone famous, and asking them to help you, or to agree to be interviewed, or to hire you. You’ll be volunteering to speak in front of an audience or do a piece of work you’ve never done before.

Sometimes it’s scary stuff.

But don’t let that stop you. People get stuck for years paralysed by what they describe as “fear of failure”.

Fear of failure doesn’t really exist.

Most steps you’ll be taking are really not that risky. Nothing in Screw Work Let’s Play advocates putting your house on the line or quitting your job without a plan. So if any one step fails, it shouldn’t ruin you and there’ll be a way to recover. The fear is not really of failure. It’s not even fear of what others will say, do or think.

What’s frightening is what you will tell yourself when things don’t work out.

It’s the nasty stuff our own mind taunts us with when things go wrong. Even if the most critical person in your life comes up and tells you you’ve made a complete and utter fool of yourself – it’s what you tell yourself that matters. Because if you know they’re wrong, it will barely concern you.

People occasionally email me angrily to tell me I left a typo in my email sent to 1000 people or in my book sold to 1000s of people. At the beginning of my business, that might have hurt. It might have felt like a failure. But now I just make a note and carry on. Because I know it’s more important to get on with doing what matters in my business than get hung up on a single word out of 72,000 in my book.

If something has turned out badly for you and you hate yourself for it, ask “What am I telling myself about this?”. Write it down. Then gently ask “What might be a kinder thing to tell myself?”. Write that down. If you’re holding off on doing something because you’re afraid it might fail, ask yourself the same questions.

When you finally realise that what you tell yourself is not the truth, it’s just a thought, you can breathe again. Go get someone supportive to back you up, see if you can modify your next step to be more agreeable and know that if it doesn’t work out, you don’t need to torture yourself.

Most important of all, remember that when you make a habit of taking the scary but manageable steps that other people opt out of, you will create a life that others only dream of.

There is much more about this in “Secret 4: How to guarantee your success” in Screw Work Let’s Play (How to do what you love & get paid for it)

Posted by Jay on August 12th, 2010

5 steps to being brilliant (without being a jerk)

I’m just back from a 5-day break in Sicily at a remarkable boutique hotel. Every so often in our lives we are lucky enough to happen upon something truly brilliant – a restaurant, a hotel, a home. It may be grand or simple, but everything is just right – the food, the decor, the location, the welcome.

Mandranova is one of these places – a converted farm house and working olive farm creating some of the finest olive oil in the world and serving stunningly good home-cooked Sicilian food.

How do some people manage to achieve this brilliance while others don’t? How can you achieve something truly brilliant in your own life? And how can you communicate that without boasting and alienating people?

This is a question that percolated through my mind as I sat relaxing in the Sicilian olive groves contemplating my surroundings.

Here’s what I observed in Giuseppe and Sylvia, the creators of Mandranova:

1. Find your brilliance

Find that thing you have a natural ability and enduring passion for (clue: you’ve been doing it in some form your whole life)

2. Accept your brilliance

Even if you don’t shout about it to the world, you must stop pretending you’re nothing special (Brits in particular take note here). Downplaying your strengths short-changes both you and the world and it guarantees you will never rise above the level of ‘good’ to reach brilliant. (A good place to start is to find out which Wealth Dynamics profile you are.)

3. Develop your brilliance

Take what you’re already good at and enjoy doing and focus all your energy on that. Become superb at it. It’s going to take a while but if you’re “in flow” you’ll have a blast along the way.

4. Create something truly brilliant

Use your talents with the skills and knowledge you’ve developed to create something really special. Focus on something very specific you can excel at. Collaborate with others who are brilliant at the parts you’re weaker at. Producing something is the most important step of all. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you believe you are if you have nothing to show for it.

5. Show the evidence of your brilliance

Occasionally I meet people who tell me how brilliant they are. I’m really not very interested. Tell me what you’ve created or contributed to and what other people have said. Better still don’t tell me, show me by helping me with this skill and knowledge of yours. Or just let me find you by others’ recommendations.

The Mandranova experience speaks for itself. Most of their bookings come from word of mouth recommendations and MrAndMrsSmith.com, the specialist website for exceptional places to stay as determined by independent reviewers.

Giuseppe never once told us his olive oil is the best in the world but he did explain with passion the processes required to make the best olive oil in the world and was pleased to report that it was the chosen oil of The Ivy restaurant in London. The result: it was not the hosts who were using superlatives, but the guests.

Find the time this week to start creating something brilliant of your own.

If you’re in London this week, come along to the Scanners Night Picnic in the Park for creative people. It’s free.

Posted by John on August 8th, 2010

How to stand out from the crowd

Once you escape the world of the job and start working for yourself, your challenge quickly becomes how to win enough work. And to do that you need to be willing to shake off the anonymity of the crowd and stand up and stand out for something.

For some quick tips on how to do this, watch this short video of 5-time author Nick Williams interviewing me on “how to play the fame game”.

I gave an exclusive talk for Nick Williams’ Inspired Entrepreneurs group earlier this month that has just been made available as a downloadable recording. In it, I cover the essential components of getting “paid to play” from winning your first ‘play-cheque’ to turning your passions into a full-time living.

Find out how to download my “Getting paid to play” talk here

Posted by John on July 30th, 2010

It’s a real-time real-world

Tweet on train I received this tweet (see image) today from someone who had just bought my book for their journey home and was immediately moved to tell me what they thought.

This now happens to me every day – and I’m glad to say that so far they have all been enormously positive.

While this might be very nice for me, it’s also an indication of what I write about in the book in How to play the fame game. Our opinions of the products, services and creations we buy have never been so easy and quick to express publicly, and in a form that spreads.

The flip-side of this is that you can’t just fake it any more. No matter how great your marketing, if the reality of what you provide doesn’t live up to expectations, everyone is going to know pretty quickly. Some very large companies are finding this out to their horror right now.

It’s not so easy any more to hold the public at a distance and manufacture their impression of you. Here’s a particularly powerful example from Greenpeace UK calling for new logo designs for BP, to reflect their handling of the one of the worst environmental catastrophes of recent history. The designs were sourced from anyone who had design skills and then voted for by the general public.

Whether you agree with these tactics or not, Greenpeace have used them to change fundamental business strategies of powerful multinational companies.

And the most interesting part of this is that Social Media is still very, very young. Just watch what happens next…

You can follow me on twitter as @johnsw

Buy Screw Work Let’s Play here

Posted by John on July 16th, 2010

The Times: Fed up with work? So play!

Earlier this month The Times did a 2 page spread on Screw Work, Let’s Play and myself (John Williams) as the author. How did they represent play? By photographing me sitting on a space hopper (sadly the space hopper is cut out on this online version).

It’s actually rather a good introduction to the book so if you’re trying to decide whether to buy it, read what Times journalist Fiona Macdonald-Smith wrote:

Do you have a sane work-play balance?
Had enough of your job and want to change your life?
Here’s how to do it

John Williams Screw Work Let;s Play Sitting on a Space Hopper in his Converse trainers, John Williams looks like the world’s least likely careers adviser. His advice isn’t conventional either: his No 1 rule is summed up in the title of his new book, Screw Work, Let’s Play. A bit of a risky proposal in a time of economic uncertainty, you may think.

Hundreds of his followers, however, have done just that thanks to his workshops, mentoring and semi-social events called Scanners Nights, where people seeking to change their way of working gather to swap ideas and advice (“scanners” is the expression coined by the US careers guru Barbara Sher to describe people who love to explore new things but don’t want to focus on just one job or business).

Williams, a 44-year-old former consultant at Deloitte, aims to revolutionise the way we think about work. “The rules are changing,” he says. “My mum’s belief was that work was to be endured, not enjoyed, and her generation didn’t really have a choice. But we no longer need to be driven by the old work ethic; we have entered the era of what the author Pat Kane calls the Play Ethic — ‘placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world’.” Even the term “worker” is outmoded, he says. “We need to reclaim the word ‘player’ as an alternative. We want to play all day and get paid for it. The player’s ultimate career goal is to ‘get paid for being me’. There’s never been a better time — all the tools are there on the internet for you to get paid for what you enjoy. Previously, setting up a business needed premises, funding — but today you could set up your own eBay shop in an afternoon.”

Williams makes it clear that he’s not advocating doing the thing you love and just hoping that the money turns up. “Aristotle said, ‘where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation’. You need to find the sweet spot between the things you love to do and doing them in a way that solves people’s problems for them — and there is your means of earning a living.”

It worked for Williams himself. “Many years ago when I had a job as a computer programmer I realised the only way I was really going to work out what I wanted was to imagine I could have anything. And what I wanted was not to work. I didn’t want to sit on the sofa all day, I wanted to play — to do whatever fun stuff I love doing and get paid. At the time this seemed unrealistic, but then the company announced a chance for voluntary redundancies and I took it. In 2003 I publicly declared I never want another job for the rest of my life.”

And now? “Now I have a portfolio career consisting of mentoring, corporate creativity workshops, copywriting, blogging … I set my own hours, choose my own co-workers and alternate my place of work between my home, my garden and the local café. “One of the most tragic people I’ve met while running career advice workshops was a woman nearing retirement,” he continues. “She said to me, astonished, ‘Do people actually change career then?’ I often hear ,‘You can’t change career at 30 — or 40, or 50’. But I am utterly convinced it is never too late to change your life. Stop asking yourself if it is possible to do something, and decide that you are going to do whatever it takes to make that thing happen. Don’t waste another minute.”

That’s all very well, you may be thinking. But how do I know what I really want? The answer is to follow your instincts. Imagine someone handed you a year’s salary and said you didn’t have to go back to work for 12 months. What would you do? Sit on a beach? Go travelling? But after the first three months of pleasure and idleness, what would you do then? That, says Williams, is the clue to what you should be doing with your life right now.

He suggests that you get yourself a notebook “Write down everything you discover — what you like, what you don’t like, people whose work or lifestyle you’d like to emulate, ideas for contacts to talk to, projects to try. This is now your playbook.”

You should also make like Columbo — the detective with the famous line, “Just one more thing”. “You can learn a lot from Columbo,” he says thoughtfully. “No clue goes unnoticed by him, and it shouldn’t by you. What part of a bookshop draws you in? What did you enjoy doing as a child? It doesn’t have to be something that immediately seems ‘creative’, just driven by a genuine interest — I had a client who, it turned out, wanted to be a City trader: one of the clues was that he always turned to the business section of the newspaper first.”

Try to make every Wednesday a day when you get a little bit closer to your ideal life. “Halfway between weekends, it’s the ideal time to build a little play into your working week,” Williams says. “Even if you can grab only a few minutes out of your day, do it. If you want to be a poet, take a book of poems to read and a notebook to write in on your commute. Then find ways to free up more time as the weeks go on.”

The piece then continues with Five questions that could change your life taken from the book.

Read the whole article here
(Sadly The Times now require you to register to read their content but you can register for free to read this quite quickly.)

Buy the book here.

Posted by John on June 25th, 2010

“Cars are what I lived for” – John Haynes, creator of Haynes manuals

At 16 years old, while still at school, John Haynes realised that “Cars are what I lived for”. He bought an Austin Seven Saloon, dismantled it, and built a lightweight, open two-seater sports car.

Then he had an idea – as he explains in this BBC News interview by Mark Miodownik from last year,

“I thought to myself if I produce a booklet about how I built this Austin Seven Special, because there was nothing published in those days, I might sell a hundred copies in a couple of months.”

But it only took 10 days to sell all the copies, which made him realise that there was a gap in the market for car instruction manuals that gave detailed instructions on how to repair and maintain different models of car. The first Haynes manual was born.

Haynes Publishing was founded in 1960 and has now gone on to sell more than 150 million Haynes Manuals throughout the world, more than half a million in the UK last year alone. There are around 300 UK car manuals in print plus motorcycle manuals, and international editions.

And now they have extended the format into books on babies, the male body, and even sex!

I love the fact that John created a business empire from his greatest love and had the creativity to then use that brand to make popular books on very different subjects.

Read the interview with John and listen to an audio clip on the BBC News site.

Posted by John on June 12th, 2010

Blogging for lazy people – quicker alternatives to blogs

I’m a great believer in the power of blogging for almost any project or business as I explain in Secret 6: How to play the fame game in Screw Work, Let’s Play. Blogging allows you to play out your idea in public and engage your audience, followers, or potential customers in the process. It’s ideal for ‘thought leaders’ who have something interesting to say about their field and of course it’s superb for writers.

And I believe every website should include a blog even if it’s only an occasionally updated “News and articles” page. That’s why I recommend most clients to build their whole website in WordPress from the beginning.

But blogging takes time – quite a lot of it to do well. And you probably have a lot of other stuff to fit into your precious waking hours, particularly if you’re marketing your own work. What can you do that gives you some of the benefits of blogging that’s less labour intensive? Thankfully, there is a rash of new alternatives to blogging that are aimed at exactly your problem.

Tumblelogs

A tumblelog is a simpler form of blog consisting of a long flowing list of images, videos and short text extracts (such as quotes). They are ideally suited to artists, photographers and other visual media and they also make a great scrapbook for collecting images and ideas about an area you are currently playing with.

I maintain an irregularly updated tumblelog DesignPorn containing images of my favourite contemporary architecture and interior design. There is no great business purpose for it, it’s simply a place for me to play out my passion for design and share it with others.

Check out Tumblr or Soup.io. Or you can now find free tumblelog-style themes for my favourite blogging platform WordPress.

Some people also use tumblelogs and posterous as feed aggregators – which is a very fancy term for saying it collates all the stuff you post to Facebook, Youtube and so on in one place.

Posterous

Posterous is a quick and simple version of a blog often used as a second, off-topic, blog by famous bloggers. It provides lots of very simple ways to post to it and to update other services like twitter when you do. In fact I use it as a way to tweet larger items such as quotes that won’t fit into 140 characters.

See how Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, uses it here.

Audio blogs and video blogs

Speaking what you have to say is usually a lot quicker than writing it. If talking into a mic or camera is something you’re comfortable with, create a video blog or audio podcast. (Ideal for Star profiles in Wealth Dynamics terms!)

You don’t need much more than what comes included in your laptop computer out of the box. You might want to invest at some point in a good microphone or a point & shoot video camera like a Flip. You’ll probably find you already have basic software on your computer that can edit what you record.

Then insert the recording into a blog post. If it’s video, post it to YouTube or Vimeo (for videos longer than 10 minutes) and then insert it into the blog post. You might also upload audio podcasts to iTunes.

For an example see the popular Boagworld podcast for web designers by Paul Boag. And for video, check out the hilarious Will It Blend who recently put an Apple iPad in a kitchen blender.

Other options

Also, of course, look at microblogging service Twitter. You can’t get much quicker than typing 140 character messages! There are still many more options such as creating Facebook groups and fan pages that allow you maintain a more fluid collection of news updates, images and videos which can be contributed to by your followers.

So don’t give up on finding some way to get your ideas, opinions and expertise out there. When you get it right and provide something people really want, you can grow a huge fanbase that then directly converts into clients, customers or buyers.

If you’re in London next week, come along to my event for ideas people, Scanners Night, and get up to speed fast on Twitter with expert Mark Shaw.

Posted by John on June 5th, 2010

How to create your own global microbrand

Hugh MacLeod is an artist who first made his name drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. He also now writes a superb blog called GapingVoid on art, entrepreneurship, marketing and other good things.

One of Hugh’s great concepts that I refer to in Screw Work Let’s Play is that of a Global Microbrand.

He suggests that one of the most effective ways to further your own success at this point in time is to create your own Global Microbrand which is, as Hugh explains:

A small, tiny brand, that “sells” all over the world.
The Global Micro brand is nothing new; they’ve existed for a while, long before the internet was invented. Imagine a well-known author or painter, selling his work all over the world. Or a small whisky distillery in Scotland. Or a small cheese maker in rural France, whose produce is exported to Paris, London, Tokyo etc. Ditto with a violin maker in Italy. A classical guitar maker in Spain. Or a small English firm making $50,000 shot guns.

When it works, you get to create a sustainable business you can live off and as Hugh says,

Frankly, it beats the hell out of commuting every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city, something I did for many years. Just so I could make enough money to help me for get that I have to commute every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city.

As ever, the starting point for a Global Microbrand is to do something truly remarkable, that you really enjoy doing, and then get known for it using the kind of techniques I describe in Secret 6: How to play the fame game. Social media such as blogging and twitter has made this easier than ever before. And you don’t need the whole world to care about you, just enough enthusiasts to keep you in business. This number is often a lot smaller than you think.

Read more about Global Microbrands on GapingVoid.

Posted by John on June 3rd, 2010