Did I have any experience in administration? Nope, but I sure knew how to fake it. All that time I’d put in dating helped me to develop some great social skills, and I know how to appear confident even when I’m way outside my comfort zone. I immediately told my new boss that I needed more money than they offered and a whole new office setup. They gave me the salary that I asked for and a new desk chair and even a brand new computer.
Everyone else in the department was envious. I already had another job, so I was able to negotiate without fear.
The things I have shared with you before about mindsets and favors are the techniques I used in that negotiation. That is why I covered that material first. You now have the ability to get yourself a raise at work or negotiate if you jump to another company. Even if you don’t want to break free of all your chains, I want to help you!
I was twenty-nine years old. I was the only person from my graduate program to get a job in higher education. And I wasn’t just a teacher; I was running a program worth over $1.5m. That was shocking to me. I used the job offer letter to get a new apartment and buy a car. I accepted these long-term financial chains because my “dream job” was secured.
And then I lived happily ever after, right? Wrong. Within a week I realized that the job was nothing like I imagined. Assignments that were supposed to last for months took me hours. I don’t have that natural bureaucratic skill of doing nothing while it looks like I’m doing something.
One of the assignments was to get the students in my department some amazing field trips. I was supposed to come up with something amazing with a budget of zero. They had messed up the money or something before I came on board and every dollar was already allocated for other stuff. A big oil company funded the program. That was all the information I had the first day I sat at my desk.
Within six hours, I had two amazing trips locked in. The first one was to a bottling plant that didn’t even give tours! I did some research and found a new method of making bottling caps from oil. So when I approached the plant manager, I explained that the funding for my project came from an oil company, so it would be a perfect fit and great way for them to earn some goodwill from a vendor. He went from skeptical to excited. As I already taught you, I approached him by offering value first. I found a way this tour would be a benefit to him.
I went to my new boss, and she told me that this trip sounded fine, but it wasn’t at zero yet. How would I get the students there without paying a penny? Talk about cheap! I wasn’t even allowed to use the university vans because they use gas. At this point, the trip would cost around $20 total. I was about to offer her the money out of my pocket just to shut her up.
But I know how the mind of a drone works. If it’s written on a piece of paper it might as well be written in blood - she would have turned down the money. I went back to my office and hopped on the Internet. I found a free medical shuttle between our campus and an offsite medical center a few hundred yards from that bottling plant. I found free transportation between the two locations.
Looking back I realize that she gave me tasks she considered impossible, but I don’t know how to operate without winning…
Thirteen days later I was fired. Someone found my old dating blog and connected it to me. Honestly, I think an ex-girlfriend called and turned me in. I don’t know. When I took the job, I read all the paperwork carefully, and there was nothing about telling them if you have an anonymous blog.
I come in one Monday morning to my boss and the head of my division waiting to ambush me. Someone who never deigned to meet me before. They told me that because I had sold ten copies of that book I had violated some rule about not having a second job. The idea that teachers aren’t allowed to write books is so ridiculous, but it was the best idea they were able to come up with.
I sat in a room with two women who had spent the weekend cooking up a reason to fire me. I could have taken them to court, and I would have won because their reason was ridiculous. But who has that kind of time or money? When someone wants to fire you, they will think of a reason.
I was amazed that they said something so ridiculous with straight faces. If you’ve been to college, you know that every professor has a book for sale. But reality didn’t matter at that moment because I had no power in that room.
Those two idiots were so smug as they made me hand over my office keys. They had this look of pride in their eyes as they took away my job. I’ll never forget it. They were so proud of themselves as they freed me from prison. That is the best day of my entire life.
If they hadn’t fired me, I would never have gone out to start my business. Reality overcame my fear. I got a fantastic health insurance package when they fired me. If they had waited two more weeks, that wouldn’t have happened. I lucked out in that department. They thought they had destroyed me, but within six months I had replaced my income. Within a year I was making more than my boss and within two I was making more than the division head. If they hadn’t fired me, I wouldn’t be living on a tropical island, working these hours, with my awesome girlfriend and my wonderful kids.
Getting fired truly freed me.
IX
Let's Take Action Today
Action is the foundational key to all success.
- Pablo Picasso
64
Actions that help you no matter your destiny
There are many paths you can take to make money online. I’m going to teach you several very strong ones, but my list will not be exhaustive. The good thing is that there are a series of core skills that offer a lot of value. Things you can start to learn now that will help you no matter the path you take.
Think of these as the core courses you take at university before you choose a major, except that this material will be useful. I want to give you a baseline of skills so that you start to feel confident enough to take bigger and bigger steps towards that big, beautiful open prison door.
You might be reading this book for a laugh or because you have a friend who might need it. Maybe you have an awesome career and don’t need to jump ship. You might be in sales, and your destiny is already in your hands. You eat what you kill, and that’s awesome.
I still want you to get some personal value from this book. There are a few things that you can learn that at some point in your career will be useful. These are foundational skills that everyone will need in the future.
65
First Action Steps
The first step you should take today is to set up an Internet property. Buy a domain and set up a blog. Learning this process is imperative and doing it yourself will give you a feel for what you can and cannot do. You will get a feel for what skills you have and what you won’t be able to learn without a lot of effort.
I explain the process in great detail at:
http://servenomaster.com/book/
Just scroll to the bright blue banner that says “Start Your Own Blog Today.”
I have step-by-step instructions with a lot of pictures. It’s much easier to follow along when you can copy and paste, rather than trying to hold this book up against your computer monitor to follow the steps. I don’t want to leave you hanging, so I’ll give you the basics right here.
You start by picking a name for your website and buy it. Then you want to pay for hosting - the computer your website will live on. There are thousands of great options, but I use Namecheap to buy domains and ASmallOrange to host them. Next, you point your domain name from Namecheap to ASmallOrange, which takes about 3 minutes. Then you log into your new account at ASmallOrange and click on the “Install Wordpress” button.
If this sounds too complicated, remember that I have a step-by-step explanation with screenshots and images on my website to make it super easy for you. It will take less than fifteen minutes to do all of this.
Just going through this basic process will provide you with an Internet property to develop. You get a feel for what it’s like to write a blog post that the world can instantly see. You wil
l see the moving parts of a website and what all of that means. Starting with a blog is great because it gives you that first feel of how the Internet operates. That’s how I started and accidentally built my first fan base (and lost that job)!
I run contests all the time, and one of them is a thirty-day blog challenge. Everyone builds a blog at the same time, so you get a sense of solidarity and community. There are always cool prizes for people who finish the challenge. The dates for the next contest are always available on my blog.
66
Websites
The ability to build and develop websites is extremely valuable in the online world. There are plenty of ways to make money online without ever touching a website, but this gives you a significant level of control over your destiny. If you are running a business through a Facebook page, and they decide to cancel your page, you’re out of business.
I like to remove as many vulnerabilities from my life as possible. If you can set up your own property (and there’s a reason I use that phrase), you have a skill that people will pay you for. If you look on UpWork or Fiverr, you will see little gigs to set up blogs all the time. Being able to do this yourself saves you from hiring someone else and gives you a basic skill that you can sell.
There are other great platforms if you want to get into e-commerce, but most of the websites out there are built on the Wordpress platform. It’s robust, constantly updating and best of all - it’s free!
This is a cool skill because it’s simple to do and delivers real value. Once you know how to do it, you’ll be surprised how many people around you mention that they are struggling to get a website up. It’s easier than you’d expect and a great way to offer value as you build your network.
67
Graphics
Setting up a website isn’t everything. The Internet has changed a lot in the last few decades. Before Windows came out in the early 1990s, computers were entirely text driven. There were a few graphics programs, but to start one you had to use the Disk Operating System, which was pure text. If you didn’t know the right code words you couldn’t do anything.
Now, people expect websites to be sexy and beautiful. I can’t tell you how valuable the ability to do basic Photoshop tasks is. Whether you are designing banner ads, simple book covers or Facebook banners, the skill of graphics comes up all the time. You don’t need to become a graphic master unless you’re artistic, and you want to leverage that talent. What you want is the ability to do basic tasks. Move stuff around, remove backgrounds, and create basic images. These skills are great for two reasons.
The first is that you won’t need to hire people to do them for you. Some tasks that take me less than ten minutes cost $20 to pay someone else to do. The problem is that you spend money hiring someone to do something like that, and it takes them a few days to do it. You’re never going to be anyone’s top priority at that price. You go right to the bottom of the queue. The only way to get fast results is to hire someone full time, and that’s not a direction you want to go in for now.
The ability to maintain momentum when you are working on something is crucial. There is nothing quite so frustrating as working on your Facebook page and being frozen waiting for a graphics person to finish a banner you need to use. Your time is super valuable, and we want to focus on efficiency right out the gate. These skills are really about something you can dabble with quickly and learn today.
If you don’t have Photoshop, there are tons of great alternatives. I don’t use the current iteration of the software. Nothing I’m doing requires the latest technology. A few years ago, they shifted from letting you own the software to renting it. I’m not interested in paying a monthly fee for the rest of my life, so I just stick with version 6. It’s part of my plan to control costs. If I am going to pay an extra ten, twenty or thirty bucks a month, then I need to make that much more money to cover that cost.
There are some great alternatives that you can check out on my book page. Dabble with each of them and see what direction you want to go in.
68
Software
As you begin to build your business online, every idea you have on the potential of software will change forever. Maybe you only use a few pieces of software daily – stuff like Word, GarageBand, and Skype. There’s much more software out there, and people are willing to pay massive amounts for some tools.
For people that get into foreign exchange and money markets, there’s software that costs tens of thousands of dollars. It’s very easy to get into deep debt just buying such powerful software. Some software programs have simply amazing sales pages that convince you there is a magic button you can press to make a ton more money.
Here, I just want to share with you a few basic tools that I use every single day. These tools are the foundation of my business, and I’ll explain why. I cover a lot more tools that I use at ServeNoMaster.com/book.
The first tool is more about techniques. I don’t think in straight lines very much. I tend to think in circles. And it turns out that I’m not alone.
Some genius invented this idea called mind mapping. It’s building outlines in a circular format. For some reason, it works perfectly for my brain. I have been using mind maps for quite a few years now. All of my video products and bestsellers, including this one, started out in a mind map. I love how easy it is to move things around and change the order. That’s very valuable for me.
There are a lot of expensive mind mapping tools out there. I have received emails about mind mapping products that cost over five hundred dollars. I’m the first person to invest money in my business if there will be a positive return on that investment. I’m rather obsessive about efficiency. Before I make a purchase, I ask myself a simple question, “Will this tool make me more money?”
The tool needs to either increase my productivity or accelerate some other part of my process. I have used two mind mapping tools in my life. I use one on my iPad that cost 99 cents when I bought it. It’s called iThoughtsHD. I think it’s ten bucks now, so I’m not giving that a firm recommendation.
I recently shifted to mind mapping on my computer, and it’s a lot faster. I now use Xmind. This tool is fast, very efficient and doesn’t cost a penny. It’s a great place to start your creative processes. I have used mind maps to create things that have generated more than $10m in sales. And my total lifetime investment in mind maps is less than a dollar.
The most important tool in my arsenal, hands down, is Scrivener. It is so much more than a word processor. I grew up on WordPerfect. Then somehow that software disappeared, and I used Word. I used Word for probably twenty years. I am no power user by any means. I can only do very basic tasks in Word. The problem is that it’s built around the mindset of a typewriter. The way it approaches writing is frozen in the 1800s. I make most of my living from my writing. I write from 2-5,000 words an hour. People come to me all the time when they need content, and they need it FAST. I take writing very seriously, and when someone told me about Scrivener, I was extremely skeptical. Like a fool, I thought that all writing programs were created equal. You get a blank white page, and you start putting in words. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Scrivener is like a mind mapping word processor. It’s kind of amazing. It comes with a simple tutorial that takes about an hour to work through. At that point, you know everything you need.
It lets you chop up your book into little sections. I have each module of this book as a folder and then tiny subsections. It makes it very easy for me to jump around. I can work on this little section and jump to the beginning and write something there. I simply love that ability. Before, I was scrolling up and down looking for different sections. I spent a lot of time trying to go back and find sections to make sure they all tied together. It’s also as easy as drag and drop to move sections in your book around. I do that a lot too. It’s very hard to know in advance how each chapter will look, so the ability to move things around without the awkwardness of cut and paste is brilliant.<
br />
This software wipes writer’s block away - permanently. Most people dream of writing a book, but the thought of sitting in front of a blank page staring at that flashing cursor while trying to write an entire page is terrifying! With Scrivener, you chop the project into tiny chunks and focus on one at a time. When I’m trying to hit a target word count, I can create a small word count for each section. The more you break a project down into pieces, the easier it becomes.
Now you’re not writing War and Peace anymore. You’re just writing one 500-word section at a time. This helps your productivity. Scrivener isn’t free software, but it does cost much less than Word. It costs forty bucks most of the time, but if you keep your eyes peeled for a sale (usually synced up with National Novel Writing Month), you can often find it for half price.
I know it might seem like I’m nickel and diming here. I’m just focused on cost control. That’s one of the fundamental principles of my business – or any business that wants to go the distance. If you’re laser fastidious in the small things, it’s much easier to maintain that focus with the large things.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 13
