Chris Guillebeau must have missed the “get a job” missive. The 34 year old American writer and world traveller has been self-employed since university, selling his belongings in the early days of eBay, importing Jamaican coffee, and volunteering for four years at a medical charity in West Africa.
He has an audacious goal – to travel to every country in the world before the age of 35, which he fits in between selling his Unconventional Guides, writing his hugely popular The Art of Non-Conformity blog and books including The $100 Startup, and organising the World Domination Summit, a weekend frenzy of inspiration, brainstorming, value dissection and career brainstorming, cultural and creative outings and general good-natured muck-raising.
Brook McCarthy of Yoga Reach caught up with Chris when he was in Sydney recently talking to a group of enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers about The $100 Startup. This is a transcription of our video interview which was drowned out by Dolly Parton’s crooning.
For somebody who has already chosen a deeply personal business calling, such as a yoga teacher or a blogger like yourself, how do you discern between criticism that is useless and criticism that has value?
Chris: “I don’t know if I have developed a thick skin. I’m very sensitive to criticism; I think a lot of creative people are. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to solve that. What you have to do is to just move beyond it. You have to decide that you’re going to create and make something regardless of the response to it. It’s not that you believe the response is irrelevant, or that the response is wrong. But you have to make a decision on why you are doing what it is that you do. I think most creative people are their own worst critics. We don’t need other people to criticize, we already have voices in our head telling us that there are things we could be doing better. I guess I’m trying to focus on my own improvement. I know there’s a long list of things I do very poorly and so I’m trying to work on those, I don’t need anyone to tell me more of them.
When you love what you do, how do you derive a healthy income from it? Do you have to change or compromise? How do you discern between personal and professional?
Chris: That’s what the $100 start-up is about. I don’t think you have to compromise but you do have to choose things that you love that other people also find valuable. There’s lots of things you might love to do and that’s fine and well, but that doesn’t mean you can make an income from them. What you have to do is find a passion or interest or skill that other people are also interested in and relate to. Yoga is a good example of that. You can be passionate about yoga but hopefully you’re also passionate about teaching something or communicating something or sharing that experience with others. That’s what an income comes from. So I think at a certain point, it’s a question of deciding, I have a number of different passions, a number of different interests, which of them are personal and which of them do I hope to create a business out of? Because they are not necessarily the same.
Where do you get the drive to work?
Chris: I do like to work, I do like to make progress towards goals and relaxing stresses me out. As to where I get the drive, I am curious and I am interested in new things. I love travelling and meeting new people and this project (the $100 start-up) came about through meeting a lot of interesting people I met all over the world who were doing really fascinating things to create their own freedom and to create security for themselves. Making a good income while also making the world a better place. I found it very motivating to hear their stories and to hopefully be able to tell them.
If you have lots of ideas, how do you break through indecision and overwhelm and take action?
Chris: It’s good to have ideas, but it’s better to take action. So when you’re overwhelmed, you can do a couple of things. You can use a systematic process I call the Decision-Making Matrix to go through and assign each idea a point score in a few different areas. This helps you understand the potential impact for each idea, and perhaps leads you to pursue one idea over another.
If that’s too complicated, though, you can just decide to pick one and move forward. Picking the wrong idea, even if there is such a thing, is better than failing to take action at all.”
