10 1 Habits How To Build Strong Post Pandemic Career During The Corona Virus Quarantine

The coronavirus is destroying the worldwide economy, it is wiping out entire industries, and it is obliterating careers. You may be someone who played by the rules your whole life, worked hard, studied hard, had a good career, and now you're staring at a screen, looking at nothing, not knowing where to go. In this video, I'm going to cover 10.1 habits on how to build a strong post pandemic career. And I don't have all the answers. These are my attempts to try to make some sense of coherence in the world so that we can all navigate it together. Habit number one. You must define yourself as number one in something. I don't mean being a braggart, walking around, sticking your chest out, beating on it and being full of braggadocio. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about finding a particular subject matter that you are fascinated by, that you know a lot about, where you help other people. This could be anything. And folks, let me tell you, this is not some video about how you need to become an Internet marketer or about affiliate marketing or SEO. I'll leave that to others. This is for real people just like you. So the first habit you've got to go deep into one particular area and own could be as a 10th grade history teacher. It's fine to be a 10th grade history teacher, but what if your whole school district goes out of business because everyone there has moved away because there are no jobs? You've got to be prepared. That means reading about your subject matter long after you got out of college, reading every day, thinking about it, coming up with new ideas, becoming truly an expert. You may pick one period of history, say the 1920s in the United States, where you become the expert on that. And then you write books about it, you do podcasts about it, you create training materials for other teachers. But whatever it is, you have got to become number one at something. I highly recommend you read Seth Godin's book, Linchpin. You need to become the linchpin not just of an organization, but of your industry. Your business may go kaput. The corporation you work for may go out of business. But if you are the linchpin of knowledge and expertise, you will be in demand. There will be room for you. Habit number two, you must become a media company. What do I mean by that? Do you have to blog 24 hours a day? Livestream your whole life, your private life? No. I don't want you to do anything that's cheesy or makes you feel uncomfortable. But if you own a cell phone. You already have a multimedia production studio right here. You can make videos, audios, podcasts. You can do blog posts, you can tweet. You can create content on a daily basis that relates to your niche. Again, I'm not talking about just SEO marketers and computer programmers. You might be a blacksmith, okay, not a huge demand in most cities for that. But if you are the world's best blacksmith and you can make horseshoes the way they did in the 19th century and the 17th century, and designer horseshoes, you can talk about that, you can make videos about that, you can blog about that, you can become the expert. So if a Hollywood producer wants to have an authentic horseshoe from the 19th century, they have to come to you. It's not going to happen unless you tell the world what it is you do. Now, you may be thinking, tj, I don't have time for all that. I got to figure out quickly how to make a living, how to somehow get a career going. It can be as simple as this, focusing every day on your area of expertise and then just answering one question, giving one insight where you talk for 15, 20, 30, 45 seconds every single day. I make a short video, less than 60 seconds, where I talk about good habits. I do it in one take, less than 60 seconds. I post it on 12 different social media accounts. The whole thing takes me less than 10 minutes. If you really want to build a career for the post pandemic career, you've got to start thinking about yourself and as a media company, you've got to create content. You don't want to do video, fine, do a podcast. You don't want to do a podcast, create a blog every day. But you've got to be putting your ideas out into the world that are helpful to others. The need to communicate your expertise is what is crucial. It's not enough to have good ideas. You have to communicate those ideas on a daily basis. That is what is going to give you a strong foundation for your career in the post pandemic world. Habit number three, you must be able to exist in a purely digital format. Who knows when this particular pandemic will end and we can go out and get close to people again. And maybe it's fine this summer, but the fall happens and social distancing comes back. What if there's another virus that comes out a year from now, two years from now, and we're back cloistered in our homes again? Are you prepared, you are not truly prepared to have a post pandemic career Unless you can exist and make money just from your own home, this means you've got to have ideas in your head. You have to have valuable insights. That's why it's frankly not enough to be a great driver. Now, I'm not knocking drivers, but you could be a driver a hundred years ago with no formal education and earn a living in this modern era. That might not happen. But if you are a driver who also can coach other people how to drive, how to be a driving teacher, instructor, how to advise car companies making automatic cars know what drivers are thinking. If you can give people advice on what are the best cars to purchase, what are the best electric cars to purchase. Now you've got ways of monetizing expertise. Now you have content you can share on your LinkedIn page, Twitter, on YouTube. So you really have to think in digital terms. If you develop a reputation of being an expert on something, people can call you and pay you money for your consulting time or your content or your online course. If you have a business model that depends on you being face to face with people or traveling to people, you could be in big trouble if there is another lockdown. What's going to happen? Now this affects people whether they're blue collar workers or surgeons. If you're a surgeon and all you can do is perform surgery on people and you're not an expert on the problems in a current epidemic, you might be useless. But if you can write books on your particular area of medicine, if you can create online training tools for other surgeons who want to do what you do, if you can advise doctors in other parts of the world through Skype, video conferencing, consulting, now you're going to have a strong career and it could be on the other, you could be a bartender if you're just a bar, and I don't mean this in any condescending way, but if you are a bartender and your restaurant's closed, you don't have plan B, that's it, you're going to have no money. But if you are a bartender and you think of yourself as a true expert, as someone who is thinking about new mixes for drinks, how to make them look pretty, if you're creating books on the most beautiful cocktails in the world, you're self publishing those. If you're having a podcast now, you are existing in a pure digital form. It might not be as good as doing in person as well as digital, but you can exist, you can support yourself and you can make money in a purely digital format. Habit number four you must ride technology waves in real time. No, you don't have to know how to program. Everyone in the world cannot be a computer programmer. You don't have to know complex computer languages. But if everyone else in your industry is communicating on Skype and conducting meetings on Webex, you have to know how to do it. You can't say, well I'm not a techie. The instant kiss of death for careers in the post pandemic world is to say I'm not a technology person. I'm not. That's a signal to others, you are lazy. You have to learn technology. You have to learn how to use all the technology that everyone is using in your field and get a little bit ahead. You can't get a little bit behind or you will become obsolete. Habit number five, you must do the hard stuff. This relates to habit four. You've got to learn technology as soon as it's available and get a little bit ahead of the game. You've got to be in front, not behind. This applies to absolutely everyone. Because the old barriers to entry of professions, educational degrees, diplomas, they are not going to mean as much as the new world. What really matters is can you accomplish hard tasks that others don't want to do. For example, in my world of online training, if you go to Amazon and look at a subject matter like public speaking, there are 20,000 books. But if you go to the number one online platform training and type in public speaking, you'll see there are only a couple hundred public speaking courses online. It's simply harder to make a course using video and multimedia than it is to write a book. You are going to have to learn how to do hard stuff. That's where the added value is. That's what people are willing to pay for and to pay just for your time to talk to you over the phone or through Skype or through email. Habit number six, you need multiple sources of revenue. Now I know what you're thinking. Anytime I hear someone talk about multiple sources of revenue, multiple revenue sources, watch out. It's usually some scam artist trying to tell you you can become rich in 30 days if you just give them $3,000 for their Internet marketing program. No, that's not what I'm talking about. What I am suggesting is that you can't put all your eggs in one basket. Look at the difference between a chef who or cook who works at Waffle House versus a well known chef. A cook is told we're shutting down Waffle House today, that cooks income goes to zero if you are a well known chef, even if you have to close your own restaurant, there's multiple sources of revenue for you. You can get money from your books, you can get money from product endorsements, you can get money from speeches. You can get money from all sorts of other endorsement deals. Your revenue isn't dependent on one source of income. For years I made the majority of my income by doing improper training workshops and speeches. Now I get the vast majority of my income through online training. Now I had both. I'm not giving up one if it comes back, but it doesn't really matter to me. It's not going to affect my standard of living because I have multiple sources of revenue and I generate all the revenue I need for my family through purely online content, online courses. So you've got to figure out multiple sources of revenue without spreading yourself too thin. The more they can be focused on one area of expertise where you are devoted as an expert, the better. Habit number seven, Prepare to fail into the future. You've always got to be planting seeds for the future. You don't know what will work and you don't know how long it will take. The problem most people have though is they don't plan for the future. They just say, I'm going to show up today at my job because it was there yesterday. I got paid yesterday, so I'll get paid today for doing more or less the same thing. That attitude doesn't work. If you want a strong foundation for a post pandemic career, you've got to constantly experiment with things, get ahead of the curve. For example, I started online training in 1998. I basically failed for 20 years. I made virtually no money for 20 years. Now, that wasn't all I did, but I spent a part of my time creating online training courses. I failed for 20 years and then a couple of years ago it really became very, very profitable and has skyrocketed since then. Now, am I a genius? No. I have failed at so many things. I failed at countless TV shows, radio shows, podcasts. But the one thing I have done is constantly experiment. Thinking about the future. That is what you need to do. Habit number eight, go outside your comfort zone. Don't be afraid to try new things. You don't have to stick in one particular genre, one particular niche your entire life. If you have one that's profitable, dig deep, go further, but occasionally try other niches. I've been spending increasing amounts of my time in the online training world focusing on my core niches of how to build strong habits in public speaking and media training courses. But I experiment from time to time as well. Six months ago, I decided to create a class on how to declutter your home and office. Now, when my wife first heard this, she couldn't stop laughing. You. She thinks of me as very messy. I don't. But you know what? It doesn't really matter. I studied more, I thought about it, I came up with my own ideas and I created a course on how to declutter your own home and office. And it's not beating Marie Kondo, but it is number two to Marie Kondo and has made thousands of dollars at this point. It's not because I have any unique talents that you don't have. It's because I specifically looked around and decided I'm going to try something I have an interest in outside of my comfort zone. And if I fail, so what? That is the attitude you need to have if you're going to have strong post pandemic career habit number nine, rely on yourself. Now I'm not suggesting that we should turn our backs on our neighbors, friends, family members, members of our community, our state, our country, our nation and the world. What I am suggesting is you have to realize you cannot depend on depend on a big corporation or even a big government to take care of you. If you want a strong post pandemic career, you have to rely on yourself. That means every day you have to learn more. Every day you have to get better about really delivering value to other people in every format, perhaps in person, but also digitally. If you really take this attitude that you're gonna have to support yourself forever, it changes your perceptions. You don't simply tune out and turn off at 5pm you don't just say oh weekends for me to do nothing but watch sports. That will no longer be your attitude because you realize you have to build yourself as an institution that is going to last decades. That leads to habit number 10. You must plan the ultimate retirement plan. We've seen how the pandemic can easily destroy 401k plans. Net Worths can vaporize your plans of getting your 401k up to a certain amount of money at age 62 and then traveling and living the so called good life for another 30 years gone. You can no longer count on that. You can no longer count on the stock market. You can no longer count on a pension fund necessarily if you're lucky enough to have one of those. You can no longer count on the revenue from your rental property either. There's only one true retirement plan that is going to help you in the new era. And that is the retirement plan of you counting on yourself to do valuable things to help other people as long as you are alive and as long as your brain is working. Now, I'm not suggesting you have to do some job you don't want to do, going around being someone picking up garbage and having to cut yards, even though you don't want to do that, you're physically not able. What I'm talking about is if you become a world class expert, whether it's stamp collecting, whether it's a type of brain surgery, whether it's medieval history, whether it is SEO marketing, and you get better and better at that skill and you're producing content on it daily and you're interacting with people who value your ideas, you will be able to make money from that for the rest of your life. I plan on working every single day until I die. Now, I take plenty of vacations too. But I plan on being productive as a human being for many reasons. Number one, it's fun. Number two, it keeps me alive and active. But number three, it's the ultimate retirement plan. I plan on making more money per year when I'm 65 than I am now. I plan on making more money when I'm 75 than when I'm 65 because I plan on making more online courses, more books, more content. If you really want to have an ironclad retirement, there is nothing better than investing in yourself so that you can create more and share it with the world and charge for what you've created. That way you have continual streams of revenue and you're not dependent on the stock market being up or down or the property values of your house going up or down. Your revenues will continue ideally long after you're gone. And now for the bonus habit 10.1. You need a system for programming yourself to follow these 10 habits. The easiest system I know and what I use is the selfie speak program. I simply take my cell phone and I go to the audio memo record and I tell myself every single day the habits that I want to have in order to give myself a strong career. Every single day I listen to an audio where I tell myself tj, you read at least one hour a day on your subject matter. Niche of habits tj. Every single day you're going to create one new video giving people tips. I tell myself that I don't just think about it once. I don't go to a workshop and get all hyped up and forget about it. I take all the principles that I want to impose on my career and I record what those messages are once, and then I listen to it every single day. The Power of Repetition the Selfie Speak program can help you take these nice fuzzy concepts, these abstract ideals, and turn them into daily habits through the power of repetition. Thanks so much. I hope you've gotten something out of this and changes are going to happen faster and faster. Some of what I say may be completely irrelevant in six months because the whole world has melted out. I don't know. But this is the best I can come up with right now. Based on on where we are at this moment, I'd love to hear from you. What tips do you have for others on how they can make their career stronger so they can survive the post pandemic career? Please leave comments below. Let me know. Let the community know what other tips you have. We'd love to hear from you. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for spending some time with me and good luck in surviving this. Number one Number two thriving in the long run by building a strong career. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you haven't already done so, please like this video, leave a comment and please please subscribe. If there's anything you found valuable here today, please share.