Breakout Blueprint (eBook)

How to Find Your Passion, Take Action, and Build a Lifestyle Business

Doug Foley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
158 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1548-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Many of us live in a prison of our own making. We spend our lives dreading Mondays, looking forward to paychecks, and working longer hours, only to shoulder even more responsibility. It's a never-ending chase. Life doesn't have to be that way. It's time to stop going through the motions and start living. It's time to build a business that offers you freedom. After interviewing more than 150 entrepreneurs, Doug Foley realized they all had one thing in common-and it wasn't a fancy job title, car, or house. Instead of building their lives around their businesses, they built their businesses around the lives they wanted to live. This book is your blueprint for following their lead. Using the four pillars of every successful business-passion, expertise, need, and value-Foley explains how you can break free from the typical 9-to-5 and create a deeply fulfilling career on your own terms.

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Chapter 1

1. The Breakout Blueprint

There are two scenes in Office Space, a classic nineties satire of everyday work life, that are the most accurate depictions of the typical workday.

The first scene happens early in the movie. The main character, Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Livingston), is being chastised by his boss for putting the wrong cover sheet on the TPS reports. The scene is so famous, it is the basis for thousands of memes, T-shirts, and coffee mugs.

The second scene is with Peter Gibbons again, except this time after his awakening. After showing up in the office late wearing flip-flops, he proceeds to filet a fish at his desk—the fish he caught that morning (which is why he was late). He unscrews his cubicle and, with a gentle nudge, kicks the cubicle wall over into the aisle, giving him the perfect window view.

Peter’s character resembles so many of us who are chained to the cubicles and forced to put “cover sheets on TPS reports” all day long. Chances are that if you’re reading this book, you are fed up with the monotony of unfulfilling paperwork and you are ready to unscrew that wall and kick it over.

Welcome to the Breakout Blueprint! In this chapter, I’m going to show what that freedom looks like and give you a framework that you can apply to your life to take back control. It’s a framework I’ve developed through my journey as an entrepreneur, and my experiences and mistakes have shaped it. I call it the Breakout Blueprint and it’s a simple formula you can apply to find meaning in your work:

Breakout Blueprint = (Passion + Expertise) × (Need + Value)

In this book, I’ll explore the components of that formula and look at how you can apply the Breakout Blueprint to your life to build a business that works for you.

I’ve developed this formula through trial and error: it’s an encapsulation of my learnings and my mistakes. My journey into entrepreneurship has been a wild one. I spent more than ten years trying to “get rich quick” in an attempt to fast-track life experiences and buy “nice things,” while simultaneously trying to follow a traditional career path, mostly to keep my parents happy (something of a curse, being the youngest of eight kids).

The sad part? Rarely can those two ideas coexist.

Throughout my journey, I was an avid listener of podcasts and audiobooks. During one of my long commutes, I came across an interview with Jeff Hoffman on Inside Quest. If you’re not familiar with Jeff Hoffman, he’s a serial entrepreneur who has helped transform industries, created a Grammy-winning album, and advised world leaders on entrepreneurship. In the interview, he shared a story about his view on entrepreneurship and something he calls “Your Golden Purpose,” which is “the intersection of ‘the thing you’re best at,’ ‘the thing you love,’ and ‘something the world values.’” I realized after listening to that interview that not only is it possible for us to find jobs or build businesses around what we love, but it’s what we’re meant to do.

It was that lesson that helped me find the term “Ikigai,” which literally means “a reason for being.” After the awakening I had during my daughter’s birth, the concept of “reason for being” really struck me. It forced me to look at life through a new lens, and to find ways to do more of the things I loved in my work and in my life. I wanted more meaningful experiences, and I wanted my work to fulfill me, not just give me a paycheck. More importantly, I wanted to make space for the people that matter in my life—like my daughter—and to give back something of value to the world.

This realization helped me create the formula, Breakout Blueprint = (Passion + Expertise) × (Need + Value). The greater each element is for you, the greater the impact you can make on the world and the more freedom and fulfillment you will find.

1.1. What Holds People Back

For the longest time, people believed the cubicle life was just the way things were. You didn’t choose to be Peter Gibbons from Office Space—you had to be. If you dared to imagine anything different, then, well, people would roll their eyes and laugh you out of the room. You would be a dreamer.

Making matters worse are your self-doubt and limiting beliefs. Those voices in your head are holding you back and preventing you from finding fulfillment and true happiness, saying, “I’m not good enough to do that…,” “Nobody would ever pay me to teach them that…,” “I’ve worked so hard to get where I am…I can’t throw that away,” “What if I fail…,” and the worst of them all, “What will my parents think?”

The list of thoughts holding you back could go on forever, but the truth is, those thoughts are not reality. They are just what you tell yourself to settle for the status quo.

Here is a typical story I hear on The Happiness of Pursuit:

“I went to school and graduated top of my class. I got a good job immediately out of school. I was climbing the corporate ladder…and hated every day of my life! I couldn’t take it anymore so I quit and built my business doing something I loved—and in the process changed a lot of lives, and now make three times more than I did at my job.”

So much of how we judge success in our society is based on where we went to school, our professional designation or job title, and things we want to buy. Those social measurements become our compass, and eventually we fall victim to Peter Gibbons’s fate: we end up sitting in a cubicle, wasting away, feeling unfulfilled, undervalued, and living paycheck to paycheck.

This book is going to break that cycle. No longer do you need to waste away, daydreaming about what life could be—or worse, could have been.

The Breakout Blueprint is the system you can use to build the life you were meant to live. There is no limit to what you are capable of once you master it!

1.2. A Lifestyle Business: What It Looks Like in Real Life

When people say you should love what you do every day, it is often misunderstood as turning your hobby into your job. If you look deeper into this, you’ll often find the ones who truly love what they do have tied it to a bigger purpose. This enables them to do more of the things they love. I often refer to this kind of career as an impact-driven or lifestyle business.

If you’re looking to make your business and job work for you (rather than the other way around), then you’re probably looking at building a lifestyle business. This is what the Breakout Blueprint will help you do.

When most people hear the term “lifestyle business,” they usually picture something out of Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek: working from a beach with a laptop making millions.

For most of us, that’s not realistic. And in my experience, building a business is much more than that. Building a business takes work. It’s not easy, but when you align your passion and your expertise, you will find that the work feels much easier, because in a lifestyle business the work is more fulfilling. A lifestyle business also gives you the opportunity to create more flexibility in your schedule, as well as an unlimited ceiling for earning potential. Many of you reading this will get to earn what you are actually worth, while working less. You’ll feel better.

That said, creating a lifestyle business isn’t easy. Starting a lifestyle business is different from starting a typical startup: your thought processes and values need to be different. This is where I went wrong multiple times, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake. Here are some lessons I’ve learned from my journey to create a lifestyle business.

1.2.1. It Can’t Be about the Money! (Value Is Worth Ten Times More)

After graduating college, I was focused on one thing: making as much money as I could. I was fortunate enough to land a sales job right out of college and began to accumulate a substantial commission well over $75,000. At twenty-three and right out of school, that was a lot of money.

Living well outside my means in the expectation of receiving my commission, I accumulated credit card debt, bought a car I couldn’t afford, and took vacations on borrowed money. Then 2008 came and, like many others, the company I was working for went bankrupt. My commission vanished overnight. I was left with a mountain of debt and no way to pay it off. I had borrowed from the future and now it was time to pay up.

I went from aspirations of wealth to desperation and survival. I borrowed more to try and keep up appearances, only to dig a deeper hole. I began to pursue “side hustle” after “side hustle” in search of becoming an overnight millionaire.

I learned the truth the hard way: there is no such thing as an overnight millionaire.

I had a failed apparel company, a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.9.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-1548-0 / 1544515480
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-1548-9 / 9781544515489