NickVenturella.com 8-31-17

NickVenturella.com | GrowLoop.com | NickVmusic.net  | AutismHR.com

I've been thinking about what makes people feel satisfied and fulfilled in their work. It's hard to do anything for the majority of your life and love every single minute of it.  However, if you can find something that you like and can tolerate more often than it displeases you then you're moving in the right direction. Often people are able to identify things they're passionate about, which can provide great motivation for accomplishing things related to that passion. Finding one's passion doesn't seem to be the issue. Unfortunately, it's much harder to identify the intersection of where that passion can be reasonably compensated that is problematic. In other words, how do you make money doing something you love? For some, it's really a matter of looking at your current situation and with a few tweaks of your perspective realizing that you actually are using skills related to and/or intertwined with your passion in your day-to-day job.Unfortunately, sometimes the grind of our day-to-day profession blinds us to the fact that we actually are engaged in work that can be fulfilling. That's not always the case though. In many cases people are in a job to earn a paycheck and really nothing more. In these cases there feels like a very large separation between one's passion in their personal life and what they have to do to pay their bills. The utopia is that you are following your bliss and earning a livable wage engaged in work that aligns with your passions and interests.  So regardless of your situation, how can you strive for the utopia? The answer is self-examination, research and action.Self-examination:You have to be aware of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like, what you value as well as knowing what you’re passionate about.One really great way to do this is simply by writing. Grab a pen and a notebook and jot down an inventory of all the things you value, like to do, don’t like to do and anything else you can think of that would allow you to know yourself better. You may want to enage in this exercise over a period of time. For example, give yourself a month to write out your inventory, but be sure to work on it daily or near daily for that month. Research:Now that you are aware of who you are and what motivates you, do some research (use the internet, and/or even the library) about ways to further your skills within your area of passion.Research activities, jobs or work that can earn you income from your passion or some aspect of your passion (don’t get hung up on earning a full-time wage at this point).Then find a few people (likely online) who seem to already be where you want to be – those who share the same passion you do and have figured out how to earn a living wage from it.Connect with those individuals online through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, be honest about why you’re connecting with them and then ask them questions (where and when you can, make it worth their while to engage with you – promote them and what they do to your social networks to spread their message).The point here, is you’re gathering information. Give yourself a month or two to gather this info. Likely, your self-examination will also evolve as you uncover more and dive deeper into your research.Action:Finally, you have to take action to achieve anything in life, and if you’ve done the self-examination and research then you’ve already been taking action. The truth is self-examination never really stops, research never really stops and you can never stop acting upon the information you’re gathering and uncovering if you want to pursue your passions.However, for this Action section, I do want to point out that it’s useful to identify 8 to 10 items you can take action on within a month’s time that will push your progress forward toward your goal of pursuing your passion at a liveable wage, even if that progress is just 1% in the right direction from where you are today.If you write your actions down and track your progress on those actions from month to month, over time you’ll see how far you’ve ventured from where you started.…And whether or not your uptopian situation is ever met, progress is really the name of the game. If you can continually get closer to your ideal and enjoy with gratitude each step closer that you get, then you’ll feel far more satisfaction than not trying at all.-------------------Regarding another topic...I'm looking for your feedback on this newsletter. I want to ensure I'm making it more valuable for you.  That said, if you haven't already, please take a moment to follow the link to complete a short, 4 question survey (don't worry it's anonymous):https://goo.gl/forms/rrP09JwcQT3QHZwl1 Have a great rest of your week!Sincerely,Nick Venturella NickVenturella.comNickVmusic.net also MadVinyl.com (cover band)GrowLoop.comAutismHR.com