Hasta La Ideas

In my opinion, there are only two kinds of jobs that are not clutter:

1. A career that you love with a deep passion, surrounded by great colleagues who support and believe in a similar vision, and that is an integral part and reflection of who you are
2. A job that has regular hours, no demands on your time beyond your scheduled work day, generates enough income for a comfortable lifestyle, great colleagues, and a positive corporate culture

The first type of career completely gels with who you are and provides you with significant happiness. Even though you may not like every aspect of your work, you find the reasons behind it invigorating and worth the effort. You have your dream job and reap the benefits of this match. In many ways, the line between work life and personal life are blurred with this type of career.

The second type of job is one that you can turn off when you leave the office. It allows you to take advantage of all of your free time and deeply explore happiness in the world beyond your job. Being surrounded by people you like is a key to this type of job because if you don’t like the people you work with, then a job like this will be loathsome.

If you’re in a job that doesn’t make you happy and is cluttering up your life, or have recently been downsized because of the rough economy, then I want to recommend you read Jonathan Fields’ new book Career Renegade. His book is filled with actual advice that gives you instructions for “how to make a great living doing what you love.”

Career Renegade is not a touchy-feely, discover-what-you-want-to-do type of book. The premise behind the text is that you are eager to have a career you love and want to know exactly how to make it a reality.

The majority of his advice is targeted toward carving out niche careers in markets that are already established. However, I really enjoyed his insight relating to careers in markets that don’t yet exist:

Real innovators usually have:

• A deep passion for the content, beyond the desire to make money.
• A clear picture of the gap in the market of the problem in need of a solution.
• A nearly unshakable commitment to solving a problem or doing something better than it’s been done before.
• A willingness to take risks and make decisions based on the best information available relatively quickly, even if it’s not all of the information that might be accessible over a longer period of time. Entrepreneurs refer to this as the ready-fire-aim mind-set.
• An ability to visualize a solution that does not exist or at least to see the possibility of the solution.

The people who have manifested these qualities and succeeded in creating solutions, businesses, products, or services that simply did not exist before are the ones you need to seek out.

If you’re ready to have a career you love, then Career Renegade is the book for you.