AnywhereMan

Let’s pretend you are a high school senior. You already know what you want to do for a career: you want to be a programmer for a company like Google or Facebook.

What’s going to get you there in the best, least debt-incurring manner? Four years of college? Or walking up to Google and telling them you’ll work for them for four years for FREE? After four years, you’ve already got a ton more experience than your peers who are just graduating and you won’t have the massive student debt (you might just need a paying part-time job on the side…which you’d need through college anyways). Your professional network is also going to be immensely larger.

Yes, you’ll start at the lowest rung possible but 1) You’re not costing Google anything and 2) you’re learning exactly what they want you to learn. You’ll be putting in some extra time doing self-study over the years, but almost everything you’re learning will be applied.

So which is the better deal? And which would give you a better chance of getting your foot in the door in the first place? Now that everyone goes to college, does it really get you ahead of the pack? I think education through experience is becoming more important than formal education.

Disclaimer: I have a four-year degree. Obviously this approach wouldn’t work with a profession such as a doctor, teacher, or lawyer. But I think it would have worked for me (Business/marketing degree).

X – X – Y – Y – X – X – Y … What comes next? A “Y”, right?

I stopped home for lunch earlier this week and my wife was working with our five year-old daughter on some homeschool stuff. They happened to be working on patterns similar to the one in the first sentence. As I watched her analyze each pattern and anticipate the next character, I realized how vital the skill of recognizing patterns can be.

When I spend less time checking emails each day I get more done. When I get more done I have more money and more time.

My high-paying clients are usually more trusting of my opinions than most low-paying, DIY clients.

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Earlier this year, I recognized a trend where some potential clients needed a simple website but couldn’t afford my base site development price. I tapped into this trend by launching TweakMyTheme.com specifically for them.

Lately, I’ve noticed how inefficient my sales pipeline process is. By detecting patterns in the questions potential clients ask, knowing which potential projects are high-priority, and developing a standard follow-up process, I’ve developed a new, improved system for my business.  I’ve started using Capsule CRM to manage my entire prospecting and sales process, and I continue to use Freshbooks for my invoicing and time-tracking.

If you can recognize patterns in your career, you’re going to succeed. Learning, business, investing, education, relationships…so much of what we do is dependent on finding patterns.

Lately I’ve been keeping an “I Am/I Am Not” list in the back of my notebook to help determine the skills and services I want to offer to my client base.  This helps me accomplish a few things:

1. It helps me narrow down exactly what my business “does”
2. It helps me determine the things I need to get better at and develop through research, education, and practice
3. It helps me cope when working on things I don’t necessarily love doing

The primary goal of my list is to figure out how I can spend more time doing the things on the “I Am” list (and get paid for them), and how to spend as little time as possible (if any) doing things on the “I Am Not” list.

There is nothing super-revolutionary about this practice, but it’s just a way to keep my mind from getting too cluttered.

How do you make sure you are doing what you WANT to be doing?