Born For This is a compendium of insights, ideas and inspiration to help you do what you love and love what you do. Speaking from experience, writer/entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau provides a practical guide to finding work that brings you joy, money and flow with strategies that include side hustles, DIY self promotion and hacking conventional 9-5 employment.
Born For This Summary
As a follow up to his bestselling $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau maps out advice for the new world of digital nomadism, gig economy working and slashie self employment.
Easy to read, inspiring and practical, this is a fast moving book that covers a lot of ground from making money online, creating a side hustle, self publishing and finding a career sweet spot, with practical advice and plenty of case studies to back out each claim.
Below are some of the key insights from the book.
Key Insights
- In a changing world, it’s important to flip the script that comes with conventional careers advice for a bygone era.
- Instead, aim for a career that provides high levels and balance of Joy-Money-Flow
- Specialism is overrated, when choosing a career it’s important to experiment, fail and juggle ideas until you settle upon a winning formula.
- Always bet on yourself. If plan A fails there are 25 other letters in the alphabet.
- Give yourself freedom by mastering hard skills that are in demand and soft skills that are timeless in appeal.
- When mastering skills. Always become so good that they can’t ignore you.
- To find your thing – make an effort to engage and ask others.
- A good technique is to expand your mind and options before stripping everything down to the single most important things that bring you Joy-Money-Flow.
- Starting a side hustle is a proven way to boost engagement, try new ideas in a sandbox environment and learn what motivates you.
- Expanding your side hustle into a full time business requires no gatekeepers, investors or anything else. Just action.
- Stop playing the numbers game. Step outside of conventional advice and create your own career destiny. There is no need to apply for permission anymore.
- There is nothing wrong with being an employee – but it’s better to approach the game as if you are self employed as no modern company owes you a living.
- In the digital age, anyone can become a DIY Rock Star in their chosen field. Start small, work smart and invest in yourself using self promotion to your advantage.
- Refuse to accept the conventional ‘work-life balance’ tradeoff and instead aim to achieve everything you desire.
- Fail fast and fail often. Winners quit all the time when they have realised there is another game and a better game to play.