That’s what makes this so hard to talk about. You know what bothers you about the job. But somebody looking at your salary and the company you work for may wonder what you have to complain about. After a while, you may start asking yourself that same question
Your employer pays you to solve problems. Coworkers ask for your judgment. You know things that took years to learn. Yet when you consider consulting, it can be surprisingly difficult to say what someone would buy.
The missing piece is often a clear connection between what you know and a problem a particular person wants solved.
Jonathan Stark explores that connection in his video, 5 Basic Steps for Starting a Profitable Consulting Business. Here is how I would apply the idea to people who have built their experience in engineering, management, education, or another professional role.
Dan Koe’s video, “Work Less, Earn More, Enjoy Life,” made me think about that question. He explores the one-person business model: using your interests, skills, and expertise to build a business as a creator, freelancer, coach, or consultant.
I see a connection to the Company of One model I teach, especially for people who already have careers, families, and responsibilities.
You may enjoy your work. You may have spent years becoming good at it. You can value that career and still want more control over your income and time.
How to stop collecting business ideas and start building real options.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to spend months—or even years—thinking about making a change without actually doing anything?
Maybe you’ve considered consulting. Or starting a business. Or investing in real estate. Maybe you enjoy your job but are tired of the bureaucracy and restrictions that come with it.
You keep looking at possibilities.
You watch videos, read books, attend workshops, and talk with friends about what you could do.
But nothing really changes.
I think one reason is simple: There’s no urgency.
If you want to quit your job but don’t know what to do instead, start by choosing one kind of work to investigate. Identify what you want to change, notice work you enjoy, and talk with someone already doing it. You can take those steps while you’re still employed.
Here are three questions to help you begin.
If your paycheck stopped Friday, where would your next dollar come from? I’m not suggesting you quit your job. I’m suggesting the opposite. Keep the job. Keep the paycheck. Keep the benefits. But start building something beside it.
What’s something you’d love to get paid to do, but you keep telling yourself it’s too late, too impractical, or just doesn’t fit the career you’ve built?
Maybe you have the salary. You have the title. People depend on you. And there’s still something you’d like to try, even if you aren’t sure what it is.
AI was supposed to save us time. It can write in seconds what once took an hour, summarize a meeting almost instantly, and produce a first draft before we could have gathered the source material ourselves.
Yet many people are not working less. They are producing more, responding faster, supervising more output, and ending the day more exhausted.
The problem is not that AI failed to increase productivity. The problem is that productivity and freedom are not the same thing.
Now organizations are getting flatter. Teams are getting smaller. AI is increasing what individuals can produce. Leaders are still needed, but more organizations expect them to lead and contribute
Here’s the uncomfortable question: if you left your job tomorrow, how much of that experience could you actually sell? Not put on a resume. Not talk about in an interview. Sell.
100% of most professionals’ income comes from one customer: their employer. We call that job security. If a business had one customer controlling all its revenue, we’d call it dangerous. This episode is about closing that gap — without quitting your job, without a big idea, and without becoming an entrepreneur.
Here’s the problem: you make too much money to quit. And starting over somewhere else doesn’t sound any better either.
there’s a difference between having a job and having only one customer for your skills. And most of us have never noticed the difference, because we’ve never had to.
The Best Career Decisions Often Start as Bad News. Most people already know more than they admit. The real question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s whether you’ll build options before someone else decides for you.
12.7. That’s the average number of jobs Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held by their mid-50s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the interesting part isn’t the number — it’s that almost none of those changes came from a master plan. Life happened: a layoff, a new boss, a better opportunity, a move. Which raises the real question: why do we wait for life to change before we change ourselves?
Twenty-two years of experience. A team that hits its numbers every quarter. And he still feels like he has to earn his spot in the room every few months.
This week I got an email from a listener named Denise. She’s 44, she’s been at her company for 11 years, her performance reviews are excellent, and her director has told her directly that she’s one of the most dependable people in the building.
43% of mid-career adults did some kind of job-related learning last year. That means most people didn’t.
That’s not actually the number that worries me.