"Do what you love”...

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. 

Time. A typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all your non-career hours.

Impact. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

Identity. We tell people about our careers by telling them what we are.

Profits from your freelancing career can't simply be added into your personal bank account for the following reasons:

• Mixing personal and business finances can lead to an impossible task at tax season.
• You can be personally liable for lawsuits against your business.
• You'll fail to build business credit.

When you go freelance, open up a business checking account and get a business credit card.

Keeping track of contracts, invoices, overdue payments, and tax can become a burden.

There are several low-cost and free accounting and business management software options to help you stay on top of your finances. During tax season, it may be useful to make use of a professional accountant.

• Analyze your current skill set, training level, and accomplishments to date. 
• Write down the aspects of the work you liked and what tasks or things you disliked. 
• Explore different career options. Investigate new fields, industries and potential careers. 
• Interview individuals who work at those types of jobs, or in fields of interest to you. 
• Look at growth opportunities, salaries, benefits, education level and then determine the job title to target.

• Use your transferable skills. You have acquired abilities from previous positions.
• Use your strengths. Incorporate your talents into any position you choose to go after.
• Get new skills. Study the industry you want to enter. Take some courses so you can more quickly enter the field.
• Many people prevent their own success. They find excuses, or blame others, for their own failures or mistakes instead of learning and improving from them.

Anxiety activates the body’s fight or flight response, which sets off a number of uncomfortable reactions from sweating to tunnel vision. 

Calming yourself with grounding techniques (ways to stay in the present moment) can get you back in control. A few examples: meditation, stretching, calling a friend, or going for a walk.

While you can’t control most of your environment, make it a point to change what you can.

Get enough sleep, avoid too much caffeine, work by a window with natural light, and control noise in your workspace with headphones.

Here are Five Steps that can create your career:

1. Analyzing yourself.

2. Identify your industry

3. Improve your basic, universal skills

4. Start from Scratch

5. Continuous Self-Development

When you analyze yourself, instead of pondering over what you are not good at, find out your strengths and sharpen them, turning a good skill into excellence.

Popularized in Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog, the idea here is that you tackle the biggest, hardest, and least appealing task first thing every day, so you can move through the rest of the day knowing that the worst has already passed.

There are only 24 hrs in a day. You can fill it up with meaningless little tasks, or you can do the big stuff first, then the smaller stuff, and finally fill in the spare moments with the useless stuff.

Sit down tonight before you go to bed and write down the three most important tasks you have to get done tomorrow. In the morning, tackle them one by one in order of importance.

• Present: Talk a little bit about what your current role is, the scope of it, and possibly a recent achievement.
• Past: Tell the interviewer how you got there and/or mention a past experience that’s relevant to the job and company you’re applying for.
• Future: Continue with what you’re looking to do next and why you’re interested in this job.

Interviewers want to know how your answer about yourself is relevant to the position and company you’re applying for.

This is an opportunity to articulate why you’re interested and how your objective fulfills their goals. In order to do that, spend some time researching the company. If your answers resonate with them, it shows that you really understand the role.

To get someone to act on your advice, it’s going to mean giving up at least some of the credit for it. 

When the person receiving your advice feels like they had a hand in creating it—with guidance from you, the expert, of course—they’re far more likely to act on it.

In this case, you’re showing your work because it instills trust, and trust is critical for acceptance. 

When you show you work, the person you’re advising doesn’t have to take your recommendations on blind faith. They can see exactly how you got to your advice and buy into it along the way.