Your work really can be whatever you want it to be
During
the first week of July, the World Domination Summit was held in Portland, Ore., for the second time. No, this isn’t some kind of Austin Powers joke. C.C. Chapman, a well-travelled professional business speaker, describes it as a conference focused on “living a remarkable life in a conventional world.”
One of the organizers behind the unconventional conference was Chris Guillebeau, the author of the bestselling business/lifestyle book, The Art of Non-Conformity – Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World (Perigee Trade, 2010).
Is this all sounding a little bit too new age-y for you? Are you waiting for the talk of chakras and crystals to benefit your financial growth? You shouldn’t. In what can best be described as an anti-traditional work movement, people like Guillebeau, Chapman and Tim Ferris, New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, are attempting to persuade others to embrace their non-traditional perspectives, philosophies and strategies for what work is … and what it can mean in 2012 and beyond. These are the new entrepreneurs, and their thinking is changing the fabric of business. They’re not looking for sprawling offices and growing team members as an indicator for success. They’re looking for self-actualization (and happy to make a lot of money if contentment comes first).
“Being self-employed is great, and it provides a great opportunity to think differently about life and the work you are meant to do,” Guillebeau explained via Skype recently. “I love to work, I love to make things and I’ve always been that way. I’m constantly focused on a project or the next project. So, in that sense I always have a job, I just don’t have a job where I work ‘for the man’ or in a cubicle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I just don’t come from that world, so I don’t know that much about it. As I started expressing these ideas on my blog and in books, I started hearing more from people who want to break out of that world and start something different.”
Guillebeau is about to turn 35 and while he doesn’t conform to what most people consider a “normal” lifestyle, he seems to be doing just fine owning, operating and executing on many micro-businesses. He explains that his entrepreneurial history has ranged from importing coffee from Jamaica, search engine optimization in its early days, Google Adwords and Adsense arbitrage, to building a small publishing company while volunteering in Africa. He now writes and sells a product he calls Unconventional Guides, and just published his second book, The $100 Startup – Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (Crown Business, 2012) which became an instant bestseller. If that’s not enough, he’s about to complete the journey that started it all: a desire to visit every country on Earth (out of close to 200, he has a mere eight to go).
“One of the many things that I learned while researching The $100 Startup, is that there have always been all sorts of people that have been self-employed in different ways,” Guillebeau said. “Microbusinesses have always existed since the beginning of commerce. When I lived in West Africa, you would realize that everyone in the village near Sierra Leone is an entrepreneur. There is no formal economy. They are simply hustling by selling their wares. But there is this new movement, because of globalization, access to technology, more and more people being comfortable buying and selling online, that allows people to go out and build businesses by connecting to people all over the world based on shared values, ideals and world view. Those are the conversations that I want to be a part of. The whole philosophy behind The Art of NonConformity and The $100 Startup is that you don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to. On top of that, you can do good things for yourself and for others at the same time. It’s not a false dichotomy. I think that creative self-employment is a great way to do that.”
As participants left the World Domination Summit, they were handed an envelope. In this envelope were two items: One, a $100 bill. The second was a note that read: “We’d love to see how you can put these funds to good use. Start a project, surprise someone, or something entirely different – it’s up to you.” When was the last time you attended an event and were given $100 back at the end to actually do something with the information you received and the people you connected with? The World Domination Summit sold out their 1,000 in a couple of hours. Guillebeau expects that next year’s edition will do the same, perhaps even faster. It seems like others are beginning to realize that work can, finally, be whatever you want it to be.