employer.
If you don’t have any marketable skills, don’t panic. Start by taking classes! You can take free design and Photoshop classes at the Apple store, you can pretty much get any tutorial now on YouTube.com, and you can also find so much information on Google. My close friend Manick went from being an investment banker to learning how to code on his own at a very high level in less than three months because he dedicated himself to it day in, day out, for three straight months. Now he is launching one of the smartest companies for music that exists online, Rukkus
.com, a website for music lovers to discover new music and easily find out where the bands are playing. He built the entire back end of his website by himself. Three months of dedication, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing. Fully dedicating yourself to something for only a few months upfront can reap benefits for the rest of your life. By the way, for those of you excited about learning some code—a useful skill for pretty much any entrepreneur these days—you can also attend Codecademy (codecademy.com) to learn various computer programming languages quickly.
Once you figure out what you’re good at, it’s so much easier to ask yourself the next question:
What am I passionate about? What am I really good at?
By now you know that you can pick your passion project only within the realm of the things you are actually good at. You must pick a passion project utilizing your talents, the things that your most trusted people around you say you’re exceptional at! You can work in the music industry if you really like music, but you may not end up a singer.
Within “What am I passionate about?” answer the following:
(A) What do I like to do for fun?
Do you like to build things for fun?
Do you like to write for fun?
Do you like to volunteer and work with kids?
Do you like to cook?
(B) What’s the last thing I’ve done that I’m proud of?
Have you helped someone else achieve something?
Have you built something that is important for the community?
Have you supported a group or community through a rough period?
(C) Are there any communities, people, places, or issues that I care about supporting?
Are you passionate about helping your family and friends?
Are you passionate about storytelling?
Are you passionate about human rights?
Are you passionate about women’s issues?
After you have identified what you are good at and then what you are passionate about, now it’s time to apply it.
6
WHAT SUCKS IN YOUR WORLD
How to Put Your Passion in Motion
Status quos are made to be broken.
—R AY D AVIS
I clutched my stomach in pain for what seemed like the third time that week. After a long day of working on set of a Victoria’s Secret commercial (yes, Adriana Lima is that hot), gastro pain was the last thing I wanted to deal with again when I got home. This time though, it was worse—a cross between serious bloating and sharp abdominal pain.
Why was this happening? I never had this kind of stomach pain before, but it now seemed to be a constant foe! I simply couldn’t live this way.
What had I been eating? I knew I had been eating crappy, unhealthy, processed food on set of the commercials and I had ordered some creamy dish that night (man, it was good). I recall wolfing it down before speaking to anyone at dinner. I’ve always been a fast eater, since I grew up with an identical twin sister with an identical starvation syndrome ( and with an older sister who was less than one year older than us). The three of us would race to the kitchen table and play a game of “How much food can I stuff inside myself before I can grab seconds?” It was tough competition. My poor parents were left with scraps.
Now, I really had to do something. There had already been too many times I’d pulled the old “it wasn’t me” line when my stomach was upset. (You know that move, you’ve done it before, don’t pretend.)
As I sat on my couch with a
Sharon Kleve, Jennifer Conner, Danica Winters, Casey Dawes