I wish you could judge someone’s PERFORMANCE by their PERSONALITY, but you can’t. Oftentimes, niceness is overcompensation for people’s inability in the areas you need them the most. We’ve been trained since kindergarten to be nice and in school being nice was a good thing. Remember when you got report cards in elementary school and they had an academic grade and a citizenship grade. The mean kids got bad citizenship grades which usually meant bad academic grades because the teacher didn’t like them. It is rare to find a student with bad citizenship grades and great academic grades, but you find tons of cases of good citizenship grades and bad academic grades (see the report card above).

That’s why in the real world “nice guys finish last” in their careers. Today, a lot of GOOD PEOPLE are unemployed. The reason is that PERSONALITY can only get you so far. In many cases, PERSONALITY is what carries people through the interview process because most people believe the myth that GOOD PEOPLE are GREAT PERFORMERS. As a result, GOOD PEOPLE get in the door while some GREAT PERFORMERS get the door slammed in their face. PERSONALITY alone can get someone through the first few months of new employment, but it’s not until it’s time to PERFORM and deliver that cards get put on the table. I’ve learned that PERFORMANCE trumps PERSONALITY.

On the flip side, there are a lot of GOOD PERFORMERS who do bad things—I could make a long list of top athletes to prove it, but in an effort to be non-judgmental I won’t. But if you’re a nice person and you know you’re hiding behind a cloak of niceness, your RESULTS have to eventually match the quality of your RELATIONSHIPS. And if you’re a great performer, your RELATIONSHIPS have to eventually match the quality of your RESULTS.

Now I’m not saying be MEAN, but I am saying that you have to be MEANINGFUL to the organization’s bottom line and your team members. In order to advance your career, you have to have great RESULTS and RELATIONSHIPS. Leaders should always hire for PERFORMANCE first and PERSONALITY second. Though business ethics is important, hiring is not a question of morality unless you’re HR manager for the Vatican and even they don’t do a great job.

The hardest thing to do is fire a GOOD PERSON—a family man with 3 kids who volunteers and goes to church every Sunday—because it feels morally wrong whereas GOOD PERFORMERS rarely get fired. Companies are created to make PROFIT, not PROPHETS, so unless niceness is a part of a company’s business model (i.e. customer service, hospitality, etc), don’t expect niceness to be your job security.

You can write the most thorough resume with strong action verbs, the nicest layout, with the best schools and GPA, printed on the finest paper, but if it doesn’t communicate that you 1. Create value and 2. Get money, the chances of you getting hired is slim.

Size does matter.

The sizing of each section of the resume, is extremely important. 80% of your resume is about your performance and 20% personality. A lot of resumes are full of fluff. If you are overcompensating by filling up your resume with achievements and awards from high school or words typed per minute, it’s probably a sign that the size of your impact isn’t that great. Where you went to school and your GPA don’t matter that much—even 4.0 won’t get you hired today. The baseline is that you have finished college, created value, and some sort of leadership beyond self.

As I stated in my last post “How To Write A Real Resume” (link here), a resume should not be a carbon copy of your job descriptions. Instead, each bullet-point should communicate how you moved the organization or some aspect of it from Point A to Point B.  Potential employers are more concerned with what you MOVED FORWARD than what you DID BACK THEN. You can even take it one step further and create a resume 2.0 (see mine here), which is more like a visual portfolio of your value. An addendum to your portfolio should include physical examples of the quality of your work (i.e. business plans or essays you’ve written, presentations you’ve created, an actual website or product you designed or marketed, etc).

Employers trust results, not resumes.

Let’s face it, most resumes are lies. There is so much information asymmetry in the career search process. Companies lie by posting job descriptions that don’t truly communicate the nature of the job and potential employees exaggerate each and every bullet-point on their resume falsely presenting their true nature. It’s easier to search the dictionary for the perfect SAT word than it is for someone to actually create real value. Employers see you as a risk until proven otherwise.

Every company is hiring…even in economic downturn.

In other words, no company is NOT hiring. When a company is down, it will hire anyone who it thinks will take it higher. The only way to bounce back from an economic downturn is to either layoff people and hope that things return to the good ol’ days or hire great people who will be intrapreneurs (=entrepreneurs within an existing company) and think of new ways to reposition and repurpose the company through innovation.

If someone great knocks on the door, they won’t shut it. But keep in mind that I don’t mean great as in great person or personality—I mean someone with a great performance track record. Leading people over the past 10 years has shown me that nice people don’t always produce nice results. It’s sad but true—unfortunately, personality and performance aren’t correlated. Personality only gets you so far. Sometimes nice guys do finish last because they don’t perform.

Have you created EXTREME value? If so, how?

The best resume I’ve ever seen is Jay-Z’s (click image on right to enlarge). His resume is full of ways that he has created EXTREME value for companies he has started and worked with. School doesn’t prepare us to create EXTREME value—it prepares us to be employees. An 8am-3pm workday become 9am-5pm and homework becomes work that you have to take home.

Bill Gates (Microsoft) Steve Jobs (Apple), Michael Dell (Dell), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ralph Lauren, Jack Taylor (Enterprise) and others dropped out of college because they saw ways to create EXTREME value in the world that college wasn’t preparing them to do. Imagine if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg followed the rest of his classmates and ended up being a consultant or investment banker. I probably wouldn’t be typing this to you on a PC or a Mac and you probably wouldn’t be reading it on Facebook.

I’m not saying this to encourage anyone drop out—I have three degrees and I value each one, because I used the free time and risk-free space to practice value creation. I failed at 5 business during college and grad school. Instead of seeing yourself as buying an education, see it as buying two or four years of time to educate yourself and demonstrate you can create value through on-campus leadership, entrepreneurship, event execution, and internships. Even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur, you need to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit.

Everyone expects to have a job, but few are creating them.

The last time I was speaking I asked everyone who intended to have a job to stand up and of course everyone stood up. Next, I said sit down if you’ve never created $1,000 of income in a year through any form of work and about 30% of the room sat down. And finally I said sit down if you’ve never created $1,000 of income on your own outside of a company before. Only a handful of people remained standing. This is the problem with our economy—everyone wants a job, but nobody is trying to create them. There is an imbalance between entrepreneurial-minded people and employee-minded people. Companies need both, but the entrepreneurial-minded person will always get hired first and the employee-minded person will always get fired first.

Value is that which causes a transaction.

True value forces whoever is being offered the value to make a choice. It causes the exchange or movement of time, money, and other forms of capital. Most people are indifferent and happy with who they are and where they are even though they may say they aren’t. Value makes them admit that they want to be somewhere else, somewhere better, and then helps them actually get there. In my book, The 8 Cylinders of Success, I define this ability to close space between point A and point B for someone else as your professional velocity. The higher your professional velocity is, the faster you will get hired. You communicate this on your resume through using point A to point B bullet points.

Unemployment is caused by bad resumes, not a bad economy.

Unemployment is not a sign of the lack of jobs in the economy. Unemployment is a sign of a lack of people who have and can demonstrate that they have created value for others in the past. That’s why 50% of workers are underemployed, meaning that that they have jobs, but they aren’t using their passion, they aren’t reaching their full potential, and they aren’t making their highest contribution to the world every day. Whereas the national unemployment rate is only 10%, underemployment is five times that. This cycle starts with your resume.

So many people drive to work, leave half themselves in the passenger seat, and drag the other half of themselves inside the office. Note that underemployment has nothing to do with one’s salary—You can be making $200,000 a year and still be underemployed. Economies fail when too many people are underemployed. Employees get mad when companies cut dead-weight and employers get mad when they realize that they hired dead weight. Are you dead weight or are you helping your company soar? It’s hard for dead weight to move, so it simply holds on as long as it can.

It is what it is.

At the end of the day, a resume 1.0 won’t get you a job and a resume 2.0 might land you an interview. A resume is exactly what it means…without the accent (‘) over the e. It’s a document that employers use to answer the question “Will this person be able to resume (pronounced re-zoom) their past success here?” But if you haven’t been creating value where you are right now—even if you hate it—it’s going to be difficult to communicate your value to another potential employer. If you hate your job, remember that you chose it by way of your past choices and actions which ultimately shaped your future choices. So seek to create value wherever you are because it will only position you to do things that you truly value in the near future.

I’ll leave you with the quote that inspired this blog entry. It came from Jeremih’s “I’mma Star”—an unexpected place.

“So here I am, check my DNA
Gettin’ money is the only thing on my resume
I thought I told you I’ma star”

Are you a star? Is creating value in your DNA? And is gettin’ money evident on your resume?

Related Posts

• How to Write a Real Resume
• Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself: Jullien’s Resume 2.0
• Interview Tips To Get You Hired
• The Art of Inner-Viewing Part 1
• The Art of Inner-Viewing Part 2
• Letter To An MBA

This is specifically for knowledge-based entrepreneurs meaning people who have mastered or are mastering a subject or skill and now want to sell that mastery to people who also want to master that subject or skill or people who need that knowledge to get to where they’re going in life. In this information age, we are shifting to a knowledge-based economy meaning that the moment you know more about something than someone else is the moment that you can create value for them.

This is why auto mechanics make so much. People are ignorant about how their cars work, yet they need them to survive and thus a mechanic can charge an arm, leg, and transmission and they would just have to pay it because they don’t know any better.

Here’s a few things that I learned in year one of my business that I think will be useful to anyone considering starting a knowledge-based business this year.

1. Creating extreme value & solving a real problem

The best definition I heard of value is that which causes a transaction. If you can’t get people to pay for what you offer, then you haven’t created something that is perceived as more valuable than the cost or you’ve created something valuable but you haven’t connected it to the right costly problem yet. Through surveys, feedback of your products and services, and simply listening to your market through talking to people, reading, and targeted searches on Twitter. This year I discovered that the problem my work addresses is underemployment. A year ago I would have said purposelessness, but that did stick for people.

Tools

• Google Forms or Wufoo.com
• Twitter (http://twitter.com/#search?q=purpose)

2. Develop products and services

In a knowledge-based business, you want to develop 3 kinds of products and services:

Tools

• Conference Calls: Freeconferencecall.com or vyew.com
• Radio: Blogtalkradio.com
• Video: Youtube.com or Vimeo.com
• Email Marketing: Mailchimp.com or iContact.com
• Publishing books: Lulu.com or Blurb.com
• Publishing audio: iTunes.com or CDBaby.com
• Public Speaking: Go to Toastmasters.org or study (not just watch) Ted.com

3. Building community & credibility

Community is credibility. No matter what business you’re in, you’re trying to build a movement that grows beyond you. You can only do so much on your own. People power is necessary to spread the word about your business to people you don’t know. Read Seth Godin’s book Tribes and Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. The magic number for a movement is 150+ believers. The 200+ people that have gone through my courses this year have created more value for me than just money; they have helped with marketing, editing, event planning, and design. Money doesn’t fuel movements, people’s hearts do.

Tools

• Facebook.com
• Twitter.com
• Blog: WordPress.com or Blogger.com
• Autoresponders: Mailchimp.com or iContact.com
• Event Registration: Eventbrite.com

4. Developing a brand

Most people focus on logos, websites, and and business cards first, but this is actually last. For the first few months, your company (and yourself) will likely have an identity crisis, unsure of who it is and what it actually does. And you can’t build a strong brand until you know who you are and what you do best. In the meantime, use these tools to get the ball rolling.

Tools

• Logo: Logomaker.com
• Business cards: Vistaprint.com
• Website: WordPress.com, Wix.com, or Webs.com
• WordPress Themes: Woothemes.com or Themeforest.net

Once you’ve got all of these taking care in place, the next step is simply refining them, refining them, refining them until you create a business model that works. Below are some other quick lessons that I’ve learned along this year.

Don’t try to sell to friends…directly

(DO NOT do this. Your friend are worth more than money.)

You may be able to squeeze out a few dollars from your friends, but they love you more than that. Before your business, they wanted to be a part of your life becaue of who you are and now that your business is part of you life, they just want to be part of it’s success as well. Your friends may or may not value what you have to offer, but I guarantee that they know 10+ people who will.

Instead of saying “Buy one of my _________!” you a better way to reach out to your friends is say “Do you know of anyone who could use a __________?” This type of ask gives your friend the opportunity to be of serive to you and another of their friends. They become a connector between you and others. It is more valuable to sale to people who truly value and need your product than it is to sale to a friend who may not need it. Don’t make them feel guilty. They are your biggest fans.

Get on the phone

The purpose of the sales process is to build an intimate relationship with the potential client. Almost every major opportunity that has come my way this year has come through a phone call. While emailing and mail merging is efficient, it doesn’t allow you express your passion and energy the way call does. Because calling can be so time intensive, it requires you to be strategic about who you call and because time is limited, you will naturally make more targeted asks and have higher conversion rates.

Email is a way to sustain a relationship, not a way to build one. If you get a voicemail, leave one and then follow up with an email saying that I left you a voicemail. People get hundreds of emails a day, but very few calls, so you automatically rise up on their priority list.

Be cost consciousness…at first

When you first start off as an entrepreneur, you are extremely cost conscious. While it’s important to have a budget and stretch your runway as long as possible, your business will not grow if you don’t invest in it with time and money. After you’ve minimized your personal expenses, you need to think of business expenses as business investments. Ask yourself, “Is paying to go to this conference going to create more value by increasing my personal, intellectual, social, or financial capital or by helping me do something more efficiently or effectively?” If the answer is “yes”, then you should buy it without hesitation, because if the answer is really “yes” that value will come back to in the form of more money or more time in the near future. Don’t abide by the law of scarcity in a world of abundance.

Create accountability

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road, but it doesn’t have to be. This year, I have surrounded myself with over a dozen entrepreneurs at various stages of business development. I’ve arranged weekly calls with some of them and I’ve created 30 Day Do Its with others.

The 30 Day Do Its are monthly accountability groups where we help each other identify what’s the most important thing we can do to create value in our business in 30 days. The 5 of us make commitments to each other to either PROVE that we did it or PAY the group if we didn’t. With money and other value things on the line, most people execute and as a result we get results.

Develop a personal board of directors

Your company may have a board of directors, but you also need a personal board of directors consisting of mentors that you can reach out to more frequently. Mentors are extremely helpful in figuring out what you should do next and asking questions about things you never thought about. But oftentimes, when we meet new people that can be helpful, we have a great first conversation and then the relationship ends.

Instead of just taking someone out to lunch, make a 30 day commitment to them. For instance, before you leave their presence tell them:

“Thank you so much for this time. I really valued what you had to say, especially the part about the business plan. That’s the first thing I’m going to work on. Do you mind if I send it to you three weeks from today and then we meet again in 30 days to discuss it?”

This will give them a chance to see if you listened to what they said and it will help them decide if they want to keep investing in you. Sometimes mentors can be more valuable than financial investors.

Other tools I use

Online

PayPal.com: It allows me to accept credit card payments easily

Mozy.com: It allows me to automatically backs up 2GB on my hard drive for free so that I don’t lose any important documents.

Hootsuite.com: It allows me to manage multiple Twitter accounts at once.

Ning.com: It allows me to create an online community where my clients can connect and help one another.

Wisestamp.com: It allows me to customize my email signature with pictures and my social sites.

Firefox.com: It allows me to customize my web browsing experience with plug-ins.

Mint.com: It allows me to manage my personal finances and my business finances

Picasa.com: It allows me to store and organize all of my photos.

YouTube.com: It allows me to store and organize all of my videos.

Google Voice: It allows me to have a business phone number that forwards to my cell phone and I can listen to my voicemails in my email.

Google Analytics: It allows me to analyze the traffic of my website so that I can see which post are attracting the most attention and what regions and websites visitors are coming from.

Google Docs: It allows me to access my documents anywhere and any computer.

Google Calendar: It keep me stay organized, management multiple calendar, and it syncs with my iPhone.

Software

iWorks Keynote (Mac Only): It allows me to create amazing presentations that integrate various types of multi-media

iWorks Pages (Mac Only): It allows me to create amazing documents and proposals.

Adobe Photoshop: It allows me to create high-resolution images for the web and other documents.

MacSpeech Dictate (Mac Only): It allows me to speak to my computer and then turns it into text which saves me time and typing.

Products

iPhone: It allows me to efficiently access the web, my email, get directions, manage calendars, record myself, and take pictures all in one place.

Flip video camera: It allows me to capture video and easily upload it to YouTube.

Services

MVMT: They manage my brand and optimize my business systems so that I can focus on doing what I do best.

These are my thoughts as a 2007 Stanford GSB grad after sitting on a career panel at The Columbia Graduate School of Business. Let me know what you think.

This has not been checked for grammar. It’s a freewrite. Thanks for reading.

MBAs are risk averse.

Business school students are among the smartest and hardest working, but they are some of the most risk averse people in the world. Many of us were driven by fear of not having, not succeeding, and not “making it”. We’re running as hard as we can, but we’re not necessarily sure where we’re running to. Sometimes it’s best to just stop, be still, and listen to your voice within. The greatest risk in the world is not taking any risk at all.

(Most MBAs wouldn’t do this with their career unless a lot of other MBAs were doing it too.)

MBAs are some of the most underemployed people in the world.

Underemployment is the biggest issue facing MBAs and the world. Underemployment is when you’re working below your full potential. Anyone who has said they hate their job is likely underemployed. Underemployment has nothing to do with income. It’s about how passionate you are about your daily work.

Imagine having a sample economy of 100 people where 10 are unemployed and the other 90 are only 50% engaged or underemployed. 90 x 50% ~ 45 people being unemployed which makes it 4.5 times bigger of an issue than unemployment. In addition to being some of the smartest and hardworking, MBAs are equipped with an amazing set of leadership and business skills that position them to building teams and solve the world’s greatest problems. The sad part is that most MBAs don’t seek professional paths that tackle the world’s greatest problem. If not us, then who?

(Underemployment has nothing to do with income. It’s about passion.)

MBAs make you money, not happy.

I even have classmates who are unemployed right now, but it is because they would rather be unemployed than underemployed. Their self-confidence gives them the strength to hold out so that they can find the perfect opportunity instead of potentially missing it because they are caught up somewhere else. Whenever someone is underemployed, not only are they unhappy, but the what they produce is not top quality, therefore the customer is unhappy, and then the company is unhappy. Everybody loses. Full employment means the perfect alignment of your passions and purpose with your profession. In a recent US job survey of 7.000+ workers, researchers found that:

• Only 45% of workers say they are satisfied (33 percent) or extremely satisfied (12 percent) with their jobs.
• Only 20% feel very passionate about their jobs; less than 15 percent agree that they feel strongly energized by their work
• Only 31% (strongly or moderately) believe that their employer inspires the best in them.

Your purpose and passion are too big to fit into a single profession or job title. Your career is just one avenue to exercise and fulfill them. Underemployment, unemployment, or full employment. You choose.

(These guys probably think their job is the $#!+)

MBAs should focus on creating value.

MBA programs, even online MBA programs, focus more on capturing value (business models) than creating value. Whereas leadership is the process of taking smart risk and creating value, management is the process of sucking risks out of a business and capturing value. Keep in mind that entrepreneurs don’t love risk—they actually hate risk. True entrepreneurs are just willing to take the risk necessary to achieve a larger purpose. The Masters in Business Administration (MBA) should be changed to an Masters in Business Leadership (MBL) or Masters in Value Creation (MVC). This would change the focus of the curriculum, students, and programming. Though most people go to business school to change careers, it has the power to change the world.

Do you realize that if you figured out how to create and capture 25 cents ($0.25) worth of value every minute of the day for a year, you would earn $131,400. That’s more than the average starting salary of a recent business school grad? What if you just focused on increasing this number instead of working like crazy for someone else for 40 years?

MBAs are taught to believe in the law of scarcity.

I think MBAs get it from economics which is based on the law of scarcity. Scarcity of natural resources. Scarcity of jobs (Get in where you fit in). Scarcity of great talent (the whole premise of business school). Scarcity of idea (someone’s going to take my business idea). The perception that things that are scarce are more valuable (i.e. MBA admssions) is killing us…literally. Mother Earth produces more than enough food for everyone in the world to eat, yet there is still starvation. Why? If the world is abundant, but everyone believes that it isn’t, then people tend to hoard or capture what they can get. People take more than they need and others are left without.

(Is that water in the background?)

MBAs should learn to value time over money.

The only scarce resource that really exist is your time, thus making it your most valuable resource. You choose how to spend and invest it, not your company, not your parents, not your family or friends. Anyone not in control of their own time is a __________________ (I’ll let you fill in the blank). You probably know exactly what’s in your bank account right now, but nobody knows how much time is in their time account. Whoever said time is money was all wrong. Time IS LIKE money in that you can spend it, lose it, waste it, invest it, and run out of it, but Time IS NOT LIKE money in that you can’t get it back or make more of it, or measure how much you have left. Even Bill Gates can’t buy another second of time. Everything costs time (not money). An iPhone priced at $300 cost the CEO who makes $100/hour 3 hours, but it cost the entry level employee who make $30/hr 10 hours. The CEO and employee are paid based on other’s perceptions of their ability to create value. We should embrace the law of abundance given our capacity to innovate and create value.

(Time is NOT money)

MBAs can create value by saving others time.

You can’t really save time as in store it, but if you can help people “save” time by getting them to where they want to go faster, safer, and easier, you can create extreme value for others and capture some of that value in the form of money. The reason a personal trainer is able to make a living doing what they love is because they can help someone move from 300 lbs. (point A) to 250 lbs. (Point B) faster than the person could have done it on their own. The reaon the iPhone is doing so well is because it helps people navigate their music, the internet, contacts, and other data faster and easier than the individual could do it on their own. It’s pretty simple. I call this your professional velocity. Your professional velocity is your ability to close the distance between point A and B for other people and organizations. The higher your professional velocity, the more value you will create and capture.

(Save time and create value)

MBAs shouldn’t seek jobs, they should create them.

Instead of focusing on job loss, lets focus on job creation. It’s a little known fact that more millionaires were made during The Great Depression than in any other time in U.S. history when resources are supposed to be most scarce. How is that? Value creation! Billion dollar companies like Microsoft and Google grew out of free ideas. But you can only get free ideas when you believe they exists. But capturing value only last for so long and that’s where scarcity applies. Once a leader creates value through innovation, then the focus shifts to capturing that value and that’s where management comes in. Management’s job is to suck all of the risk out of the business. Entrepreneurs aren’t risk lovers—it’s just that their vision and sense of purpose transcends the perceived risk. Fearlessness doesn’t mean having no fear, it means having less fear than courage. Yet, they respect all of the people like Phil Knight, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, and Steve Jobs who took risks to develop and create major value. Together, these 5 people have created $666,000,000,000 in value and created 175,000 jobs. Imagine if Bill Gates followed the rest of his classmates to McKinsey or Sergey and Larry worked as engineers at HP. None of this value or these jobs would exist today.

(Squeeze the world’s sourest problems)

Passion is the GMAT of Success

You’ve probably heard of Good To Great and Built To Last, but have you read Success Built To Last? In the book, Success Built to Last, Jerry Porras (coauthor of Built To Last), Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, interviewed hundreds of “successful” people—including some of the names mentioned above, many Nobel Laureates, government and community service leaders, teachers, scientists, and Olympians, as well as Pulitzer, Grammy, Peabody, and Academy Award winners—to identify common characteristics among them. Success was defined as having at least two decades of impact in one’s industry, field, or lane.

They discovered that successful people don’t obsess over what other people may think about their work. They also found that enduringly successful people are more concerned with doing what they love than being loved. They don’t treat their passions like a trivial pursuits or low-priority items. Successful people focus on being good at what is meaningful to them, and do that—not “whatever” just comes along. They understand their unique passions and allocate their view of the right amount of time to each, according to their own individually chosen preference. In summary, excelling at your passion is a pre-requiste to success in the same way that excelling on the GMAT is a pre-requiste for MBA admissions.

(Take your passion as seriously as you took the GMAT)

So how do I find my passions?

First and foremost, I don’t believe that you don’t know your passion. It’s an easy excuse. You’ve likely been using your passion all of your life whether you know it or not, but you’ve probably never thought about it in a professional context. For example, I think Bobby Fisher, one of the greatest chess players to ever. But what if chess was only a manifestation of his true passion for strategic thinking? Lets say he didn’t want to become a professional chess player. What else could he do with that passion? I think he would make one hell of a strategy consultant, sports coach, or military general. Why? Because the same mind set required to be a great chess player is required to be great at those other things. If he could see those careers as one big chess board, the transition wouldn’t be that hard. In the same way, there is no difference between someone who is passionate about bargain shopping and someone who does mergers and acquisitions for a living. It’s the same game on a larger scale.

List all of your favorite activities, projects, books, movies, TV shows, and discussion topics from childhood to now. After that, ask yourself what part of this thing did I love. For instance, lets say that you used to want to be an archeologist when you were younger. That may indicate your passion for digging for information, studying history, or comparing cultures. Once you complete this list, you’ll be able start to see patterns and uncover your true passion because all of the things you engaged with.

(Sir Richard Branson, Founder & CEO of Virgin at work)

Can I make money with my passion?

You can monetize any passion if you’re passionate enough and (you get) other people (to) love it too. It’s more of marketing question than a money question. Tony Sheih of Zappos has monetized studying happiness. Ben & Jerry monetized their passion for ice cream. Walt Disney monetized his passion for art and animation. Herb Keller, CEO of Southwest as passionate about injustice, but law wasn’t the only way to manifest that. He saw an injustice in the airline industry that the average American could fly so he set out to create the lowest cost airlines ever. Ivan Chounard’s passion for rock climbing has become Pategonia. Phil Knight monetized running and athleticism. He didn’t have to be a professional runner to pursue his passions. The deeper you delve into your passions, the more business opportunities you will see. Don’t expect to put your big toe in the kiddie pool and expect to find hidden treasure at the bottom of the sea. Immerse yourself in your passions.

(Ben & Jerry sharing their passion for ice cream)

So if I follow my passions, the money will come?

Not quite. You’ve probably heard the saying “Follow your passion and the money will come.” They skipped a step. It’s follow your passion, get great at it (meaning crystallize it into a skill), and then the money will come. The only difference between a professional athlete and an amateur is that they are able to replicate success at a given activity more than an amateur. Do you realize that you be great at almost anything you want if you commit to it? Unfortunately, many millennials are non-commital and self-discipline is a scare resource. But, the worst thing you can do is get great at something you hate. In Hollywood, it’s called typecasting. You take a role that don’t like and you do well. All of a sudden, those are the only roles that come your way. Breaking out of that mold is 10 times harder than starting off on the right path.

(Murder mediocrity and sharp shoot for your dreams)

How do I crystallize my passion into a skill?

Since finding your passion is all about exposure and the recruiting process only exposes you to a limited menu of options, you can start your own 30 Day Do It group with classmates. This will help you crystallize your passion into skill during school. We have structure and accountability at work and school, but for some reason, we don’t have them for our personal goals. A 30 Day Do It is a group meets every 30 days to set goals and hold each other accountable to last month’s goals. The self-discovery process needs structure just like school has structure and work has structure. That’s why I wrote The 8 Cylinders of Success and Good Excuse Goals. Together, both books will show you how to answer the life questions school doesn’t ask and setup structure and accountability to find answers. Imagine if you and 4 other classmates spent your first 6 months of schools doing deep dives into different career paths. At the end of 6 months (around February) you would be open to 30 (5 people x 6 months) career paths that you never considered before.

Once you find your passion, you have to commit to greatness at it. As Malcolm Gladwell states in his book Outliers, to become an expert at almost anything requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. That’s 20 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 10 years. Luckily, you’ve probably already accumulated time toward a particular passion, but despite classes and other activities, you have to create at least 20 hours of space in your week to practice your passion. Since, we’re not playing a sport, practice can be hard to define, but it can include anything related to your passion such as additional reading, networking with people who share your passion, meeting with professors who are experts, conducting passion related research, creating a company related to your passion, leading a student group, or interning among other things. Ask yourself, what can I do today to be the best I can be at my passion tomorrow?

(What do you love doing and why?)

What about on-campus recruiting? Avoid it!

Avoid on-campus recruiting. It creates career tunnel vision and the time line is screwed up. Have you ever been in a crowd an experienced everyone just start running. You’re not sure why people are running, but you figure that you better run too. That’s exactly what on-campus recruiting is. Just because the companies are ready to hire doesn’t mean you’re ready to be hired. A successful on-campus recruiting season is not measured by the number of offers you get. It’s actually measured by how FEW interviews if takes for you to find your fit. Since business schoolers like to golf, you understand that hole-in-ones are better than bogies. There are more jobs in the world where you could create (and capture) extreme value than the limited number of ones that come to campus. Get off campus and go find them.

Don’t be recruited by a company. They will never know you the way you know you. All they are really look for is a huge ball of clay talent to mold. You can try to fit in, but you are who you are. Therefore, recruit the company you want. Find the company that will fit you by thoroughly researching opportunities (usually off-campus). I would recruit like an archer instead of machine gun. Rather than shooting everywhere hoping something hits, I would take my time, take aim, and release. You save a lot of rejection, inauthenic conversations, and stress that way. When I went to business school, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I failed to position myself as an entrepreneur post-MBA due to some poor leadership choices, product delays, and lack of funding, I knew myself so well that I interviewed with one company and got the job.

(Don’t be recruited. Recruit the company you want.)

Won’t business school help me find what I love?

Business school is simply a space for you find yourself and what you love if you choose. Most people come to business school or grad school in general to hide out for two years because they hated their previous job and don’t know what they want to do yet. Everyone is hoping that business school will help them find IT, but in reality, they must find IT using business as a time and tool. What sucks is that recruiting starts right after mid-terms as if the student has had time to do real self-discovery between the time they left their previous job and started school. The problem is that grad school buys you more time, but it doesn’t guarantee self-discovery. Most people graduate from grad with a masters degree but no mastery of self. If you know who you are and what you have to offer, you will always be able to find a place to fit and a way to contribute and create value. If you simply know your options, but don’t know who you are, the likelihood of you finding a fit is a shot in the dark.

A masters degree doesn’t mean self-mastery. You have to make time for that just like you would a class or else you’ll end up in the exact same situation you were in after undergrad in a new company and perhaps industry with a new title making more money. I repeat, school does not promise to help you discover your passions, purpose, or profession. Maybe you’re okay with that. How is that hundreds of the world’s best and brightest all want to do the exact same few jobs? consulting, banking, and brand management. Do you really know that that is what you want to be? Why? How do you do know?  How many people have you talked to that do that? Do any of your mentors do that? How did you decide on this? What other (non-traditional) career opportunities did you explore? What made this one the best? Don’t lead on a an employer who wants to get married when you aren’t even “engaged”. They will find out. You can only fake love for so long.

(A master’s degree doesn’t mean self-mastery)

So what should I do in business school?

Do everything you couldn’t do if you weren’t in business school. Fail BIG. Travel EVERYWHERE. Create VALUE (from scratch). Be GREAT.

Finish unfinished business.

First and foremost, do what you didn’t do in undergrad. If you’re in a good business school, you likely did well in undergrad, but if you could do it all over again knowing what you know now, you might flip undergrad a little differently. Check out this list of 66 things every college student must do before graduation. Though it was written with undergrads in mind, you may have some unfinished business to handle in graduate school. The list was designed to help you maximize your personal, intellectual, social, and financial capital while in school using the school’s intellectual, social, and financial capital as well as your time outside of class. Since I finished undergrad in 3 years, I didn’t get a chance to study abroad, so that’s one thing I regret. Business school affords you the time to travel all over the world—some even require it.

Fail BIG while trying to create extreme value.

Usually starting a company is the best way to fail. When I say fail big, I don’t mean fail intentionally. Try to succeed. But do something that you’re not sure you can do. Stretch yourself. Even if you fail and you don’t get the outcome or income you expected, you will still have stretched and expanded your idea of what’s possible. I failed at two businesses while in business school—an online green products store and a people-based search engine. These were the greatest leadership lessons I could ever have. The process of trying to create value from scratch and building a team challenged me in a way that a classroom couldn’t. Most people in the world, even MBAs haven’t made more than $1,000 on their own outside of a company. Try to create value (innovation) and capture it (business model) whether you intend to be an entrepreneur or not. People who have an entrepreneurial mind will lead in the 21st century because they know how to identify problems, develop iterative solutions, and execute. The world is evolving too quickly for you to think you’re going to be able to hide inside a company and take an elevator to the C-level suite without solving a major problem. Any company not solving a major problem in the world will not last and likewise, any employee now solving a major problem for a company won’t last either.

(Escape the cubile. Dig within. Smell freedom

Declare your greatness.

Like I said before, you can be great at anything so why not get great at the thing that you want to be great at. Declare what you are committed to being the world’s greatest at. As talented as MBAs are, if I asked everyone in this room the question, “What is the one thing you are committed to being the world’s greatest at?” many people wouldn’t have an answer. We’ve become comfortable with “good enough”. We were good enough to get into b-school. We were good enough to get that grade or GMAT score. We were good enough to get that job or internship. But what are you great enough to do?

Take a second. Think about it. If you had to choose one thing to be great at, what would it be? If it immediately comes to mind, then write it down. If not, then write the question down until you choose an answer that resonates with you. with the exception of biological feats like the world’s tallest person, nobody in the Guinness book of world records got there by luck. Everyone made a conscious choice as some point in their lives to be the best. And no matter how obscure the thing they chose, most of them are making a living doing what they love. Now keep in mind that I when I say best, I don’t mean better. This is not a competition with anyone else. This all about you. You can be your best without being the best and your can be the best without being your best.

Is entrepreneurship the only way to find the perfect career?

No. I’m confident that if I wasn’t an entrepreneur, I would be perfectly fit for a leadership position in HR at a company I cared about or student life and admissions at a major university. How many people MBAs do you know would even consider that as a career option? Too many people are looking for the sexy jobs when the ones they should marry are right around them. There are more companies than the 50+ that recruit on campus and there are more paths out of business school than 5.

I’m not saying that you have to be an entrepreneur. You can also be an intrapreneur. Instead of trying to fit into a job description on a company’s website, you can propose an entrepreneurial idea that will solve a huge problem in their company or industry. We do it in our case studies in class all the time. After railing on an entrepreneur for decisions in the past (even though their company is worth billions today) we come up with these great ideas for companies that we could actually propose as jobs, not just ideas. Dissect the company or industry you want to work for and make a proposal. As long as you can demonstrate that it will create more value than the cost of your salary, you’re a go. But again, most people haven’t gone through the process of creating value and capturing it on your own. That’s why I highly recommend taking on a project or entrepreneurial venture that will allow you to explore that during business school.

(Understanding how to create and capture value will make you forever rich)

What if you hate your summer internship or first job out of school?

Look at your all of your work experience thus far like it was just more school (with a scholarship to cover living expenses). But here’s the catch, you have to set your graduation date. When you set a graduation or departure date it will force you to maximize your experience by building relationship and developing skills. I call it a bridge job. A bridge job is a time-constrained career move you use as a stepping stone to get to your next job that doesn’t take up more that 50 hours/week. It’s almost impossible to build a bridge if you spend all of your time on one side fo the career river. You commit to leaving the bridge job at the 18 month mark or once you’ve saved up 6 months of basic living experense—whichever comes first. This keeps you from not get too comfortable in a situation you don’t want to be in. Knowing that this is just a bridge job forces you to keep your living expenses low so that you don’t trap yourself. Increasing your living expenses, is the worst thing you can do (no matter how much money you’re making) if you’re in a job you hate. I have friends who hate their job but bought houses. Now they are stuck because they have to “pay the bills”. Hold off on that stuff into you find something you love. I took a bridge job after school when my companies didn’t work out and 17 months later I saved up and started a new one. I gained some invaluable intellectual, social, and financial capital while there and created extreme value while I was there.

(Sometimes bridge jobs are necessary to get where you want to go)

At the end of the day it comes down to this. If you were in an abusive relationship, but they were paying you $10,000/month to stay, would you? Leave! It’s your time and your life. Don’t believe the lie that work sucks no matter where you work so you might as well just stay where you are. Keep in mind that there are known possibilities, options, and unknown possibilities. Up until this poin, you have been operating in the ream of known possibilities and your options within those possibilities. There are literally 100,000s of possibile career paths and companies, but they are only available to you if you’re open to them.

What do you think about making money and then giving back?

I don’t believe in philanthropy or charity as a solution to the world’s greatest problems. I believe you are the solution to world’s greatest problems. Philanthropy and charity are nice-to-haves, but how many charities or foundations do you know have obviated themselves because they solved the particular problem they were created to address?  I’ve heard the quote “I can’t give back to the poor if I’m one of them.” That’s B.S. Has it every cross your mind that it’s not money that the poor need—it’s actually financing for all of the million dollar ideas they’ve thought of because they’ve been undercapitalized (not poor) for so long. (Shout to my classmate Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva.org). Gandhi proved you don’t need money to make HUGE impact. Bill Gates proves that even with a lot of money impact isn’t guaranteed. The world needs you now! As stated earlier, your time is your most valuable asset, not your money.

In his book The Monk and the Riddle Randy Komisar talks about the Deferred Life Plan in which there are two steps 1. Do what you have to do and then hopefully 2. Do what you want to do. According to Komisar, most people stay in step one unaware that they can freely move to step two (or even skip step one) once they’ve discovered their passion. In avoiding the Deferred Life Plan, he makes a clear distinction between passion and drive. “Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can’t tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn’t just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it’s not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It’s not about jumping through someone else’s hoops. That’s drive.”

In conclusion…
In closing, I hope that I’ve created life changing value for you. Though you’re reading this online and accessing it for free, it cost me to create this. I’ve invested years of disciplined study, spiritual practice, self-evaluation and reflection to produce this insights for you. I believe that the wisdom I’ve shared with you will bring you abundance personally and professionally, otherwise I wouldn’t have written it.

I’m trying to create my 25 cents/minute worth of value in the world. If you found this valuable, please help me get there by purchasing one of my books at:

Sincerely,

I remember when we first met. You were wearing all black and I was afraid of you. At the time, I was dating Good Enough. I didn’t want to take a risk on you. With Good Enough, I was safe, secure, and comfortable. But Good Enough wasn’t good enough. I needed more. I needed to be pushed…be challenged.

That’s when we met face-to-face. I guess opposites attract. Who would  have thought that a Successful and a Failure would date. It’s like mixing vinegar and oil or a Capulet and a Montague. I acted like I couldn’t stand you, but when I relaxed and just truly embraced you, I learned so much from you. I wish more people got to know you like me and would stop judging you.

You remember who introduced us? My first business introduced us back in 2005. All my other friends hated you. But I didn’t care what they said. I had to see for myself what you were all about. I invested my time, money, energy, and identity in you. You showed me things about myself that I didn’t even know about like my ego and my self-doubt. You knew how to press my buttons and now I know myself better.

I know I ran away when we broke up. It was me, not you. In hindsight, I have to admit that you made me better. And for that I want to say thank you.

I have a feeling that I’ll be seeing you around. I hear you’re out there still breaking hearts. I don’t want the next time we meet to be awkward.

As you’d always say, “If you fall out of love with a Failure, make sure you fail forward.”

Sincerely,

Mr. Successful

1. Employment of individuals with greater skills than the job requires
2. Involuntary part-time works—workers who would work full-time if they could but can’t find it
3. Overstaffing—businesses hiring workers who aren’t fully occupied when at work

Unemployment occurs when a person is available to work and seeking work but currently without work. The currently unemployment rate is at 12%, but nobody knows what the UNDERemployment rate is and that the biggest problem the economy has right now. When I speak of UNDERemployment, I am referring to first definition above—the employment of individuals with greater skills than the job requires. It is impossible to sustain an economy when the cost of the worker exceeds the value they are creating and that is usually the case with UNDERemployment.

Lets say that there are 100 employees in the economy. If 12% of them are unemployed, then that means 12 people are without work. Now, if the UNDERemployment rate is 50%—meaning that 88 of the employees are only working at half of their capacity—then essentially, the value of those employees is only 44 (88 x 50%) and the other half is left on the table as wasted potential. Therefore, whereas unemployment leads to a loss of 12 employees, UNDERemployment is 3.5 times greater. UNDERemployment is worst than unemployment if it is above 14% (because 14% of 88 = 12.32).

The first version of UNDERemployment is primarily caused by two things:

• RESTRICTION: Risk-averse companies managing employees too tightly and lot allowing them to create the most value they can
• REPRESSION: Risk-averse employees pursuing careers that aren’t aligned with their greatest strengths and passions

The way companies can combat RESTRICTION is to open dialogues with employees who interact with the customers on a daily basis and find out where they see opportunities to add more value for customers, their teammates, or the company at large. The way to decrease REPRESSION is to help prospective employees find their purpose and passions in a safe environment and then recruit based on their intrinsic motivations rather than using extrinsic things like salary to attract (the wrong talent).

If an employee makes $0.10/minute in profit for their company for one year, they would create $52,560 (=$0.10 x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days) in value for the company. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the reason the economy has tanked is because most employees aren’t meeting this plateau. The average American earns about $40,000/year, so we have to figure out how to support each other in creating more value than we take through innovation (or educated risk-taking) and better recruiting practices.

Aaron Lazansky
http://blog.sohnup.com

Alanzo Dale – The Minority Report
New York lifestyle, fashion, & events
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Alfred Obiesie
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Allan Cole – Word is Born
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Ashley Mui – Rebellion In The Hood
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Caits Meissner
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Zebi
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The Million Dollar Homepage

One million dollar idea that I heard of was pretty simple—so simple that you get mad at yourself for not thinking of it first. The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator.^[1]

Keyword = Notepad

When asked how he came up with the idea Alex responded “It was a muggy summer’s night late in August (2005), the time around midnight, and there I was, lying on my bed with a notepad, brainstorming ideas to make money.” The keyword in this sentence is notepad. Alex knew that he should write down all of the ideas that came to his mind until he found one that resonated with him. Sometimes it takes a million million dollar ideas to find that one, but if you don’t write them down, you’ll forget—and those don’t count.

Every day I keep a pen and quarter-page sheet of plain paper in my pocket for my ideas. Simply having it opens my mind to seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling ideas. If ideas knock on our door and we never answer, eventually they stop knocking. I don’t act on all of my ideas, but I acknowledge them by writing them down. As a result, I’m working on a few that I think have the potential to be BIG.

But there comes a point when every entrepreneur has to make a leap from cost consciousness to cash flow consciousness. It’s easy to get caught up always thinking about your burn rate and forgetting that sometimes you need to inject the business with cash by investing other things besides your time in order to grow.

I’ve come to a point where I’m ready to bring on my first part-time employee for 10-20 hours a week. My cash flow consciousness tells me that as long as an employee creates more value than they take in given period of time then they are a good investment. Of course I have to find the right person first. This means building a team to build the business. It’s an opportunity to bring in other people’s gifts and talents to the vision. And I’m certain that I’ll work harder knowing that someone else is depending on me ever week—even in the hours that they aren’t around.

This is definitely a sign of growth for me. In the past I’ve had difficulty asking for help from people, but I’m trying to grow something that is bigger than me and outlives me so I have to rely on other people. The DMV’s growth is dependent on my growth until I get many others to adopt/shape it as their own vision. I definitely believe in employee ownership emotionally and financially. No more small thinking. Dream BIG!

Ashoka »

Ashoka is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

Dell Social Innovation Competition »

The RGK Center at The University of Texas and Dell are looking for college students worldwide with ingenious ideas to change the world. Dream up a plan that combines creativity and innovation to tackle a pressing social issue, and you can win $50,000 to put your plan into action!

Echoing Green »

To accelerate social change, Echoing Green invests in and supports outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions. Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems.

Global Giving »

Unlike a traditional foundation, GlobalGiving does not directly offer grants or support. GlobalGiving uses its website to connect individual and institutional donors directly to social, environmental and economic development projects around the world via our “public” website, www.globalgiving.com. Potential donors can browse and select from a wide offering of projects, organized by geography or by themes such as health care, the environment, and education. GlobalGiving markets these projects through a number of channels, including corporations, employee giving campaigns, and direct consumer marketing partnerships. When donors come to GlobalGiving, they can find and fund projects that meet their diverse interests.

Global Social Venture Competition »

The purpose of GSVC is to actively support and promote the creation and growth of successful social ventures around the world. We define a social venture as an enterprise that has both financial and social goals integral to its purpose. Grand Prize: $25,000 2nd Place Prize: $10,000 3rd Place Prize: $5,000

Knight News Challenge »

We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

Skoll Awards »

The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship support social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, economic and social equity, and peace and security. These issues are at the heart of the foundation’s vision of empowering people to create a peaceful, prosperous, sustainable world.

Stanford BASES Social E-Challenge »

The Social E-Challenge is a business plan competition for entrepreneurial ventures whose primary goal is to effect social and/or environmental change. Participants range from for-profit businesses with a strong sense of social responsibility to nonprofits with sustainable revenue-generation models. The common denominator is that these companies seek to have a positive impact on our society and/or the environment. Social E-Challenge provides participants with $50,000 in final round prizes, as well as the resources and training to launch their startups, which include workshops, mixers, speakers, a mentorship program, and individual feedback from renowned judges.

Whitney M. Young, Jr. Memorial New Venture Competition »

Whitney M. Young, Jr. Memorial Conference is focused on early-stage new ventures. The primary purpose of the New Venture Competition is to provide entrepreneurs of African descent the opportunity to present their ideas for growth companies to an illustrious panel of investors and venture capitalists. The top team will receive $10,000, while the 2nd and 3rd place teams will receive $5,000 and $2,500, respectively.

For Technology Start Ups

BootUp Labs »

Bootup Labs is a startup accelerator in Vancouver, BC that helps founders and companies go “from zero to fundable.” Bootup Labs recruits and supports promising entrepreneurs and provides mentorship, ongoing support and office space to help define their business and secure venture financing. Our nine-month mentoring and support program is designed to help you get to the next level with your company, and prepare you to receive your first round of funding. Read more about Bootup Labs, or contact us if you’re ready to start talking to us about how we can help.

DreamIt Ventures »

The DreamIt Managing Partners have been investing in early stage companies since they sold the companies they started. In the last few years we have become enthusiastic about how quickly and inexpensively great companies can be launched. At the same time we have seen some very talented people with great ideas struggle to pull the pieces together and get over the startup hump. With the help and support of entrepreneurs, technologists, prominent law and accounting firms, angel investor groups and venture capital firms, DreamIt Ventures was born. Our goal at DreamIt is simple: Help great people with great ideas build great companies.

LaunchBox »

LaunchBox Digital is a place for cutting-edge ideas and cutting-edge talent. LaunchBox Digital helps entrepreneurs maximize their chance of success and get through the challenging early days of starting a new business.

Seedcamp »

At Seedcamp, we believe Europe has the talent, the role models, and the capital founders need to succeed. We want to provide a catalyst for the next generation of great entrepreneurs and help you take risks, think big, and succeed. Participating in Seedcamp will give you enormous validation and access to a world-class network of advisors to help you with every aspect of your business, plus a direct route to seed and venture capital.

TechStars »

TechStars only accepts about twenty companies each summer (about ten in Boulder, and about ten in Boston). In Boulder last year, 393 companies applied and ten were accepted. Getting in is hard, and it means something special. TechStars fills the startup funding gap by providing just enough capital to get your idea off the ground. Your new company receives up to $18,000 in seed funding.

Y Combinator »

Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company. We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.