Career & Purpose

28 Dec

Posted at 10:15h in Career & Purpose, Life on Your Terms Interviews by

inspire whats possible

"If you don’t know what you want, pick something that might be it, and practice it. Real, deep, profound passion requires your focus, engagement, and daily practice."

-Barrie Davenport

*Time Sensitive: As a little Christmas and New Year's bonus, today my good friend Barrie Davenport and I are giving away five free copies of her new book, The 52-Week Passion Project (which happens to make for the perfect compliment to our Live Off Your Passion career course). All you have to do is leave a comment telling us one of your interests, passions or hobbies - we want to get you thinking about what excites you in the new year! Your answer must be in by this Friday to win a copy of her book. If you're reading this in email, click here to participate. Now it's time to hear from one of my favorite passion experts! *****

Learning from the Right People...

When starting out in a new industry or career, we all have people we look up to. Those we constantly study and admire (and whom we might even feel a tad of envy for here and there).

05 Dec

Posted at 11:21h in Career & Purpose, Communication & Rapport, Entrepreneurship by

How to get invited to give a TEDx talk

“I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

- Thomas Jefferson

I have the quote above engraved on a silver cup that my parents gave me for Christmas ten years ago. It's been on my desk ever since.

Last month you all made a dream of mine come true.

I was invited to stand on the TEDx stage in San Francisco and give a talk on our core message and purpose at Live Your Legend: How to Find & Do Work You Love. Five days ago that video was published on YouTube. As of this morning it had 40,147 views, 447 comments, 1,010 likes, and 15 dislikes. ;) [Update - August 2014: nearly 1,700,000 views!] One of the members of the TEDx community wrote to me yesterday and said our talk was the #1 trending TEDx talk on YouTube. On top of that, 1,801 people joined our community here - Welcome to the adventure! I am still pinching myself as I write this... So I thought it'd be a worthwhile exercise (both for me and for all of you) to recap exactly how this dream came true and maybe sort out what was blind luck and what might have been luck that was a little more in our control - because with any dream becoming reality, there's a lot of both. Because more often than not, when things like this happen to people, the world tends to like to dismiss it as, "Oh, he just got lucky," or, "Of course they got to speak and their talk got a ton of traction. Look at the size of his following!" and on and on. But we must be very careful not to confuse the type of luck we can control with the type that's plain dumb…

14 Nov

Posted at 10:41h in Career & Purpose, Entrepreneurship by

passive income is a lie

"If you want real passive income, dedicate your life to making the people around you better, every single day."

-Anonymous

Thanks for all of your inspiring responses to our "Name our Movement" contest last week. Wow! We're still sorting out the best name, but we have chosen the 10 random folks to win a free LYL shirt. We will email the 10 winners this week. Now for today's topic... Btw, pardon the occasional unsavory language below - when I get on a rant, sometimes I can't help myself!

The Biggest Lie on The Internet

Okay so I have a bit of a bone to pick. The more time I spend online, the more I learn about how to build this business and the more I get requests from people for help, the more I hear the same damn word and it's about to cause me to jump out my window (which would suck since I only live on the third floor). The phrase is... Wait for it...

06 Nov

Posted at 14:18h in Career & Purpose, Entrepreneurship by

how to turn a message into a movement

"A message becomes a movement when every member of the mission becomes its leader. And when everyone starts to lead, a revolution begins."

Lately I've been doing a lot of research on revolutions.

I've been curious how they start, how they grow and how they create change in a lasting and meaningful way. Why? Because at Live Your Legend, we are leading our own revolution. And it's starting to catch on in a pretty big way - 100% thanks to all of you. In the last few months, readers have held LYL Live Meetups in Los Angles, Australia, Pittsburgh and New York, and more are already being planned for Minneapolis, Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, Paris and China in the next couple months. One of our inspiring members, Mark Arkell, has even started a Live Your Legend Club at his university in Ontario, Canada where he's completing his PhD in philosophy! It's hard for me to believe this is really happening, but there's no question that indeed it is.

11 Oct

Posted at 16:51h in Announcements, Career & Purpose, Entrepreneurship, Life on Your Terms Interviews by

do something that matters

"The only difference between impossible and normal is choosing to hang around the people doing the things you thought couldn't be done."

- Anonymous

Yesterday a big dream of mine came true...

I stood up on the TEDx stage in San Francisco and gave an 18-minute talk (17:51 to be exact). The topic was "The Work You Can't NOT Do & Surrounding Yourself with the People Who Won't Let You Fail". It was the most invigorating/exhausting/terrifying/emotional/awesome/humbling/surreal day I've possibly ever had. It was perfect.

TEDx Golden Gate Park

And the best part about it? You guys made it possible. Without this community I could have never stood on that stage. In fact without you, I would have never even known about the event - one of you told me about it in our Facebook Action Group last month! As usual, I cannot express my gratitude enough. But hopefully this post is a start.