Blog | screw work let's play

Why don’t we do the stuff we really care about?

You get your important work done just fine in your job (even if it’s at the last possible moment).

So why don’t you make such consistent progress on your own projects?

What happened to your plans to change career, start a business or write that book you’ve been thinking about?

Did you put it aside for another week? Another month?

There’s a very simple reason for this: no one’s making you do the fun stuff – the stuff you really care about.

At work, you have a boss to answer to. Or if you’re self employed, a client. And that means you have a deadline. And there’s a consequence if you don’t meet it.

So you do it. Even if you have to pull out all the stops.

But what happens if you don’t write that book? Or meet someone to talk about that new career direction? Or experiment with that business idea?

Probably nothing.

Except of course the familiar pang of disappointment.

You need to make what you want to do into a must do. And that means getting other people involved to support and challenge you to get it done.

Do one thing today to make this happen.

Posted by John on July 18th, 2011

Postcard from Bali

This is a copy of my email newsletter sent at the end of a month living and working in Bali.

The wonderful thing about creating your own business today is that you can design it to be portable.

Working in a hammock All you need is a laptop computer, a mobile phone, and a WiFi connection, and you can run your business from anywhere in the world – whether that’s your own sofa or garden, a local cafe or where I have spent the last month, Bali in Indonesia.

So out here in our little house in the rice fields, I have been writing, organising my business, and running client sessions by Skype – in between yoga classes, trips to the beach, and discovering Balinese cuisine and culture.

Dream beach

I wanted to share this experience not to ‘show off’ to but to show you what’s possible – should you want it.

A month in an idyllic place like this might seem extraordinary but if you design your life the way you want it to be you might be surprised what you can create.

It could be a long journey from where you are now to what you most want but stick with it. My own career has been through many iterations over the years to get closer and closer to what I love. And I’m still not finished because this is not a journey that ever ends.
Monkeys

Meanwhile I feel privileged to be enjoying the delights and oddities of Balinese life:

The pretty offerings to the gods of flowers and food placed outside every home and establishment (even on the counter of Ubud Starbucks)
The visibility and loudness of the ecosystem – ants, bugs, lizards and more stroll in and out of the house at their leisure, quickly carrying away any dropped morsel of food.
And sunrise is a cacophony of frogs, cicadas, ducks and birds.

Balinese flower

Eating a delicious Nasi Goreng at a local cafe for less than £2 or grabbing a healthy organic smoothie at Kafe, where Elizabeth Gilbert wrote large chunks of her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love.

My month in Bali is now over but I will be experimenting more with location independent living over the next year.

If you’re interested in creating a business and a lifestyle that gives you the freedom you want (whether that’s to travel or simply get paid to do the things you love) enter your email address below to get my Playkit and regular updates.

Best wishes,

John

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Posted by John on June 15th, 2011

Obvious to you. Amazing to others

You have new ideas and thoughts every day and you’ve probably had more than one that could make you some money. But… how many of them do you act on? Do your ideas seem too obvious to you? Do your talents seem like ‘nothing special’?

Then take a lesson from Derek Sivers, musician, entrepreneur, and all round playful genius who I interviewed for my book.

In a little over 1 minute Derek will show you how your obvious idea could just be a piece of genius:

Once you have an idea you think might be able to make you a living, what do you do next? How do you know for sure that it could work as a business? And how do you move from ‘just an idea’ to something that gets you paid?

Is it really possible to earn money from your idea?

Want to make money doing what you love? If you have ideas for what you’d like to do (or are doing it already) but haven’t quite managed to turn that into a realistic pay cheque replacement, then check this out.

Right now Marianne Cantwell and I are putting together a private (free) email-coaching series where we share with you the key things you need to know to create a full time income stream so you can quit your career cage.

This isn’t about deciding on what you’d like to do, this is the nitty gritty of ACTUALLY making it happen without having to live on baked beans for a year.

To get in on the series simply click this link to grab your place in 10 seconds.

Posted by John on April 21st, 2011

What’s your Minimum Viable Business? (Or ‘How to launch your idea as quickly as possible’)

If you’ve got a good idea, don’t let it gather dust. If you want to make it happen, start now. Here’s something to help you.

There’s a concept in product design called the Minimum Viable Product – something that has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more:

The product is typically deployed to a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters that are thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype or marketing information.

It is a strategy targeted at avoiding building products that customers do not want, that seeks to maximize the information learned about the customer per dollar spent.

Wikipedia

You can apply this principle to any idea or business you want to launch. Lots of successful companies started with a Minimum Viable Business.

Amazon sells anything and everything right? Not when they launched. They only sold books (remember that?) When they had proved that the principle worked and people had really taken to the business, they diversified. Now you can buy everything from a can opener to a laptop on Amazon.

What’s the core of your idea? How can you launch as quickly as possible and just get the idea out there? Soft-launch your website or share your business with a select group first. You might trial your new workshop or service with some friends first. Or volunteer to be social media specialist at your current company before plotting your global social media consultancy empire.

Don’t waste time on a fancy website and the perfect logo. (Seriously, no one cares about your logo)

Instead, invest your energy in the part of your idea that really matters, get it out there, get people using it, and get feedback.

That feedback will tell you what you need to change to make it really fly.

WordPress is used by over 25 million people and yet its original creator Matt Mullenweg says,

If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.

So what’s your Minimum Viable Business?

Launch your idea

Very soon, 200 people will be joining us to make their Minimum Viable Business (or other creative idea) into a reality in the 30 Day Challenge.

Posted by John on April 8th, 2011

What’s your big adventure?

Our Head Coach, Selina Barker, is about to set off on her own big adventure.

She’s packing up her life, reducing all her possessions, and putting everything that remains into a campervan named Beryl. Then she sets off for a 6 month road trip around the UK and Europe, meeting people, having fun, and running her business on the move.

What’s your big adventure? What’s stopping you doing it? Find out how Selina discovered what she really wanted to do, faced her fears, and took the first steps.

Start your own adventure

On Friday, Selina is leading 150 people through their own 30 day adventure in The 30 Day Challenge. There are just 2 places left at the Early Bird price.

If you haven’t already grabbed your place, get it here:

THE 30 DAY CHALLENGE

Posted by John on March 28th, 2011

How to start a business – one play project at a time

By Selina Barker, Head Coach at Screw Work Let’s Play

Ian

Ian was stuck.

He knew he didn’t want to carry on in his job in an ad agency, but he had no idea what he wanted to do instead – or even what he could do.

Ian was a classic case of a frustrated creative. Bright, creative, funny and full of potential. But he was stuck in a career that he’d fallen into. He was stressed out, working long hours and feeling increasingly worried that this was it; there was no way out.

Sound familiar? If so, read on to see how Ian played his way out and ended up creating a thriving business that surprised even himself!

When Ian contacted me to start working on a solution his best friend warned me, “He’s been like this for years. If you can sort Ian out, you can sort anyone out. Good luck!”

So when I met up with Ian for our first coaching session he looked a little surprised when I told him ‘We’re not even going to discuss career options at this stage. First thing I want you to do is go back to basics and just start doing the things you enjoy.’

‘Over the next 4 weeks I want you to start a project revolving around something you love to do; a passion, an interest, an activity. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with a career you have in mind. Right now, all I’m interested in is you doing something that you love.’

‘So here’s the question, what do you enjoy doing?’

Ian listed his interests and we talked them over. One really stood out, ‘photography and people watching. I love people’.

So that’s where we started. With a simple four week ‘play project’ to revive an old love for photography.

Ian dusted his camera off that weekend and set off for London’s South Bank to take photos of people passing by, experimenting with different cameras for different effects. And you know what? The moment he got out there and started clicking that camera he came alive. He repeated these sorties for the next few weekends.

Baby photo by Ian McAllister

By the time I saw Ian again he was like a different man. He was full of energy, so excited about his project. With this new focus in his life, work was no longer so all-consuming. He was leaving work earlier to go and focus on his photography. He was relaxed. He was happy.

And then I saw his photos…this man had talent.

Now even at this stage Ian wasn’t thinking that he wanted a career as a photographer, he was just loving rekindling an old passion that he’d been neglecting.

But, as seems to happen with play projects, his passion drew him on and one play project led to the next:

He created a simple website to display his photos (the first he’d ever made)
He had a go at photographing his friend’s new born baby and realised how much he enjoyed doing it
He offered to photograph at a friend’s wedding, to see how he found it and how they liked the photos – the impressive results drew others to hire him as well
He put the photos up on his website and let people know he was available for hire
He created a Facebook page and asked his friends to spread the word. (He’d chosen a good market as all his friends were starting to marry and have babies!)dem

And… he found he was in business. What started out as a pure play project had already turned into a nice little income stream doing something he loved.

Wedding photo by Ian McAllister Ian didn’t want to go full time until he’d built the business up, so instead he found a new job that gave him a better work/life balance with plenty of time and energy to focus on his business.

I met up with Ian the other week and business is now booming. He has decided to set himself an ambitious double figure target for year one in business (on top of his day job salary) as an incentive to push him to make it work. 5 months in and he’s close on target with momentum growing.

“How the hell did you do it?” his best friend said to me “I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy in the 10 years I’ve known him. Who knew he had this hidden talent and entrepreneurial spirit!”.

Well, something in Ian knew it and by giving him a 4 week play project to focus on something he loved to do, that creativity, hidden talent and entrepreneurial spirit finally had a chance to shine through.

That’s why play projects blow me away. People come alive, like waking up out of a long sleepwalk; they discover the things they truly love doing; they find talents they never knew they had; and they regain long-lost confidence. And after just 30 days they’ve got tangible results they can share with others and build on further. That’s why I’m no longer surprised when play projects turn into whole new careers and fledgeling businesses.

Launch your own play project with Selina’s help

You too can have Selina guide you in creating a Play Project – and for the fraction of the cost of 1 to 1 coaching – by joining The 30 Day Challenge – a unique experience you can take part in from anywhere in the world to make your own idea happen.

We kick off very soon and we’re already half full so check it out now:
Read more about The 30 Day Challenge

Posted by Selina Barker on March 20th, 2011

Are you a self-help addict? Check for these 4 warning signs

I love self-help and I’m guessing you do too. All those books, courses and workshops can genuinely help increase your happiness, success and wealth (they have mine).

But how much is too much? When have you become a self-help-aholic?

See if you recognise these signs in yourself or anyone you know:

It all starts off innocently enough with buying a self-help book or three. The books get you excited; some of them change the way you see the world, and help you believe you can do, have, and be more of what you want.

Fired up by this, you book yourself onto a weekend workshop, perhaps more than one. You come away fizzing with energy… but somehow after a few days the excitement drains away and life largely returns to normal.

So… you take the plunge and invest some serious money on an expensive programme with your favourite coach, mentor, or guru. And yet you still come away unsatisfied; it wasn’t quite the solution you had hoped for. So you buy another programme or hire another expert. And another and another.

Now you’re an addict.

The Self-Help High

Self help is addictive because of the high it gives you - the hit of excitement and insight, and the hope that things are about to change for the better. (It’s not so different from the high the gambling addict feels with the rush of dopamine and norepinephrine every time they place a bet.)

The self-help high can be a good thing if you use it to jump into action and implement what you’ve learned.

Here’s the kicker: insight and excitement are wonderful but if they don’t result in you taking action and making changes, then you are just an addict.

I’m going to be tough with you here for your own good…

You are an addict if:

you keep seeking the next self-help hit, only to watch it drain away a few days later.
you keep looking for the next book, programme or guru to give you the perfect solution before you start doing anything.
you haven’t taken all the advice you’ve received so far and jumped to put it into action – as incomplete and imperfect as it is.
you’re using self-help (or even therapy) to avoid your problems, as an escape from thinking about the parts of your life that make you unhappy.

Welcome. You’re amongst friends here.

And the first thing to realise if you want to recover is that the self-help high we love is not inherently bad. Just as prescription medicines can be used to solve a problem or can be abused, so can self-help.

Secondly, you need to accept that no book or guru at this point is going to give you the perfect solution or some magical strategy that you can’t google for free right now.

The thing is if you’re a self-help addict, you’re not short of books you already own that could create wonderful changes in your life if you actually put them into action.

The common themes in self-help works have actually all been around a long time (some of them for 2000 years or more!)

The central theme of all self-help

Here’s possibly the most important theme of all self-help. (Read this instead of buying another book!)

Take complete responsibility for your own life and the results you get.
Don’t waste time blaming others or complaining about your situation.
Instead, take the actions required to get the results you now want.

Taking those actions of course can be uncomfortable, frightening, or downright unpleasant if you haven’t done it before. Daring to express what you want, to make a change, or to take a risk to take on a new role or project can be pretty intense. If you’re hoping another book or course will show you some way to avoid all the discomfort you’ll be searching forever.

Don’t keep looking for a pain-free answer, look for support to take action despite your discomfort. If you’re looking for a coach or mentor, look for one to encourage you, console you, and most importantly challenge you to take the actions you need to take.

As soon as you’re in motion and taking action, you’re no longer an addict. Welcome to recovery!

Let us know what you think

Please leave a comment and give us your opinion. Feel free to confess your self-help excesses and your own recovery stories.

This month, we’re all about getting you moving. If you’ve been wanting to make a big change to your work and haven’t yet done it, stay tuned because we’re going to help you beat that block and get on the way to getting paid to play.

And… on top of that we’re kicking off our biggest project ever very soon: The 30 Day Challenge

Posted by John on March 4th, 2011

How to plan a life-changing project in 5 minutes

Sometimes the things we most want seem overwhelming to achieve – like finding work we love, starting our own business, or launching a range of products. The Screw Work Let’s Play solution is the Play Project.

Use Play Projects to try out a possible new work direction or business idea and start it right away – without quitting your job and without spending a fortune. But… one of the things we often find people getting stuck on right at the start is the planning.

I asked Selina Barker, Head Coach at Screw Work Let’s Play and ‘guru of getting things done’, to say a few words on the art of planning…

Plan your projects like a kid

By Selina Barker

How long do you tend to spend planning before starting a play project?

5 hours? 5 days? 5 weeks?

If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on planning your play project then YOU’VE SPENT TOO LONG PLANNING.

Why? Because planning is:

a) Boring!
b) Pointless

Over-planning is a killer. It sucks the very life out of a play project. When you laboriously plan and implement like a worker you leave no space for innovation, spontaneity and play.

Think about when you were a kid. When someone said ‘right it’s play time – you’ve got an hour’, did you spend 55 minutes coming up with the perfect game to play or did you go ‘let’s do this’ and get stuck in?

Players keep plans short and sweet and then jump straight in and start trying things out. Players don’t mess up, they mess around. Look at Richard Branson – he’s a big fan of making mistakes because he doesn’t consider them as mistakes – just trying something out and learning from it if it works and learning from it if it doesn’t. That’s how you create great stuff.

Times are changing, the old ways of doing things – planning, sticking to the rules etc aren’t producing the kind of stuff people want. They want products, services and experiences that feel alive. Innovation, spontaneity is what it’s all about these days and that comes from getting into action the moment you have a great idea and creating it as you play it out.

So if you’ve been spending all your time trying to create the perfect plan to guarantee success, then STOP. Immediately.

Do this instead:

1. Grab a post-it note, postcard or beer mat.

2. Give yourself 2 minutes to write your idea and a 3 bullet point plan on how to make it happen.

3. Choose an action that you can take today to bring your idea to life and start trying it out.

In 5 minutes you will have got further towards making your idea happen than you ever will in 5 days of planning.

Who’s Selina?

Selina Barker is our guru of getting things done (and having fun doing it!) Selina was co-founder of Careershifters, is head coach at ScrewWorkLetsPlay.com, and is about to set off on a 6 month road trip adventure living and working from a campervan named Beryl. She lives and breathes life as a player.

Look out for more posts from Selina over the next few weeks. Follow Selina on twitter: @selinabarker

Does your idea seems too big to fit into a 30 day play project? Then read this.

UPDATE: Very soon, you have a unique chance to get Selina’s help with your own project in The 30 Day Challenge

Posted by Selina Barker on March 2nd, 2011

What to do when your idea’s too big

Big Idea You’ve got an idea you want to put into action – an idea for a business, a mission to become famous, or a vision of making a living doing something you love.

But… it’s BIG. Too big.

It requires you to quit your job. Or it needs a lot of money. Or a whole team of people. Or premises. Or a huge technical build. Or it simply requires masses of time and energy (which you don’t have).

So what do you do?

Has your answer ’til now been to put your idea back in a drawer and get on with your life? Then you have just got to start doing something different. There are far too many people who have good ideas fading away somewhere at the back at their mind (while someone else has the same idea and goes and makes a success of it).

There’s nothing wrong with having big ideas – a million dollar business, a best-selling book, a national movement, or simply making a full-time living from something you love. It’s a useful skill to be able to take an idea and envision exactly how huge it could become. But… you also need be to able to do the opposite and chunk it down into manageable projects, starting with one you can begin right now.

Sure, you can go ‘big bang’ on your idea; go hell for leather and enlist all the people you need, write a business plan and go search for funding. Or quit your job and bank everything on your first book being a hit. If that’s a style of operating that’s worked for you successfully in the past, and you’re comfortable with the risk involved, it may be right for you.

For the rest of us, the thought of biting it all off in one chunk is overwhelming. And that’s not helpful if it means we end up doing nothing.

Honey, I shrunk my idea

You don’t have to give up on your grand vision of a big business, national fame, or the most common desire – finding a way of making a full time income from something you love doing. You can start small, test it out, improve it, then grow it and scale it towards your original vision.

It just requires you to be willing to think like a player, not a worker. It means being willing to play it out one step at a time – even if you don’t know exactly where it will take you and you can’t yet see how it can make you a full-time income. You’d be surprised how many successful ideas and businesses started out like this! (It’s a lot of fun too)

Here’s how to do it:

Design a 30 day ‘Play Project’ that immerses you in making your idea happen (or at least some part of it).
Since you’re not trying to create your whole vision yet but just a part of it, choose the project to be centred on the bit that’s most exciting to you. If you want to be a public speaker, go speak, don’t spend the first 30 days building a website for your future speaking career.
Make sure the project produces something you can share – some tangible result, not just 30 days of sitting and googling!
Set a deadline in 30 days’ time to share your result with others – show it to your friends, put it on your blog, tweet or facebook it. Share photos, recordings, videos on youtube. Write about the experience on a blog.
Start doing it – do a little every day if you’re fitting it around your current work, don’t wait for hours of free time to magically open up in your diary
When you complete it, look at how you could build on it to take it further. If it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, adjust your approach to give you more of the results you want and launch your next Play Project. Each one can build on the results of the last and at the end of every one, you’ll have something real to show for it – the kind of stuff that opens doors to even bigger opportunities.

What will you do?

What do you want to do? Here are some example play projects to help make it happen.

Want to write a book? Write the outline and one chapter. Or… start writing about your topic on a blog. If you want to be a novelist, you might start with a short story. Send it to some friendly readers.
Want to be a public speaker? Go to Toastmasters, learn some of the basics and set a deadline to give your first talk of 5-10 minutes at one of the meetings.
Got a business idea? Start blogging about the area or the problem you want to help with. Interview people, experiment with possible solutions. If you’re selling your own services, aim to get your first piece of work within 30 days, even if it’s at a reduced fee for a friend or colleague.
Got a grand website idea? If it’s based around content you’re creating, create the site first in WordPress. If it’s more interactive than that, see if there’s a commercial system you can use to test the idea out. (Eg if you want to create your own social network, use NING before you custom build a whole system)
Want to be a declutter consultant or a personal stylist or interior designer? Go and volunteer to do it for a friend first – either for free or for a reduced fee.
If you want to be a standup comic… don’t just go to see standup shows, do a course where you stand up and perform!
If you want to launch a national campaign or change the world, create a Facebook group for your cause and then create an event that people can take part in to build a buzz.

Scary stuff huh? Sure it is, so go get some support. Ask some supportive friends to help, or attend events like Scanners Night to meet other people making ideas happen.

What could you do in 30 days to bring your idea to life?

Leave a comment and let us know.

If you can’t see how you can scale your big idea down, describe your idea in a comment and I’ll see if I can come up with a 30 day project to get you started.

Want our help to make your idea happen? Join us in the 30 Day Challenge starting very soon.

Posted by John on February 24th, 2011

Who do you hate? (Or “How to get unstuck”)

I hate Bono Here at Screw Work Let’s Play HQ we’ve been busy getting ready for the Screw Work Let’s Play Programme which starts tomorrow.

On the 8 week programme we deal a lot with the internal blocks that stop people getting the working lives they want.

As a result, we’ve learned a lot about why people get stuck…

Sometimes we want something so badly – to make more money, to be recognised for our best work, or to slow down and enjoy our lives more – and yet whatever we do, we can’t seem to get it.

To explain why I think this is, I need to talk about Bono, lead singer of U2.

A lot of people find Bono annoying, particularly in Britain where hating Bono has become something of a national sport. There are T-Shirts, blogs and more than one Facebook group.

Why do people hate Bono?

Whatever you might think of his music, when the strength of feeling is far out of proportion to what he does you can be sure it’s not simply a matter of taste. (Let’s face it there are far more despicable people out there in the world)

Bono is hated in Britain in particular because he breaks the rules of British culture. He gets ideas above his station, he behaves as if he actually is all that. And this is the great taboo of our country – to boast, to be arrogant, to believe you have the right to change the world.

The cost of this taboo is that we Brits err towards being apologetic, downplaying our abilities, and suppressing our own power. It is a culture of playing small.

When a natural part of our personality (in this case, our confidence and willingness to acknowledge our own talents) is suppressed at an early age, we see it all the larger in others. And we hate it.

It’s a universal (and uncomfortable) truth that the solution to our block lies in that which we hate. Wherever your life is stuck, whether it’s wanting more confidence in your work, making more money, or allowing yourself to relax, you have locked away the part of yourself you most need.

How do you find out what this part is? Look at who you hate. Whoever you find most irritating or infuriating will represent the part you have hidden. If you’re suppressing your own confidence, it might be Bono. If you’re suppressing your desire to be better compensated for your talents, it’s the shop that charges a premium price for its goods. If it’s allowing yourself to relax, it’s the guy at work who seems to do no work at all and gets away with it.

How to get unstuck

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you become exactly what you hate. (You may not want to start wearing wrap-around shades indoors.) Mixed in with your prejudice, there may be some very valid reasons for disliking someone. But you can still use that person as a pointer to what you need.

Look at this person that irritates you, ask what it is that gets your goat, then ask yourself what part of your own personality might you be suppressing that this person represents? Then ask “If I could access that part of my personality (confidence, ease with making money, the instinct to treat myself more kindly), would that help me get what I most long for in my life?”

I bet the answer is yes.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Posted by John on January 23rd, 2011