Part 2 of an interview with Barbara J Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job.
Buy the book: Making a Living Without a Job
Freelance Podcast 20: Making a living without a job - part 2 [ 23:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadAndy White: This is Freelance Adviser. Welcome to episode 20 of Freelance Adviser, and we’re back with part two of that interview with Barbara J Winter, author of Making A Living Without A Job. After hearing about putting passion into your work and finding the work that you love, we moved on to the future of freelancing.
Now, here in the UK, we’re seeing a lot of people turning to freelancing. I think possibly due to the way the economy’s going at the moment, it’s sort of forcing them into a new reality, if you like. Is this something you’re seeing in the US as well? Is this a trend that’s being mirrored across the pond?
Barbara J Winter: Well, it’s interesting because you would think so. I have been seeing some stories in the New York Times and elsewhere about people who became accidental entrepreneurs. I have heard from a number of people who have been afraid to quit their jobs; who lost their jobs and started their own business. So, we’re seeing a lot of people, who thought that they were just supposed to get a job and stick with it their whole life, who suddenly are really swimming and have no idea what to do next.
But, where we’re seeing a real change in thinking is with the younger generation and I’m finding this quite fascinating: that just in the last – even before we started having huge unemployment numbers here in the US – I’ve been seeing stories about how many college students today say that they intend to start their own business when they graduate. And they’re not taking business classes in college because the curriculum still is really designed to create corporate employees. So, it’s about – going to work for corporation is what the business departments are talking about: not about doing something on your own. So, a lot of kids are starting little businesses in college and, of course, the Internet is a huge contributor to all those things that are going on.
But, kind of slowly and gradually, I’m participating in something that I invented actually. We’ve been having a lot of job fairs around the country and lots of them in Las Vegas because unemployment here has been very, very high. So we have a lot of job fairs where people come – like 5,000 people show up – and there may be employers with 200 job openings. It’s kind of an exercise in futility, but we’re going to be running something in Denver in the spring called an ‘Un-job Fair’, which is going to be a whole day to introduce people to the idea of self-employment. Maybe people who haven’t actually thought about it but – really kind of demystifying some of the things about what it takes and what’s involved and how people can get started without a huge investment and that sort of thing: intellectual capital instead of the old way of pounds and dollars. So, I’m very excited about this and I think we can replicate it in other cities. I think it’s going to open the dialogue a little bit more.
But people have to be ready: this is something you kind of grow into and sometimes that readiness comes from being shown what the possibilities are and helping them see how they have something to contribute. For most of us, there’s a process like I went through where we have ideas, discard them until we really connect with the thing that just makes our heart sing and we’re like, “I’ve got to try this! I just know it’s a good idea!”
Andy: What do you think the future holds? Do you think we’ll all be freelancing in the future?
Barbara: Oh, gosh, I hope so! You know, Tom Peters talked about this years ago, and I thought it was so interesting because what he said was that more and more and more, work was going to look like the movie business and, essentially in the movie business, everybody is self-employed. You just have a couple of hundred people that all get together and build this film and then they disperse and sometimes they work together again on another project. But, he said – Tom Peters said – he thought that large corporations are going to function more that way, where more and more of us would be independent contractors and we would work on projects and then move on and work on other projects and that sort of thing.
It’s still – the percentage of people who are self-employed is still quite small. I tell people, “You’ve got to know, going into this; you’re volunteering to be in a minority and, consequently, don’t expect everyone around you to understand your decision and your choice because a lot of people aren’t even thinking anything like this.” We who came here after – were born after – the second world war have been conditioned to think about working for somebody else, not ourselves. But it gets easier every day. And it gets easier partly because we have better tools for being self-employed than ever before. I mean, technology has opened astonishing doors for people.
But even more importantly, as more and more of us are doing it and sharing what we’ve learned with other people, it gets easier and easier. I did a – we have an organisation here called Junior Achievement, which theoretically teaches kids about free enterprise, although it has evolved from the entrepreneurial organisation that once was. They go into schools and talk to kids about having their own business. I was a volunteer and taught a group of fourth graders – so, kids who were about ten years old – about – for six weeks I went in for about an hour a week and talked to them about what it meant to have your own business. And the first day I asked the kids – told them what I did – and said that I had my own business but I don’t have a store; I don’t even have an office, I work at home; I travel a lot with my business and told them about it. And then I asked the kids, “How many of you know anyone – do any of you know anyone who has a home-based business?” About two thirds of them raised their hand. I thought, ten years ago we wouldn’t have seen that response. I thought, that is so powerful because if you grow up seeing this, it doesn’t become – it doesn’t seem like such an oddity.
I think that more and more people are thinking about the impact of their own work on their children’s lives and whether or not they’re setting an example of doing joyful work for their children or if they’re sending the message that work is a drag but you’ve got to do it anyway.
So, there are a lot of factors, I think, that are coming into changing this, but in the meantime, those of us who are joyfully jobless are having such a good time that we’re just not paying much attention to all these things that people are wringing their hands over.
Andy: What are you working on now? Can you tell us a little bit about your various coachings that you do?
Barbara: Well, I am working primarily on special events. I think that’s my favourite thing to do: is to really work with people over a two, three-day period. One of the things I got really fascinated by – even though it’s something that comes very naturally to me, but… – something I got very interested in a couple of years ago was using storytelling to market our businesses. What really jarred me was looking at peoples’ websites and looking at how boring most of the bios were of the people running the website. I thought, most people don’t know how to tell their own story and they don’t even know what the best stories are. So, I started doing a three-day event called Compelling Storytelling, which has been wonderful fun.
Then I started a new event this year that – we ended up doing it three times because it was so incredibly powerful – called Follow Through Camp. The purpose of Follow Through Camp was for people to come with a project that they really wanted to get to but had been procrastinating about and to really develop a plan with witnesses of what they were going to do next. And so – and also, just give people tools for, ‘how do you bring an idea out of your head into real life?’ A whole process for doing that. So, I’m working on both those things but, the thing that’s really been calling to me: I do a seminar called How To Support Your Wanderlust, which is about how to create a portable business. It came out of my experience and my desire to travel and also get paid to do it instead of paying to do it. So, I’m really working on developing the How To Support Your Wanderlust thing and I think that’s going to be a big focus of mine next year.
I’m working on gathering all the things I’ve written on that subject and might do an e-book, might do an actual book, for all I know. And then the storytelling, so… Kind of those two things are really high on my list. And then the un-job fair that I mentioned before about introducing people to the joyfully jobless world.
Andy: You do some online seminars as well, don’t you Barbara?
Barbara: I do. I do teleclasses and how I even got into that is kind of funny. I was participating in a seminar with Barbara Sher – who’s a very popular writer and teacher here in the US – and we had this four day event in Colorado and at the end of the event, Barbara was going round the room asking everybody what they were going to do when they got home from the seminar and completely out-of-the-blue; without any premeditation, I said, “I’m going to do my first teleclass and it’s going to be How To Support Your Wanderlust.” We had a lot of people in the class that said they wanted to travel. At that time, I had never taken a teleclass and I had no idea how you ran one, but I had 65 witnesses, so I was committed!
I was very nervous about it because I love to be in a room full of people and, you know: just have that interaction and see people’s body language and have all that fluidity that you have in a room and I just thought, I can’t imagine just sitting on the phone giving out information. But I discovered that I really enjoyed doing it and I also was astonished that I could just be sitting on my couch and really comfortable and making money! So, it had a lot advantages and then about – I don’t know: sometime last – this year, we started recording the teleclasses, which is wonderful for people who – because I do them early evening in Las Vegas, which is, in your part of the world, the middle of the night – and I would have people who would stay up until one o’clock in the morning to be on a teleclass, but now they don’t have to: they can register and get the audio download the next day. They can have the information even if they can’t show up in person. That’s worked out really, really well and also had made it possible for people who wanted the information. And I do things that aren’t the same things I do in a classroom setting or a meeting room setting, so. It’s just added another whole dimension to what I do.
Andy: So, if UK freelancers would like a flavour of your seminars I guess they need to go to the website and register. Is that right?
Barbara: Exactly. They can go to joyfullyjobless.com. They can sign up for my email list. I schedule teleclasses usually two or three weeks out before I do them. I look at my calendar and say, “Oh yes, I’m going to be home for a couple of days. Let’s throw some in.” And so the best way to find out about the classes is to be on my email list because they don’t get announced very far in advance. The emailings also have resources and articles that are useful to people who are making a living without a job. That’s a good starting point.
They can also look on my website for the audio downloads of classes that have already been done but are available. That’s another option.
Andy: Now, Barbara: the best question is always at the end. What’s the one question that you never get asked that you’d love to answer?
Barbara: You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I would say, the question nobody ever asks me is, how can I raise entrepreneurial children?
Andy: Ah!
Barbara: I would love to get in that conversation with parents. And nobody has ever asked me that.
Andy: Well, I’ll ask you now if you want! How do you raise entrepreneurial children? It’s a good question!
Barbara: I started my first business when my daughter was five and went off to kindergarten and I was really clear about the fact that I wanted her to see me working joyfully. So, I involved her in my business as much as I could, like, if I was sending out a newsletter, she would help me put the labels and the stamps on. Sometimes, if I was doing a talk, I would bring her along so she could see me talking in public. It was just a kind of integral part of our life and I ran my business from home, her father ran his business from home, so she just saw that happening. And when she was in college – and I wrote about this in my book – she called me up, I think by her third year of college saying, “You’ve ruined me. All my friends are going on job interviews and writing their resumes and I can’t do that.”
I said, “Well, I know: I did that on purpose.” She went through this kind of conflict because her vision of going to college was to go learn things; not learn to work for somebody else. She was out of sync with her classmates. But, it’s all paid off and now I have a granddaughter who’s five and I’ve written an article about a little business that Zoë started a few months ago doing books: she writes stories and illustrates them and then we sell them. That has been quite a hilarious operation.
But it really is so interesting to see how Zoë already thinks entrepreneurially and she’s only five years old. I was visiting them around Halloween and they were going to have a garage sale. Zoë got busy cleaning out her toys and clothes she’d outgrown, and got them in a big pile and got them all ready. Last week, I asked her how the garage sale had gone and she said, “I made $39,” then she told me what she had bought with it. I talked to my daughter afterwards. She said, “No, she actually made twice as much,” but half the money got put away for her to buy Christmas presents, so Zoë was only thinking of this $39.
It’s very interesting because this is one of the big, big changes of learning to think like an entrepreneur and not an employee. An employee, if you talk about – here’s a good example, Andy let’s take a trip to Las Vegas. An employee will look in their bank balance and say, “I can’t afford to do this right now.” An entrepreneur will say, “That is a fabulous idea! What can I do to finance this project?” So it’s a very different thing, and Zoë – who at the age of five – already understands that. She sees a real connection between the work that she does and the money she generates and the goals that she has for herself. That’s just thrilling to me that she’s growing up with that; that kind of thinking. She’s not going to have to un-learn all the junk that most of her elders had to un-learn in order to succeed.
Andy: It’s a wonderful story.
Barbara: But I’d like to that happen in more families.
Andy: Yes.
Barbara: I have a guy who does my CD production and he – originally I met him when he worked for a large company and then he went to a smaller company and then finally, he went out on his own. When he called to tell me he was on his own and hoped to have my business still, I said, “Do you have a studio?” He said, “Well I’m working at home.” I said, “Do you realise what an impact that’s going to have on your kids?” And I remember one day he was going to deliver some – an order to me – and he said that, “We’re on our way to the pizza place.” He had his kids with him, and I was like, this is so wonderful! The accidental role model I call him. And I think as more adults become entrepreneurial and are doing it with a sense of joy, it’s going – we’re going to have a whole generation of kids who just assume that work and pleasure are – can be one in the same, which is completely opposite of the message I got about work growing up.
Andy: Well, Barbara, it’s been fantastic talking with you. Just before we sign off, where can people go to find out about you on the Internet?
Barbara: Joyfullyjobless.com.
Andy: And where can people get the book from?
Barbara: I think you can get it from Amazon UK.
Andy: I think you’re right actually.
Barbara: I had a letter – an email – from someone in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, and I asked her where she’d got it and she said she had got it from there and I meant to check and I didn’t unfortunately. But I also – if that isn’t true – you can also order it from my website and I will personally autograph it and send a copy out to you. It costs a little bit more because of shipping but, it – we will find a way to get this wonderful book in people’s hands.
Andy: That’s a terrific offer. Now that’s – I think that’s at www.barbarawinter.com I believe, isn’t it?
Barbara: Well, joyfully jobless is my newer website; barbarawinter.com is just my original website and there isn’t much on that website. Joyfullyjobless.com is where all the good stuff is –
Andy: Okay, so that’s where people need to go to get your book is it, if they want a signed copy?
Barbara: Either one, yes.
Andy: Fantastic. Well, Barbara Winter, author of Making A Living Without A Job, thank you very, very much indeed.
Barbara: Thank you, thank you.
