1. Don’t Freak
You may have left your job, but you haven’t left YOU! Your skills, abilities, experiences, connections, knowledge, work ethic and drive go with you. So, if you succeeded by applying these things to a field that held little interest to you, imagine what you’ll be able to achieve when you turn these same qualities loose on something you love.
2. Own Up To Your Passion
Step back and revisit what really makes you come alive. Most of us already know what it is. We’ve just buried it deeply, because we assume we can’t earn enough money doing it and think that, even if we tried, nobody would support the quest. A growing movement of Career Renegades now obliterates this assumption. Your job is to own up to what you really want to do, and then...
3. Research Your Passion
You may have a passion for something, but that doesn’t mean enough others share that same passion to make it worth building a career around. Get online and (a) search for people or companies who are already doing what you want to do and see if they need help, or (b) surf search engines, forums, social networks, magazines and more for evidence that enough other people share your passion to make serving them a profitable adventure.
4. Choose Your Renegade Path
Changes in technology and Internet access over the last five years have created a wide variety of renegade paths to profitability. They’ve made it possible to turn things you thought would never generate much cash into serious businesses and delivered a worldwide market of customers, clients and colleagues to your doorstep. Learn to leverage this technology and the world becomes a much richer place (in all senses of the word). With rare exception, making a great living doing what you love isn’t a matter of “if” anymore, it’s a matter of “how.” Yes, even in this economy. Here are a few examples that cost almost nothing to begin:
à Serve the community, information or education needs surrounding your passion. Even if there’s no clear “conventional” way to generate income around your passion, there is often a renegade way, and that renegade path very often requires little or no investment up front.
You might be able to tap the power of eBooks or paid membership sites to share information about your passion. You might rally people with a shared interest in your passion through blogging or forums, and then turn that into paid conferences, retreats or meet-ups—or bring products and services to your community’s attention in exchange for a commission on sales.
The beautiful thing is, you can get started for less than $50 and all you need is a computer, internet access and a desire to share information about your passion that others would value. And, with services that help you either for free or very little money, you don’t even need to be all that tech savvy to do it.
à Find people in business to partner with and share the income. Artist Ann Rea painted vineyards in Napa, and then partnered with the wineries to display her art in exchange for a percentage of the sales. This allowed her to launch a career as a very successful artist, spending almost nothing up front.
If your passion leads you to create a product or service, you can make an initial “test” batch of merchandise or sample services and ask people with existing foot traffic, communities or audiences to sell your merchandise on consignment or commission.
The point is, even passions that most people thought could never make money can often generate a lot of it if you throw off the chains of convention, think differently and take a renegade approach. And, if you’re willing to swap time for money, you can often do it from anywhere, spending almost nothing.
5. Speeducate Yourself
Whether you just need to brush up in the area of your passion or train intensively, you can now find massive amounts of information, education and even certification and licensing for nearly any pursuit online. Much of it is free or available at a very reasonable fee, and it’s there for the learning whenever your schedule permits.
à Blogs – There are now thousands of blogs that will let you learn anything from background to highly technical how-to information about nearly any field. For example, if you have a passion for photography or photo-editing, PSDTuts.com is packed with tutorials on how to create high-level professional editing effects in Adobe Photoshop.
à Open Courseware Consortium – Started by MIT, there is now a rapidly growing movement by a large group of top universities to place a huge volume of detailed courses and information online for free in an effort to help level the educational playing field. Participants include Berkley, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Yale, Johns Hopkins and many more.
à iTunes – Boasts thousands of free podcasts, many with tremendous, bleeding-edge educational content.