Want to break free from the daily grind but not sure where to start?
Let John Williams teach you how to get up and running with a money-making idea you love in just 30 days – even if you haven’t yet found your killer concept. Drawing on the latest methods of famous creatives and billion-dollar startups you’ll discover:
Whether you want to start a business, write a bestselling book, create an app or launch an event, discover how to get up and running in 30 days without quitting your job or risking your savings. Case studies and stories will keep you motivated and simple confidence hacks will help you get yourself out there. You’ll get access to the Break Free Toolkit online, connect with other readers on social media, and launch your idea in as little as 20 minutes a day. Welcome to the Idea Age!
John Williams is founder of The Ideas Lab, whose programmes have led thousands of people through the strategies in this book to create award-winning blogs, win prestigious consultancy projects, run sell-out comedy and music events, launch apps, publish best-selling books, quit their jobs and launch global businesses.
‘We have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we have only one.’
—Confucius
‘We’re here to put a dent in the universe.
Otherwise why else even be here?’
—Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
YOU HOLD IN your hands the handbook for the Idea Age. Today, an idea can change the world, an idea can make you famous and an idea can make you a millionaire or even billionaire.
Whatever it is you want to do – find something to get you out of your job, do something with a burning idea you have, have a positive impact on the world or launch a business to make you rich – follow the process contained here and within 30 days you’ll have launched something real into the world (even if you don’t have an idea yet). And you can start something on the side, without quitting your job and with near-zero investment.
You’ll be in good company because you’ll be joining a movement of people all over the world taking the opportunity to make ideas happen in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. This movement takes many forms:
And now it’s you too.
You’re about to discover a process that’s been proven with thousands of people who have used these techniques to create acclaimed blogs, publish bestsellers, launch businesses, win media attention, make a positive impact on others’ lives, quit their jobs and create a life-changing financial return.
You’ll be discovering shortly how to start something that will make you money. One of life’s greatest freedoms is to realise you can make a living without a job or a boss and without doing work that bores you.
But there is more than just money at stake here.
This unique process you are about to embark on of finding ideas and making them happen is one of life’s greatest adventures. It’s about finding what you’re capable of, expressing yourself, having an impact on the world. It’s about coming alive.
This is your chance to become the main protagonist in the story of your life, rather than a bit-part player in someone else’s.
It’s also about finding out what you can give to the world. This might seem a strange way to think for those of us who have been convinced by the education system to believe we have no great gifts. Fortunately, confidence is not required for this process. Right now I probably have more belief in what you’re capable of than you do.
Starting something new is one of those things that’s all too easy to put off. Perhaps you’ve been putting it off for some months or even years already. Once you see how easy it is to start, you won’t want to wait a moment longer.
Become the main protagonist in the story of your life, instead of a bit-part player in someone else’s
So why is this movement happening now? Throughout history people all over the world have had good ideas – for services, products, books, businesses, events, brands and innovations. But within just the last ten years, something has happened that has changed the world forever.
The difference is that now it’s easy to make those ideas happen – and to make some real money out of them as well. The World Wide Web is only a little over 9,000 days old and yet it has already changed our lives irrevocably. We live in a world today where you can publish your own book, sell your own music or create your own online shop in an hour or two. You have access to incredibly powerful tools to create whatever you want and to reach a global market.
Saskia Nelson launched her photography business for online dating profiles in just 30 days when she found her first paying customer online. Wolfgang Wild started his blog of remarkable historical photos using the free WordPress system and ended up with a site getting 200,000 hits a day and an exclusive licensing deal with Mashable.com. Jody Day started a blog called Gateway Women to support childless women like herself and within 30 days it was already on its way to becoming the international movement it is now – with a global reach of 2 million people and a bestselling book to support it.
Matt Inman, creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal, raised a million dollars in crowdfunding in one day for a card game he helped design. Even more extreme, Elon Musk pre-sold over $10 billion worth of Tesla’s new Model 3 electric vehicle in just two days. None of these things would have been possible even a few years ago. (You’ll read more about these stories and many others later.)
You don’t need to wait for anyone’s permission anymore. You don’t need to win a book deal to publish your book. You don’t need to sign a record deal to publish your music. You don’t need to convince a bank to invest in you to try out a business idea. You don’t need to give a big cheque to an advertising agency to spread the word. This is a revolutionary shift of power to the individual.
Yet too few of us are taking advantage of it. We’ve been handed the most powerful toolbox in history and yet many of us still use it for nothing more than retweeting other people’s ideas and LOLing around on Facebook. It’s like we’ve been given a free Ferrari and we’re driving everywhere in first gear. How can you squander even one more day sitting on the sidelines of the biggest opportunity in history?
Those that continue to do so might be in for a nasty surprise …
While technology has given us enormous personal power, it brings other seismic shifts too, ones that are critical to understand for anyone who wants to make a good living. It’s time to get wise to where it’s all heading if you don’t want to be a victim of it.
The animal called The Job is on the endangered list. Now that everyone can work remotely and on an ad hoc basis, there is no longer the imperative to have an office full of permanent staff so companies are increasingly turning to the freelance market or ‘gig economy’ to fulfil their needs. Good jobs are also being outsourced to smart, well-educated people in other countries. And they’re even being automated by software.
So far, much of this is just below the radar but the rate of technological change driving it all is accelerating rapidly. There are big shockwaves heading our way over the next few years that we are very poorly prepared for. A report by Oxford University predicts that 47 per cent of occupations in the US will be automated within fewer than 20 years. The World Economic Forum predicts robots will take 5 million jobs in the US in the next 4 years alone. And that’s before machine learning (or Artificial Intelligence) really takes off.
The jobs that remain are squeezing employees harder and harder – to work longer and for less money. The squeeze is even greater for those under 35; 1 in 3 millennials graduating today has no job and many of those who do are in low-wage or even unpaid positions.
Even some hard-won skills and professions are becoming commoditised. If you don’t know how to make ideas happen there’s a danger you’ll end up the minimum-wage employee of someone who does. The single most useful skill in the twenty-first century is to know how to find a good idea and execute it successfully – a skill you’re going to learn over the next 30 days.
If you don’t know how to make ideas happen you might end up the minimum-wage employee of someone who does
Many of us have a psychological block about alternatives to the job; we think they are more risky – somehow forgetting that as an employee we can be made redundant at any moment without warning.
It’s interesting that so many don’t even consider the alternatives to the job and yet the job is a concept that is only a few generations old. A little over a hundred years ago nine out of ten people didn’t have a job. Then the Industrial Revolution came and people moved to the cities to take jobs in factories. The factory evolved into the modern office, but with largely the same principles – to engage people at the lowest possible cost to perform a narrowly defined role. By the end of the twentieth century, nine out of ten people were in a job and couldn’t imagine anything else.
Now it’s starting to swing back the other way.
Today nearly 30 per cent of the global work force is self-employed. And in many Western countries it’s growing. Self-employment in the UK is now higher than at any point over the past 40 years and in 2015, 7,700 people in the UK became self-employed every week.
The dominance of the job, therefore, is a hundred-year blip in the 8,000-year story of human civilisation. The job won’t disappear overnight but the changes in the world of work are dramatic and gathering speed. The shift that defined the twentieth century – the Industrial Revolution – is over and we’re entering the next stage in human civilisation. I want to show you how to be ready for it.
So given all this, why haven’t you started something of your own already? Well, I don’t believe it’s laziness or lack of ability. It’s because you were trained not to. And the training started on your first day at school. Here’s how business guru Seth Godin describes it:
Years ago, when you were about four years old, the system set out to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Not just persuade, but drill, practice, reinforce and, yes, brainwash. The mission: to teach you that you’re average; that compliant work is the best way to a reliable living; that creating average stuff for average people, again and again, is a safe and easy way to get what you want – Entrepreneur and business author Seth Godin in his manifesto ‘Brainwashed: 7 ways to reinvent yourself’ on changethis.com
School trains you for a job. It sets your expectations on employment and encourages you to work on becoming the kind of all-rounder valued by companies. Life in school even looks like the office – sitting at a desk with your peers following instructions from your superior. School teaches us to expect to get a job and that anything we do for fun is a hobby.
The education system trains us to be passive: sit still, wait for instructions, seek approval from others and ask permission before doing anything. This is good training for an employee, terrible training for making your own dreams happen.
The similarity between school and employment is no coincidence – school was designed during the Industrial Revolution to produce compliant workers for the factory. Now it’s for the office.
We have been brainwashed to become ‘workerbots’ – we look to others for instructions, we try to fit into the opportunities offered to us rather than create our own and we vastly underestimate our own unique talents. Given all this, it’s no surprise that most of us grow up without considering self-employment or entrepreneurship a possibility.
And here’s the real kicker: because this workerbot mindset is the dominant one surrounding you, it doesn’t even look like you’ve been brainwashed. It looks like normality. It looks like sanity. But as psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm said, ‘That millions share the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane.’
What’s really crazy is it doesn’t even work anymore. Today, if you really are a replaceable cog, just slotting into a standard role, the chances are some well-educated person in another country can fill that slot remotely, much more cheaply than you. Soon it might even be possible for technology to do it.
Remember that being a workerbot is not your natural state. Barbara Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job, has said:
I read about a study that found that nearly all kindergartners are naturally entrepreneurial. They exhibit the very qualities that make for successful self-employment. They’re curious, adventurous, and extraordinarily persistent. They regularly come up with creative ideas and are eager to share their discoveries. Sadly, this same study found that only a few years later, by the fourth grade, these qualities had begun to diminish. This wasn’t entirely news to me, of course. I’ve been watching people struggle with their own doubts and fears for decades.
Our natural state is to be ‘players’. A player in my terms is someone who seeks out the most exciting opportunities, is willing to experiment and have fun with them and to get into play – not to just sit and think about ideas but to get their hands dirty by trying the ideas out in the real world.
My job over the next 30 days is to return you to your true nature. They made you a worker but you were born a player:
All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs – Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and microfinance pioneer
The potential upside today of launching your own idea is incredible but if you approach it with a workerbot mindset you will fail. Everyone’s model of work, of value creation in its broadest sense, is the job. But workerbot thinking from the world of jobs won’t help you make ideas happen. The workerbot mindset will have you planning instead of experimenting, holding off on going public in a quest for perfection and wasting your time on unnecessary side issues.
In the fast-moving world we live in now you need an entirely new approach.
What if everything you’d been told about starting a business was wrong?
Eleven years ago I started working with creative people on their careers and I quickly found that the conventional career and business strategies did not work well for my clients. I developed a new approach centring not on rumination, research and planning but on real-world experimentation.
What if everything you’d been told about starting a business was wrong?
In recent years I have been delighted to find experts in other fields were coming to similar conclusions. The field of project management was adopting ‘agile methods’ to cope with the unpredictability of the modern business environment. Tech startups were adopting ‘Lean Startup’ principles pioneered by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries to launch more quickly, cheaply and successfully. And Tim Brown of international design firm IDEO was helping to popularise the term ‘Design Thinking’ to show that the methods designers used to create products could be extended to solve a whole range of complex problems, from business challenges to public health initiatives.
Everywhere it seemed people were waking up to the fact that the world was moving too fast for making long-term plans, too many ventures were failing and it was no longer possible to push your solution onto people with the brute force of advertising.
My response was to develop an approach that is radically different to that described in conventional business books. It’s designed for people who are taking their very first steps in making their creative and business ideas happen. And yet it mirrors the techniques used by some of today’s most successful global brands to get started. I call it ‘The New Entrepreneurialism’.
In 30 days’ time when you’ve absorbed and experienced the New Entrepreneurialism for yourself, you’ll see the world in a new light – a world full of possibilities for what you can create – and you’ll be amazed how quick and easy it can be.
There are three huge benefits you’ll get from this new approach:
From what I’ve seen, people starting their own thing for the first time waste 90 per cent of their time. They spend months researching and analysing, googling how to write a business plan or fiddling with every detail of a logo or website that they abandon soon after. This book will show you how to avoid all these rookie mistakes and save a massive amount of time.
When you first witness how an experienced entrepreneur operates it might well shock you. Recently I was in Bali sitting next to a serial entrepreneur from the Philippines. We were discussing a new business idea he had just had. I gave my input and he immediately put it into action. He reached for his phone, called someone who could help with the project and arranged to work with him on it. Then, as we sat in a bar overlooking the ocean, he registered a domain name and created a simple one-page website with the ability for people to register their interest by giving their email.
This ‘cut-the-crap’ mode of operating is not so surprising to me as it is how I work now. But back when I was an employee I never imagined that starting a new business could be done in a few minutes with an iPad in a bar.
Once you’ve really absorbed the New Entrepreneurialism over the next 30 days you’ll move just as quickly. For now, just trust that most things can be done a lot faster than you think.
There’s no need to quit your job, spend your life savings or risk making yourself look a fool just to get an idea off the ground. The New Entrepreneurialism avoids any of that by starting small in your spare time, getting something out quickly and then adjusting your direction based on the results. This also saves you from the number one cause of startup failures – making something nobody wants.
While other ‘how to start a business’ books make you wade through tedious admin before you take a single step and leave you with nothing at the end but a business plan, this book will throw you straight into the most exciting part – doing the thing people are going to pay you for! This also helps you learn quickly what kind of projects you actually enjoy doing so you don’t waste time starting something you hate.
After you’ve been through the 30-day process once you’ll understand how to make any idea happen from scratch. And that makes the world a more exciting place than you could possibly imagine right now.
At the heart of the New Entrepreneurialism are seven hacks I’ve developed – revolutionary strategies, formulas and tools you can use to dramatically save time and money, reduce risk and start creating something successful faster than you ever thought possible.
Instead of chasing money right from the start, put your focus on creating something of real value to others – something interesting or useful. Because once you’ve done that there will pretty much always be a way to make money out of it. Focusing too much in the early stages on when and how you’re going to get paid can cause you to give up on good ideas that would have paid off later down the line. And it pulls your focus away from where it is best placed – creating something people love.
The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Apple, to name just three, have publicly declared their focus on value not money. It’s easy to dismiss such talk as mere window-dressing but remember that Mark Zuckerberg turned down a billion-dollar offer for Facebook from Yahoo at the age of 25. It seems likely if money was his first concern he would have taken it. After the first billion, there isn’t much in the world that you can’t buy.
CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has said that it’s this focus on creating something valuable over just making money as soon as possible that ultimately wins the greatest rewards. Here’s how he evaluates a company he’s thinking of acquiring:
I’m always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway – As reported in the book Bold by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Value-focus also means skipping enormous amounts of time that most beginning entrepreneurs waste in fiddling with websites, logos, business names and the other trappings of business. Instead, you put all your time and energy into creating something people love. As you start to understand this approach over the next few days you will be amazed at the speed you can move compared to others.
We’ll dive deeper into this topic on Day 9.
Grand missions are great but you also need to be able to find a tangible first step. Follow this process over the coming days and, no matter how big your vision, you’ll find a starting point – a first product, project, event, blog post series or whatever it might be – something that represents what you’re trying to do. Then you can start straight away on making it happen.
This is one of the most fun parts of my business – showing someone how to take a huge vision they’ve been sitting on because they don’t know how to start it without a big investment in time, energy and money and in a few minutes pulling something out of it that they can start on immediately. In the ‘Lean Startup’ movement this is called the Minimum Viable Product. And once they’ve proven their minimal version works, they can build on it.
Even a Minimum Viable Product could take a few months to create. In the meantime, how can you know you’re on the right track? How do you know you’ll enjoy this kind of work? The solution is the 30-day Play Project. Why ‘Play Project’? Firstly, because you’re choosing something that excites you and will look forward to working on. Secondly, because this isn’t about spending 30 days writing a business plan or choosing the colours for your logo. It’s jumping straight into playing out your idea – doing something you’re excited about, out in the world, with a tangible result to share at the end. In the process you’ll immerse yourself in the world you want to impact and you’ll find out what you do and don’t enjoy about it.
Don’t imagine that doing a 30-day project is somehow too inauspicious a start to amount to anything significant. Mark Zuckerberg developed the first version of Facebook in just 30 days at the start of 2004 in the time set aside for study before taking his finals. And it wasn’t part of a grand plan to take over the world or become a billionaire. He has said himself, ‘We didn’t actually care about it being a business early on.’
How do ideas become a reality? Well, if you believe the dominant myth, you have an idea, you do some research that confirms that it will definitely work, then you write a plan to make it all happen. If you execute the plan well enough it is a success; everyone lives happily ever after.
Unfortunately this no longer works, if in fact it ever did.
The real process to produce something successful today is iterative; it’s a cyclical process of taking your best shot at what you think should work, noticing what happens and, if it seems to be working, building on it from there. If the results are not what you expected, you adjust your approach before trying again. It’s about exploring, experimenting and testing – and then reacting to what happens.
This iterative, more playful process is the most accessible, reliable, low-risk way to launch any idea – whether building a new career, starting a business, writing a winning blog or discovering the work you love.
The good news for you is that you don’t need to know all the answers before you start. If you focus on creating something of value to people and keep iterating, adapting and improving, you pretty much can’t fail. That might even mean a complete change of direction when it becomes obvious that your market or audience wants something else. In the startup world that’s called a pivot and some of the most successful companies in the world have been through it.
On Day 6 you’ll discover what I’ve termed the ‘Play Cycle’ – a simple way to try something out and then keep adapting it to make it better until it’s a hit.
Instead of keeping secrets and going for the big reveal once everything is finished, put perfectionism aside, open up your process and invite people in to get involved. Blog out the themes of your book and see how people respond in the comments, write a talk to summarise your mission and spread the word, release beta versions of your app and invite people to contribute to your project.
You’ll get great feedback much earlier in the process and be able to iterate faster towards a killer product. You’ll also be building an engaged audience who can later become your paying customers, clients or fans.
You’ll have a chance to practise this throughout the book by sharing what you’re doing with others.
What makes the right idea for you to pursue? How can you choose one that will be successful and you’ll enjoy doing? My answer is the Playcheque Formula, putting together the five essential elements your idea needs to be meaningful to you and also to be successful.
As you progress you can also use the Playcheque Formula to check whether you’re on track. Find out more on Day 10. You can also find a free online assessment to find out how close you are to unlocking the Playcheque Formula at www.screwworkbreakfree.com.
Don’t worry if you don’t yet have an idea for something to start. That’s quite normal for people at the beginning of this process. But you don’t need to spend weeks researching and analysing to find something. Instead, use the Killer Idea Crash Course and in just a few hours find an idea that both excites you and will be popular with others.
The sooner you start working on something the faster you’ll learn.
The 30-day process and principles contained in the book can be used to make pretty much any idea a reality: a new freelance career, a book, a blog, a physical product, an art exhibition, an event, a club night, a membership programme, a lifestyle brand, a music career, a mobile app, an online service, consulting to corporations, launching yourself as a coach, therapist, advisor or mentor, selling handmade art and crafts, setting up an online shop.
The book’s primary focus is on helping you start something quickly on the side, with little investment and without a large team. This might be a one-off creation like a book, product or art exhibition or it could be what’s called a ‘lifestyle business’. A lifestyle business is something that provides a good lifestyle: it’s doing something you care about that makes you an income to replace your job, up to six (and sometimes even seven) figures. But it doesn’t require investing the kind of time and money usually required to build something with limitless potential to scale.
However, a good proportion of what you’ll learn also applies to fast-growth businesses, like an Internet startup. In addition, if you have never had any experience working for yourself it can be very beneficial to flex your entrepreneurial muscles for the first time on something easier to get off the ground, such as working as a freelancer or consultant. And anything that puts you in direct contact with a particular niche market (such as running events or working freelance for them) will give you a wealth of information you can use to come up with your killer startup idea later down the line.
Although the book is primarily focused on an idea you can make money out of, it also works very well for both non-profit projects (such as raising awareness of a cause) and creative projects (like making your first album) where financial return is not the primary goal.
You can even use the book for intrapreneurship – launching an innovative project within your current company. This might be focused internally, experimenting with a better way to do something or launching an entirely new initiative (like one of my clients who is helping fellow dyslexics in a national retailer to recognise their strengths and overcome their reading issues). Or it could have an external focus – providing something new for customers.
The book therefore has a broad scope and you’ll notice I quote from a wide range of creative people – well-known authors and artists, clients with lifestyle businesses, recognised experts in startups and leaders of multi-billion-dollar companies. That’s because the process of making an idea happen is universal.
I’ve had the kind of widely varied career that would give a recruiter nightmares – working in multiple industries and fields in varying formats. I’ve been an employee, a freelancer, a consultant on contract and I am now the founder and director of The Ideas Lab.
I started my career as a software developer in special effects for TV and film, then moved into streaming video and then became a senior managing consultant at one of the largest consultancies in the world. I left to work as an independent consultant advising broadcasters in several countries on technical strategy, then after a couple of years I qualified as a coach, took seven years of professional development courses in psychotherapy and counselling and shifted completely to helping people launch creative ideas and make money out of them.
I’ve enjoyed making many of my own ideas happen – making experimental music that was played on radio stations around the world, helping create an exhibit for the London Science Museum, launching a London event for creative people which got into the national press, writing a bestselling book, designing and running life-changing programmes and building a business I can run from anywhere in the world. My ideas and projects have been featured in The Times, The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, Marketing Week and other magazines, and BBC Radio.
My first book, Screw Work Let’s Play: How to do what you love & get paid for it, was a UK bestseller, recommended by The Sunday Times and has since been translated into nine languages.
After the book came out I led the creation of programmes such as The Screw Work 30-day Challenge, with hundreds of people around the world making an idea happen in 30 days. The new ideas and techniques in the 30-day Challenge have had a profound impact on the participants, with many telling me the experience was life-changing. When you include my live events, Mastermind and Mentorship programmes and consulting to corporations, several thousand people have road-tested the strategies you’ll learn here.
The results have been a joy to witness as participants of my programmes have …
And if you think these people are some kind of separate breed of super-entrepreneurs, believe me, the vast majority of them are not! Many of them started with only the vaguest of ideas (or none at all), no website and no sales.
So I decided to take these strategies and techniques that had such an impact, update and develop them and make them into a step-by-step process anyone could follow. The result is the book you’re holding in your hands now.
What does ‘Screw Work’ really mean? Well, it’s not about living an empty life of doing nothing. Quite the opposite. It’s saying ‘screw it’ to the outdated ideas of work as something you drag yourself to every day just to earn a paycheque, that work is something empty, dry and lacking any fun.
Say ‘screw it’ to the outdated idea of work as something unfulfilling and lacking any fun
Instead, it’s joining the global movement to take control of your own life, create something that excites you and has a positive impact on the world and get well rewarded for it.
My first book, Screw Work Let’s Play, was an introduction to this new way of thinking about work as something you do for the love of it. But I noticed that some people read the book and reported that they were still stuck – they didn’t know how to start something quickly that would actually get them paid.
That’s why I wrote this book, Screw Work Break Free. This is about breaking free of workerbot thinking and jumping straight into finding and playing out an idea in a step-by-step 30-day process that anyone can follow and that really works. It contains everything I’ve discovered over the last six years since my first book was published, including the very latest thinking about websites, marketing, social media and making money.
The book starts with the Killer Idea Crash Course, a quick and simple way to find an idea for your first project. Even if you have no clue right now what you could start, you will do once you’ve followed the simple three-step process of the Crash Course. (If you already have an idea, do read the Killer Idea Crash Course anyway because it will introduce important concepts of the New Entrepreneurialism and make your idea even better.)
If you want even more guidance on ideas, download the Idea Cheatsheets from www.screwworkbreakfree.com – these give details on five possible projects that are particularly good if you’re still in the exploration stage and want to choose something that leaves your options open and helps you come up with other ideas you can follow on with.
The rest of the book is laid out in 30 days. Start each day by reading that day’s lesson and follow the suggested tasks to progress your project. Even if you can only squeeze 20 minutes on your project into your day, you can make real progress by following the process in the book.
The 30 days are divided into sections:
Week 1 is kickoff: jumping in, finding your feet and learning some fundamental principles on the go. This includes where to put your focus, how to make progress in just 20 minutes a day, your instant business, setting up your kitchen-table global HQ and more.
Week 2 is about going deeper: we get into some of the deeper understanding of how the New Entrepreneurialism really works: the value of being a curator, what really makes something successful, the Playcheque Formula, how to discover and grow your inner genius and superniching (or the shortcut to instant brilliance).
Week 3 is about dissolving obstacles: dealing with doubts, setbacks and critics, beating perfectionism, creating yourself a website in one evening and what to do if it really isn’t working.
Week 4 is about making your idea take off: this is when we’ll get into the nitty gritty of getting stuff finished, working out how you’ll make money, telling your story, getting others to send you lots of web visitors and customers, a beginner’s guide to social media, how to make your idea go viral and how to sell something before you’ve even finished creating it.
Finally the Launch Zone covers the last two days of thirty which are about how to launch the results of your project to the world, how to make a lot of money very quickly by running a promotion and finishing up with a celebration and instructions on what to do to keep growing what you’ve created.
Each day has tasks for you to put what you’ve learned into action. Some of the daily lessons include one or more ‘workerbot thoughts’ that are likely to get in the way of your progress on that particular day. Get ready to unlearn some things and find surprising truths about how creativity and entrepreneurship really work. In some of the 30 days you’ll also see ‘Player pointers’, providing an extra level of detail for using what you’ve just learned.
How do you know you’re on track? Well, each week ends with a simple check-in so that you can spot if you need to change your approach (there is no check-in in the final week, instead there is a review of your whole project after the end of the 30 days). You can also take the chance to share your progress with others working through the book.
Here you can read about Kiva. I donate ten per cent of ongoing royalties from this book to Kiva, an organisation that makes microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Even a $25 loan can be life-changing for someone needing to buy a sewing machine to make clothes to sell or buy stock for a small shop in a remote location. You can read about the amazing work Kiva does, how your purchase of this book will help and how you can make your own small loans.
Before you kick off, take a moment to grab the Break Free toolkit at www.screwworkbreakfree.com free of charge. This includes project choice worksheets, the Idea Cheatsheets, a ticksheet to track your progress and my recommendations and guides on how to create your website.
Elsewhere on the website you’ll find more information about the people and case studies mentioned in this book, some audio and video interviews with people featured in the case studies, the interactive Playcheque Formula assessment, the latest updates to this book, news of Kiva loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world … and even my music playlist for getting you charged up for doing your project!
This is not just a book; it’s a movement. My intention is that this book spreads the strategies, tools and approaches we so badly need in this Idea Age, empowering people all over the world to break free of the old world of work and create something they really care about. So when you find benefit from the things you’re learning over the next 30 days, do pass them on.
It’s good to connect with other like-minded people for your own benefit too. Knowing you’re not alone can make all the difference to your project. To that end, you’ll find prompts at several points in the book to share what you’re doing with others for encouragement and feedback, whether it’s with one like-minded buddy or all your friends on Facebook.
You might also choose a buddy to meet up with once a week to do the check-ins contained in the book and help each other stay on track. Or you could get a group of friends together to meet weekly – online if necessary.
Even better, you can connect with others following through this book on social media using the hashtag #screwworkbreakfree. And you’ll be able to check in to see what they’re doing too.
To help enlist your playmates (or simply to spread the word and grow the movement) you can download a quickstart guide to this book and find the best ways to connect with me and other readers at www.screwworkbreakfree.com.
OK then, fasten your seatbelt and get ready for the adventure …
Not got an idea? Don’t even know what you would enjoy doing? Got several ideas but don’t know how to choose between them? The Killer Idea Crash Course will find you a money-making idea you love in a simple three-step process.
YOUR ADVENTURE TO find a money-making idea you love starts here with the Killer Idea Crash Course. In three steps lasting as little as an hour each you’re going to discover a unique, counterintuitive method for finding killer ideas that you love and that others appreciate and will pay for.
Once you’ve taken the Killer Idea Crash Course, you’ll not only have an idea ready to put into action in your own 30-day project, but you’ll never look at the world the same again – because you’ll know the secrets to coming up with great ideas that you love putting into action.
Don’t be surprised if you start to see new ideas everywhere you look!
If you already have an idea, do still read this section to learn some of the fundamental concepts of the New Entrepreneurialism and to help you make your idea even better.
Warning
WHAT IS PRESENTED here will contradict commonly held beliefs about how you find winning ideas and turn them into a business. (But, then, if the commonly held beliefs worked, everybody would be doing it, right?)
Stay the course and be prepared to discover a far easier and more natural way to success. This process models the latest thinking in fast-moving companies such as Facebook, Google, Zappos, Dropbox and Toyota.
It is also the process I used to achieve my own career goals: first escaping the nine to five to become a highly paid independent technology consultant, then writing a bestselling book and building my own six-figure business from scratch in a completely different field with plenty of competition.
And these techniques have since been proved over and over again with thousands of people who have attended my events and programmes.
Now, before we get into the process of finding an idea you love, we need to do a little myth-busting otherwise you’re likely to put yourself under so much pressure to find the right idea that it might just stop you in your tracks.
Let’s take the pressure off. When you’re new to the world of launching ideas, it’s easy to imagine that your success hangs entirely on the quality of the idea with which you choose to kick off. And that commonly held but inaccurate belief stalls a lot of people right at the starting line, thinking that they shouldn’t take a single step until they have found an idea that is brilliant and original and yet somehow guaranteed to work. Since these things are mutually exclusive you could spend the rest of your life looking for such an idea!
The reality is quite different; the idea you start with is not nearly as important as you might imagine. Here are two reasons why:
Firstly, how you execute your idea is just as important (if not more) than the idea you choose. Apple’s first iPod was a commercial hit that signalled the start of a new era of success for the company. And yet there were plenty of other MP3 players around at the time. The iPod wasn’t even the first MP3 player with a hard disk. Nor was it the first digital product to use a wheel to control it. Even the name iPod had already been trademarked by someone else and had to be purchased by Apple.
What really made the first iPod such a success was how well Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and the rest of the Apple team executed on the idea to make the very best product they could.
Secondly, your idea will, and must, change as soon as you start executing it. Ideas change in response to the reactions of your audience or market or to get around the obstacles that come up along the way or just because you get new inspiration (and new, better ideas) in the process of playing it out. Once you give life to an idea it develops an intelligence of its own – you might be surprised where it takes you. As a result, the idea you start with is rarely the idea you end up succeeding with. Often times, your resulting book, product or business is unrecognisable from your original idea – which is kind of ironic if you spent months agonising over your idea before starting!
Even if your idea is a winner, the game doesn’t end there. Apple didn’t reinvent the music industry by designing one iPod. They continued to innovate and evolve the product. Today’s iPod bears almost no similarity to the original white model with the hard disk. Now the iPod uses ram instead of hard disk, has a touch screen and can do many things other than play music. The iPod functionality is also wrapped into the iPhone and even the Apple Watch. If Apple had created the first iPod and then rested on their laurels the device would be a footnote in the history of technology rather than a product line that was instrumental in Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.
So remember that your first idea is just that – your first.
So now you know that you don’t need the perfect idea before you start, but some part of you is probably still wishing for that killer idea to drop into your lap. Well, I’m going to let you into the secret of how brilliant entrepreneurs and creatives find winning ideas – and how you can too.
You see the truth is that people in the know don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. That’s because they know the secret of the killer idea. It’s this: the best ideas come to you when you’re in the fray, making another idea happen. So if you want to find great ideas, start with anmore