Adopt a Freelancer’s Mindset (Even If You’re a Nine-to-Fiver) · Freelancers work a whole lot differently than nine-to-fivers, but thinking like a freelancer can help along your career, even if you're working full-time for a big company. Over at Harvard Business Online this week, I ran down how employees can benefit from a freelancer's mindset. · November 12th, 2009
Leaving your full-time job in the midst of a recession is either a really stupid or really smart decision. Since I just made the move myself, I'm going to make the case for smart.
If you can swing it, a recession is an ideal time to stop being an employee and start doing your own thing. Your plans to go freelance, start your own business, or take a sabbatical shouldn't be on hold right now because of the economy. While the fear mongers might be saying you should be grateful just to have a job at all, I challenge you to expand your vision.
Now's a fine time to take a risk because there's just not much to lose.
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Ultramarathoner and Ironman triathlete Graham Cooper is a 38-year-old father of two who lives in the Bay Area and holds down a full-time job 500 miles away in San Diego. His athletic accomplishments are impressive enough, but it's his ability to find the time to train between commuting to work during the week and being a weekend dad that makes you think he must be a robot who doesn't sleep. Turns out he's not; he's just ruthlessly disciplined about cutting out every unnecessary activity out of his day in order to log his training miles. Competitor magazine reports:
When Cooper is in serious training mode, a few luxuries fall by the wayside.
"I don't watch TV. I don't socialize much. I don't read as much as I'd like. I don't do long lunches and I don't drink. When I'm training, I get about six hours of sleep a night. When you're getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 and starting your day with a workout, you get a lot done."
Cooper starts from a thesis that most of us have an inefficiency in the system. The key, he says, "is to squeeze as much of the slop out of our lives as we can."
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Happy Presidential inauguration, Americans! Frontline's whole "Dreams of Obama" series is well worth watching, but my favorite part is the post-Harvard Law chapter, where Obama turns down a coveted and potentially lucrative job opportunity to follow his heart back to Chicago.
Abner Mikva, Federal judge 1979-'94; Obama mentor; offered him a clerkship after law school which Obama declined:
One of the reasons I was sort of surprised that he turned me down was at that time I was what was known as a feeder to the Supreme Court. The justices included Justice [William] Brennan and Justice [Thurgood] Marshall and Justice [John Paul] Stevens and Justice [Harry] Blackmun, all of whom would frequently take my clerks, Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor. And it was a good likelihood that anybody who clerked for me with his kind of background would have gone upstairs to the Supreme Court. … Those are the best credentials you can have entering the practice of law. You can make an awful lot of money very quickly. You can just about call your own spot and where you want to practice, who you want to practice with.
As he said when he told me why he wasn't going to interview with me, that wasn't the track he wanted to follow. [...]
He had a pretty good idea of who he was and where he wanted to go; that money was not going to drive his ambitions; that he viewed success not in terms of how big a mark he could make in the law but rather on a larger stage.
Emphasis mine. Full video's inside.
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