The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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I finally broke down and joined part of the social networking revolution. I’m officially no longer behind the rest of the world, at least in one aspect: I’ve been using Twitter on a trial basis for a while now, and I’ve decided I really like it.

See, I’ve never used Myspace… or Facebook… and hardware-wise, I don’t have a Blackberry or an expensive MacBook laptop. I just have Gmail, a $3 Skype microphone I bought in Belgrade last year, and a $500 Dell laptop that does everything I need.

But contrary to expensive gear and other social networks, I think I’ll stick with Twitter for a while, and I think it will grow as other sites like Facebook and MySpace slow down.

My first impressions of the whole concept were probably the same as those from most initial skeptics: “What, I’m supposed to post what I’m doing at this very minute? To begin with, I don’t like the idea of telling a community of random people what I’m doing every day, and further, why would anyone be interested in the trivial details of my life?”

But as I learned, sharing trivial life details is far from the only use of Twitter, and the whole service grows on you as you use it and become part of a community that is not random at all.

Sure, you can use Twitter to tell everyone what you ate for breakfast and what TV shows you’re watching. But some people are using the service to conduct polls, promote their latest blog posts, and schedule meetings. Several people have said that they now use it more than Facebook or any other service.

Work, Travel, and Accessibility

The growing trend of Twitter et al reflects the shift in life and work that has been occurring since the widespread saturation of internet use. I talk to people all over the world every day. If I need some programming or translation work done, I can head over to Elance and have 12 bids from Bangalore on my project within 4 hours.

Although I always like to point out that life hasn’t changed that much for a lot of people in the poorest countries, the rest of us truly live in a different world now. It’s not necessarily good or bad; it’s just reality.

A couple of years ago I flew from Copenhagen to Chicago on SAS Airlines. The plane offered wi-fi access to all passengers, and because they were promoting the new service, the first 15 minutes were free. I logged on and sent a few messages out to friends. “I’m writing you from 34,000 feet over the Atlantic!” I told them excitedly.

One of them wrote back to say that she didn’t like the idea of internet in the skies. “It’s the last refuge of being disconnected from the world,” she said.

I saw her point, and the service from Boeing is now discontinued, but it’s just a matter of time until it becomes common to be in touch with everyone from the last frontiers of being inaccessible. When that time comes, we can look back in lament and talk about the days when we could count on being out of pocket at least from the time the captain told us to turn off all portable electronic devices.

But change is the only constant characteristic of advancement. If you want to ignore the world, you can always turn off your computer and phone whether you’re on the plane or anywhere else. You don’t have to answer your phone if you don’t want to, and no one says you have to check your email ten times a day.

The burden is increasingly on us to plan our own lives free of external restraint. Personal responsibility is a scary thing, but if you harness it well, you can have a tremendous impact on the world.

So despite my disinterest in other social networks, here I am on Twitter. Come and say hello if you’re a user.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the financial payoff of following your passion. If you deliberately take steps to do the work you love instead of the work you don’t enjoy, most of us would agree that you’ll feel a lot better about yourself.

But will you also make more money?

This is a controversial issue, so I asked some of the writers I read on a regular basis to chime in with their thoughts. The list of respondents includes:

• Leo Babuata, writer at ZenHabits.net
• Tim Clark, founder and writer at Soul Shelter
• Naomi Dunford, small business owner and writer at IttyBiz.com
• Mignon Fogarty, host of the very cool Grammar Girl podcast (#1 on iTunes for Educational Podcasts)
• J.D. Roth, finance guy at GetRichSlowly.org
• Darren Rowse, professional blogger
• Gretchen Rubin, author, attorney, and happiness blogger
• John Wesley, founder and writer at PicktheBrain.com

First of all, I follow what each of these people have to say on a regular basis, and I have learned a lot from them… so if you are interested in any of their topics, go and check out their sites.

I asked each writer what they thought about the original essay, and also about the concept of “following your passion” in general.

Here’s what they had to say about each subject:

Mignon Fogarty, AKA Grammar Girl:

On financial success following you-

I think it is much harder to be successful if you aren’t doing something you love because success takes time and commitment, and those are easier to give if you’re happy and engaged in your job.

On following your passion to the bank-

I think it’s a myth. There are all kinds of people who follow their passion and don’t make a lot of money. Some even go bankrupt. Having passion and loving something don’t guarantee that you’re good at it or that it will make a successful business.

A personal story-

Before I launched the successful Grammar Girl podcast, I was the host of a science podcast called Absolute Science. I loved doing that show and I was passionate about it. I actually put more effort into promoting that show than I did for the Grammar Girl podcast, and although Absolute Science was well-received, after doing it for nearly a year it was clear that the show was never going to make enough money to make it worth the time required to produce it.

***

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger Extraordinaire:

On financial success following you-

It’s a tough one - I’d like to answer that it’s a secret to financial success to do something you love but I can think of plenty of people who are financially successful who hate what they do. For me it’s certainly true - I can’t believe that I get paid to do what I’d do (and what I did for ages) for free but there’s plenty of people making good money by doing work that they don’t enjoy.

On following your passion to the bank-

I think it can be true - but what if you love doing something that there is just no economic sense in?

(Update: Darren’s book about problogging is now available on Amazon)

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John Wesley, self-improvement guru:

On financial success following you-

I think it makes perfect sense, but it took me a while to realize why. The better you are at what you do, the more financial success you’ll achieve. For example, the world’s best artist makes much more money than a mediocre banker, although on average, banking is a much more lucrative profession.

The key to financial success is being absolutely great at what you do, and you’ll never be great at something you don’t love.

On following your passion to the bank-

I think there is truth to it, but it’s also a bit dangerous. Simply following a passion won’t help you build income unless you develop it as a business. You need to actively look for opportunities to create value with your passions. You need to use them to help others, instead of just indulging yourself.

A personal story-

With PickTheBrain there was definitely a turning point where it went from being about what I wanted to what the readers wanted. This attitude has been a big part of our success in growing the site.

***

Gretchen Rubin, Happiness Scholar:

On financial success following you-

Studies show us that perhaps the KEY to true mastery is the will to practice and to persist. In other words, if you want to be good at something, it helps a lot if you enjoy it and want to stick to it! I started out my work life as a lawyer, and I was successful. I was editor-in-chief of Yale Law School’s law review, and I clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  But in my free time, though, I was writing books “for fun,” not studying caselaw. Finally it hit me: I should do as my JOB what I did for FUN, because I’d be willing to put in the enormous amount of hours necessary to achieve the greatest mastery I could.

On following your passion to the bank-

The problem with pursuing a job for the money is that in most cases, the big money comes only if you achieve a certain stature or goal. If you don’t hit that target, you don’t get the money – and you haven’t much enjoyed the time you’ve spent in pursuit. If you follow a passion, you’ll enjoy your life as you’re working to achieve your goal, so if you don’t hit it, you won’t have spent all that time in vain.

Also, I’ve noticed something. When people are doing something they enjoy, they figure things out more easily. They challenge themselves more. They’re more curious. They remember information better. They make social connections more easily. These things tend to make success more likely, and therefore, they make money more likely.

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Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz:

On financial success following you-

I believe that passion and money belong in the same sentence, but not quite so close together. Do what you love, do it very well, be prepared to accept appropriate payment for it, let people know what you’re doing and that you’re excellent at it, and then — at the very least — a sustenance level of money will follow.

On following your passion to the bank-

This might make me the bad guy, but I don’t believe that passion inherently begets money. I believe that passion makes it far easier to navigate the hurdles that come between you and money. The mountain standing in your way is a lot easier to climb when you’re passionate. If you’re not passionate you look at the mountain, realize how big it is, say “Screw it, I don’t give a shit anymore,” and then tell your friends and family that the mountain was too high. Uh, no.

A personal story-

I got into marketing because I can’t not be in marketing — I’m totally unemployable in every other capacity. Long before I even considered consulting I read marketing books on the bus, in the bath, in bed. I would rant and rage and scream about lousy marketing and bad copy and how I could have done it better myself. Then I read some more books. Lo and behold, if you read every marketing book in print, you tend to get pretty good at it. When I got good people started paying me. Now I make far more than my husband and I made combined when we were out in day jobs. So yeah, in my case, B followed A.

***

Leo Babuata from Zen Habits:

On financial success following you-

Well, it’s definitely possible to gain financial success without doing what you love. Many people have. However, I think your odds go up greatly if you do love what you do — you’re more likely to do it with passion, to put all of your energy into it, to stick to it longer than you would doing something you don’t enjoy. So if I were to put odds on financial success, I’d pick the guy who loves what he does and works with great passion.

On following your passion to the bank-

It sounds a bit too much like a guaranteed statement. I don’t agree that it’s a sure thing, but as I said, you have better odds if you follow your passion. I’d change it to something like, “Follow your passion, and don’t worry about the money. You’ll be happier, and you’ll give yourself a better chance at the money.” It’s not as catchy, though.

A personal story-

My blogging is an example. I didn’t start blogging so that I could make money. I thought that would be nice, but I did it because I love it. And I still do, and I still blog with passion. However, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to make a living doing what I love–I did it for passion, and the money did follow.

J.D. Roth from Get Rich Slowly:

On financial success following you-

Well, I’m not convinced there’s a strong correlation. I think that financial success can be related to doing what you love, but it’s not always the case. I have friends who love to teach, but they’re never going to get rich at it. I have friends who hate their jobs but make a killing.

I think it’s more apt to say that happiness is related to doing what you love. My friends who teach are happy; my friends who hate their high-paying jobs are not. I’m a strong proponent of “following your bliss,” but it does take some creativity to make it pay off sometimes.

On following your passion to the bank-

‘Do what you love and the money will follow’ sounds good, and I certainly encourage people to give it a shot, but I don’t think it’s a given. If I hadn’t done what I loved with Get Rich Slowly (and my other blogs), I would never have known if there were money there or not. I’m glad I gave it a shot. I think other people should pursue their dreams, too.

A personal story-

Get Rich Slowly is a perfect example of the principle in action. I’ve always loved writing. I’ve been blogging regularly for seven years (and writing on the web for more than that). I’ve kept at it with passion, and now I make enough to support myself full-time. Blogging is no way to get rich — slowly or otherwise — but it is a way for me to live a fulfilling life.

Tim Clark from Soul Shelter:

Financial success is related to passion, and passion derives from doing what we love. But the world isn’t entirely under our control, so we’ll do well to modify our definition of “financial success” as we pursue what we love.

I choose to believe it, with the eyes-open caveat that the amount of money that comes may be quite modest!

(Update: Tim’s post on Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan will go up later today. Good stuff there.)

***

And here’s some final thoughts from Naomi at IttyBiz:

“I am thoroughly convinced of one thing — if you do what you love, happiness and a better life will follow. You will have financial security, but it might not come in the flavor you’re used to.

Maybe you’ll sell paintings for a hundred grand a pop. Maybe you’ll rustle yourself up a patroness. Maybe you’ll spend the morning in your loft teaching three-year-olds how to finger paint, enabling yourself to spend the next 10 hours channeling your inner Pollock and not worrying about selling out. Maybe you’ll be happy eating brown rice on your brother’s couch because it’s better than working for The Man. Whatever. It all gets figured out in the end.”

That’s a great wrap-up—thank you, Naomi. I had my own ending ready to go, but I like yours better.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the roundup! Participants and readers, I welcome your further comments below.

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I read a lot of personal development books—probably at least two a month. Like most books of any kind, each one usually has some things worth learning and some things that aren’t valuable to me.

If there is one common theme to most of these books, it is that “following your passion” – or doing what you love to do—is the most important work we can focus on in life. According to this thinking, work should involve a number of things you really like to do and are really good at, not simply a series of tasks you do to make a living.

So far, so good, right? But sometimes the thinking goes even further. Not only will you feel better about yourself and provide more value to others, you’ll also end up making more money.

Follow your passion, the thinking goes, and the money will follow.

The classic example of the “follow your passion straight to the bank” idea is Oprah Winfrey. Oprah does what she loves, and she’s been enormously well rewarded for it. She was passionate about communicating with women when no one else in broadcasting really cared.

Oprah’s so good at it, in fact, that her salary in 2007 was estimated at $260 million by Forbes. That’s not bad for talking with people on the couch, right?

How to Be the Next Oprah

Not really… you don’t want to be the next Oprah, right? Oprah is cool because she is herself. You want to be the real you. And ideally, you’d like it to help pay some bills along the way.

Here’s how you become the real you and leverage what you’re best at.

1. Get a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is absolutely critical. For the four years from 2002 to 2006, my USP was that I lived in the poorest countries in the world and ran a business on the side to support my work. That was pretty cool, and when I spent time with business people in the U.S. or Europe, my introduction usually topped everyone else’s. Now I have a new USP – I’m going to every country in the world and starting my own social movement to encourage the spread of unconventional ideas. This new USP may not be as cool as living in Sierra Leone, but it still gets people’s attention. What’s your USP?

2. Become an expert. The way you become an expert is mostly by saying you are one. The more specific the niche you can nail down, the better, and you can then use that status to extend your expertise to other subjects.

3. Accept that monetization does not mean “selling out.” Just because someone gets paid to do something doesn’t mean they lack principles or integrity. It means that other people value what they do enough that they will pay for it. This is a good thing, not something to be ashamed of.

4. Follow the path of world domination – decide to be remarkable, create a vision to change the world, recruit a small army, start doing stuff using the ready, fire, aim method, and eventually scale up.

What the Critics Will Say

As you might expect, your critics will tell you that you can’t make a living doing what you love. Artists don’t make any money, writers are supposed to be poor, and you should spend at least 40 hours a week working at a “real job” to support yourself so that you can have a little fun on the side. If you’ve been living an unconventional life, none of these attitudes will surprise you.

With my wife Jolie was a kid, she told everyone that she wanted to be an artist when she grew up. Some people said “OK,” and some people said “That’s nice,” but then someone close to her said that she couldn’t work as an artist because she would starve. When she asked what she should do instead, she was told to go into real estate.

I have a problem with the idea that artists are destined to be unsuccessful.

First of all, many of them are happy with less money, and they aren’t starving. There are real people in the world who really are starving, but most of them don’t read personal development books, and none of them really have the option of going into real estate.

Second, a lot of artists do pretty well for themselves. One of Jolie’s mentors regularly sells his work for in the $65,000-100,000 range—per painting. (He spent thirty years training to get to this level, although I’ve told Jolie I’d be happy with 10% of that rate. She’s working on it.)

Finally, the odds of financial success following you as you follow your passion probably depends to a certain degree on what you love.

A while back I picked up a copy of Guitar Hero for the Nintendo Wii. Let me just say that I’m not half-bad at it. In fact, the first few days I had it, I didn’t do much other than practicing my GNR and Rage Against the Machine riffs. But if playing Guitar Hero became my passion, do you think people would start paying me to pretend to play their favorite 80s rock anthems? It seems a difficult calling to monetize, at best.

If you love staying in bed all day and not doing anything productive, that’s also difficult. Who will pay you to sleep in? How will you create serious income based on a stated goal of being useless to society?

If you love hedge funds, on the other hand, it seems fairly easy to expect financial success to follow you as you follow your passion. I don’t have any hedge fund readers that I know of yet—if you are one, please see this link—but most of us are somewhere in between absolute poverty and extreme wealth. We aren’t aspiring Guitar Hero professionals, but we aren’t hedge fund owners either.

My Personal Story

In the end, I don’t really know if following your passion will produce financial success. It seems that it does for some people, like Oprah, and not always for others, like my friends in Africa, or the guy in Best Buy who plays some amazing Guitar Hero.

For me, the development of this site is a real-world example that tests the thesis. This year I’m spending a lot of time doing what I love—traveling and writing. I do a lot of other things too, but I made the decision last December to focus on writing and travel more than anything else.

I’m not expecting to get rich from it, but I certainly wouldn’t mind if it produced some reliable income at some point in the future. I personally know several bloggers who make more than $100,000 a year, one of them a lot more… but most of them also have their sites cluttered in ads, which I don’t want.

So we’ll wait and see. I’ll keep writing, hopefully you’ll keep reading, and at some point we’ll decide on what the next step is.

Which way will it turn out? I really don’t know.

***

But enough about me.

What is your passion? Are you following it regardless of the money? And if you aren’t making money from it, would you like to change that?

Will you go into real estate instead of painting because you’re worried about starving?

Will you become the next Oprah, or will you become the real you?

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Here’s a proposal for you: raise a quarter of million dollars through withdrawing your life savings, borrowing from family members, and maxing out your credit cards. Pay that to a company that will “give you a business.” Operate that business precisely how they tell you– no exceptions are allowed. Every decision from whom you hire to what services you offer to where you locate your store is defined by the company.

They’ll even tell you what color shirt you are required to wear to work in “your own business.”

If the business works well, you’ll make an average of $47,000 a year after scraping by for three years working the same 50-hour work weeks you could spend at someone else’s company with a lot less stress. In this winning scenario, your ultimate success won’t be having started a business. You’ll have bought yourself a job.

If the business fails, which happens quite often, the company will take back the store from you and resell it another sucker… I mean client. When they do this, they won’t even count your failure as a store closure in their statistics, so when you hear that 95% of franchise locations stay open, you have no idea who is operating them and who owes their family $250,000 that they have no way to repay.

How does that proposal sound to you?

Probably not so great, but companies that franchise themselves are great at persuading people otherwise. These franchises make money by selling to franchisees. They spend that money on marketing to other would-be franchisees (just look at Entrepreneur magazine).

Think this doesn’t happen? Take a look around. Subway, Quizno’s, UPS Store, vending machines, etc. Pick up Entrepreneur magazine and flip to the back. You’ll find literally hundreds of franchise opportunities that promise exactly this scenario.

What’s the way out of this trap disguised as an opportunity? There are two options:

1) After the $250,000 investment and three years of hard work, your business is profitable and you can truly outsource its operation. You can then open multiple locations, which most franchise owners say is the only way to achieve long-term, six-figure profitability. It does work for some people; it’s just hard.

2) Start a real business. As in, your own business that belongs to you with your name on it. Success or failure is entirely up to you. Don’t go into debt if you can help it, but if you have no choice, at least your debt will go to your own venture instead of a corporate sandwich shop.

In the long term, this is the only way forward for most independently minded entrepreneurs. I’ve never been good at following directions, so unless you want a color-by-numbers business, you should stay away too.

If a business opportunity is a) high risk, b) high stress, c) high maintenance, and d) low on growth potential, why would you even consider it? Don’t believe the hype! Eat the sandwiches at Quizno’s, get a mailbox at the UPS Store, but leave the franchise brochures behind.

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Until a few months ago, the last time I visited a Wal-Mart store was more than four years ago. There are no Wal-Marts in Africa (yet), nor are there any in central Seattle where I live now.

Last Christmas, however, I received a gift that I didn’t really have a use for. Attached to the gift was the original store receipt from Wal-Mart, so I decided to break my four-year unofficial boycott of America’s low-price leader.

I should say first that I haven’t really harbored any long-standing resentment against Wal-Mart. I think they could certainly do a lot better in the employee relations department, but I don’t think Wal-Mart is the Evil Consumer Goods Villain or anything.

My objections to visiting a Wal-Mart store are mostly based on the fact that Wal-Mart just isn’t my style. I’m pro-small business, and it’s clear that Wal-Mart has done more than its share of putting a lot of small retailers out of business. I also can’t stand the crowds that usually shop there.

But I also respect innovation and efficiency, and Wal-Mart surely didn’t become the big-box behemoth it is now without some degree of both. In this spirit of checking out this culture of productivity, I decided to give it a fair chance and end the four-year boycott. I also needed to return my gift.

My visit to Wal-Mart store #2690 in America’s heartland was the most stressful and mind-boggling retail experience I’ve had since, well, maybe four years ago when I was last at a Wal-Mart.

Pretty much everything that could go wrong did. Even though I had the original receipt and the item was unopened, I was hassled to no end about the return. At first I was told that Wal-Mart did not accept returns for any reason. (I’m not making this up.) Then I was told that the $37 item could only be refunded to the original credit card. Since it was a gift for me and I don’t buy my own gifts, that didn’t work. On and on it went.

The Customer Service Manager who had been called over finally agreed to let me make an exchange. I asked for a gift card because I was running late by this point, and with the gift card I could also shop online at WalMart.com—a much more appealing prospect than wandering through the aisles dodging soccer moms and runaway children. Or course, asking for the gift card proved futile: the card system had been down all day.

(I could dwell on how odd it is that Wal-Mart successfully sells hundreds of millions of dollars in gift cards before Christmas, but after Christmas when people actually want to use them, the system no longer works. But that would be a digression.)

Thus I was sent to forage throughout the store for my choice of replacement items that would total up to $37.15. I headed back to Electronics and Cameras, where I quickly located two things that would work for me: a $17 memory card and a $20 Nintendo Wii points card. Both of these items were kept behind separate locked cases, so I walked over to find an employee.

I found two of them, chatting to each other about what they each got for Christmas. After it became apparent that they weren’t planning to end their personal conversation to help me, I politely spoke up and asked for help. One of them looked over with visable annoyance. “Just a minute,” he said, leaving me standing there all alone. Always low prices, often low service, I thought.

The unfriendly Wal-Mart guy finally walked over and got me the memory card, but not the Wii card. “For that,” he said, “You’ll have to go to electronics. I don’t work in that department.”

I looked back at the desk where he had just come from. It was directly next to a big Electronics sign, but no matter. By this time I was just ready to move on. Fine. Whatever.

My second Wal-Mart guy wasn’t exactly unfriendly, just bored. He ambled slowly over to the case and fished out the card after straightening up a bunch of other items while I looked on maddeningly. I held out my hand for the card, but he shook his head.

“Nope,” he said. “You have to pay for that here.” I explained that I had a return and needed to bring it to the Customer Service desk at the front. After considering this for a while, Bill from Electronics finally decided to walk me up to the front of the stores which my Wii points card in hand.

My new friend Bill took what seemed to be the longest possible path back up to the service desk. By this time I had summoned all my positive thinking skills in an attempt to see the good side of this experience instead of the stressful side.

I made a quick thankfulness list in my head:

• I am thankful that people care for me enough to give me gifts

• I am thankful that I will soon have a new memory card for my camera and a Wii points card for my video game system

• I am thankful that I don’t have to work at a place like this. God knows that if I did, I certainly wouldn’t feel very motivated to help customers either.

• I am thankful that I could go four whole years without ever entering a Wal-Mart. I think I’d like to try that again, starting right now.

The return process took more than 40 minutes—the better part of an hour to return a $37 item. Maybe stuff like this only happens to me, but I doubt it. I suspect that this is par for the course at Wal-Mart, because their focus is on pricing strategies rather than service-oriented strategies. I’m glad it works for them, but that’s certainly not the way most small businesses succeed.

I should make the disclaimer that there are probably lots of great Wal-Mart “associates” out there in the big-box world who really do strive to serve customers well. The fact that they can do that in spite of being paid $7 an hour and being denied overtime and health benefits is a testimony to their character, not the values of Wal-Mart. You guys, if you ever happen to read this, are not the problem.

As long as I have anything to do with it, I won’t be back at Wal-Mart for as long as possible. Instead, I’ll stick to Target, or even better, Internet shopping. I have a lot more to be thankful for when I can just get online.

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