This weekend, I tallied up how much money I’ve saved these last few years by creating my own business videos, instead of hiring a pro crew to make them for me. Would you believe it: $25k?!! Um, that’s a lot of cash, money, moula, dolla bills, ya’ll! (And learning this got me all sorts of excited again for my upcoming Creating DIY Business Videos You LOVE program in March.)
It got me thinking about the many times in my career when I had to “spin gold from straw”, that is – make something awesome happen when I had little to no resources available to me. It seems I’ve employed this trick many times – from saving my organization $10k in design costs by learning how to design brochures using an old, dusty desktop software no one in the building knew how to use, to launching a successful voiceover artist side-career after figuring out how to edit audio files when I worked in the radio industry (despite others’ urgings to not bother learning about it).
All of us know what it’s like to sit at our jobs and say: “I’m meant for more than this. I can do so much more than what ‘they’ have me doing here.” That thought/feeling can either totally paralyze us or motivate us to stretch out of our comfort zones and really shine.
Many of my clients tell me that they are stuck in their jobs or businesses. They want to be “bigger”: do more and be more. I say: don’t wait for someone else to give you the opportunity; make it on your own now. Here’s three steps to getting started:
1. Start with where you are. Look around you and see where opportunities are waiting to be plucked from the everyday landscape of your life. They’re always there…you just haven’t looked for them.
2. Then, get some support. Ask around quietly for help and find peers who are willing to support you. The boldest, most successful people I know rarely proclaim what they’re going to do. They first DO it, and then tell the world about it after their success has been made. Be a doer, not a talker.
3. Lastly, trust yourself to follow through and make something BIG out of the small nugget of goodness you’ve found.
I really do believe that we are capable of anything we really put our hearts and heads to. If you’re sitting on the sidelines of your business or job and hoping for something to come your way, stop. Get started creating your success now.