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Some Advice About Career Transitions · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to the Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're trying to figure out a pathway between where you are and where you want to go, you'll appreciate today's candid question from email subscriber Preston.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what he writes.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dear Kent, I've worked in retail for over two decades, but have been considering a transition away from that line of work to bookkeeping, which is something I can do on my own schedule.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's also a skill I've developed in my current retail job.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I recently sat in a room with a small group of Christian business owners and shared my idea about making this job transition.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was quickly rebuked for mixing personal and business goals and for focusing on a goal that gave me a financial reward instead of having a service-first mindset.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Needless to say, I'm now 70% into my QuickBooks Pro Advisor certification and feeling pretty deflated.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I understand the need to serve people, but if I serve them for free, then I defeat the purpose of even calling it a business.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: One of my big reasons for wanting to have a bookkeeping business is not only to make more money, but also to protect my writing time.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: However, I can talk about the worlds I'm creating in my stories for hours, but I honestly don't share that same enthusiasm for bookkeeping.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm conflicted about which direction to go.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Preston, thanks so much for sharing your story here and being vulnerable, especially and letting me use this question here on the podcast and in my email.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is a multi-layered question, so I'm going to do my best to answer this in a succinct way, but also do justice to several parts of your question that you mentioned.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that I want to mention is that you should never ever feel guilty about wanting to make more money.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you set yourself up with a better opportunity for supporting your family or creating a better future for yourself, I say go for it.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing in the world that's wrong about making money.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a huge fan of it because having money is a good thing.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, second of all, I want to mention that there's no conflict between serving people and making money.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a big fan of doing both things because when you serve people, and I'm I'm putting that word serve in quotation marks, when you quote unquote serve people, that's really just a fancy way of saying that you're meeting a need of some kind.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the reality is that when you have more income, you have more options for serving people.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can give more, you can hire other people, and you can be generous in new and interesting ways.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I worked at a Christian college for many years as a professor, and a pretty good chunk of our budget, as I understood it, came from ordinary people who faithfully supported our college financially.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: However, a large percentage of those funds that people gave came from a small number of wealthy people who had been financially successful.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, those kind of people either are landowners and sometimes they'll sell their land and give the proceeds to a school or a church or some type of nonprofit organization, or they're business owners or entrepreneurs who have done really well financially in their business.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna tell you, I was always really grateful for those generous people who helped keep our school running because not only did they keep our school running, which is a good thing, but they helped keep me employed and keep my family fed.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was always extremely grateful for those people who were really generous, but they had money that was beyond what a typical person who supported our college would have had.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I was really grateful that those people were financially successful.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need more people like that in the world who are financially successful, who can give, who can donate, who can support, and who have options in life.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, third, I want to say this, and this really gets to the heart of your question.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds to me like building a bookkeeping business will get you one step closer to your goal of writing more.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it could give you more flexibility with your schedule, which is good, and also help you develop some skills as a business owner that you can directly apply to building your writing business over time if that's what you choose to do.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here's the way I look at it.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Life is a series of overlapping transitions.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty rare that we stop doing one big thing and the next day we start doing something else entirely from scratch.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Life is a process of things that overlap.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: We do one thing and then we overlap it with something else that starts off small and then it grows over time, and then eventually that thing that started off as a small thing grows into our full-time thing, and then we quit the job that used to be our full-time job.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I have gone through my whole career, honestly.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I am now 52 years old, and since I was in my 20s, this is how I've always approached my career.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've had my main thing, and then I've always had something else going on top of it, even from the time I was very young.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's just always the way that I have approached my career.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm still doing that.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I have my ghostwriting business, which is my main thing, and then I have my daily writer stuff, which is this podcast and coaching and my daily email.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm building all kinds of books and probably a couple of events next year around that.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, I have other little tiny things that I'm building on the side, which are way, way too early to mention here on this episode.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: But life is just a series of overlapping transitions.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I would recommend starting your bookkeeping business on the side and seeing if you can build it up over the next couple of years.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think the next year or two will be a really good testing ground, a laboratory, a laboratory of sorts, where you can see is this something you really want to build into full-time, or should it just stay something that's part-time in the background?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no right or wrong answer.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I really, really think it's important to test things first before you leap into them for full as a full-time thing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the cool thing is that as you build your bookkeeping business, and at if that's successful and if you transition into that, in those spare moments, you can still get a lot of writing done with focused energy.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as your bookkeeping business grows and you eventually leave your real leave your real retail job, potentially, I can't talk today for some reason.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I know why, it's because I haven't had any caffeine yet.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's why.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start that sentence over.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: As your bookkeeping business grows and you eventually leave your retail job, potentially, it's not like you're gonna magically have more time to write.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have to create that time very intentionally.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of a warning that I want to throw out there.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is just because you start your own business doesn't mean you're suddenly gonna have all this extra spare time.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's in fact the opposite.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you really love what you do as an entrepreneur or a business owner, it's gonna take more and more time potentially, and you're gonna really have to fight for that writing time.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: As weird as it sounds, I am literally a full-time writer, and I still have to fight for my own writing time within my schedule because I have a podcast, I'm doing events next year, I have a lot of ghostwriting clients, I'm doing all kinds of other stuff.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke at a networking luncheon yesterday, and that took a lot of time to prepare for that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got all kinds of stuff going on, and sometimes our writing time is the first thing that we squeeze out of our schedule.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we really have to fight for that time very, very intentionally.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how I approached the transition from my college job to being a full-time ghostwriter.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: For several years, I was teaching full-time and also building my side business, which eventually grew into full-time, but the whole time I was still writing for myself and producing a podcast as well.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I don't have any magic secrets for how to do this.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's a lot of work.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: You have to want building your business very badly.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you still want to write while you're doing that, you're gonna have to work quickly and efficiently and be really, really focused.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really know any other way to say that.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the bottom line here is that this only works if you are truly motivated to build your own business and doing something that you really enjoy day in and day out.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got to be honest, I'm a little bit concerned by the fact that you don't seem all that excited about bookkeeping.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I would recommend spending some time exploring why that's the case and figuring out if your lack of enthusiasm for bookkeeping is due to the type of work that bookkeeping is, or it's for some other reasons.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're just going through a stressful period and maybe you're feeling indecisive and trying to figure this out, whatever the case, um, I would spend some time exploring that.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, bottom line here is that I'm a huge fan of owning your own business and being independent.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots and lots of advantages to that.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And my as far as I can tell, and based on my own experience, that's definitely the case.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you're the only one who can ultimately answer whether you want to do this badly enough to make that transition work and stick it out for the long term.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I can only speak for my own experience, but I don't think I could ever go back to being an employee for somebody else again.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm way too independent, I'm way too opinionated about a lot of things, and I'm basically unemployable at this point.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And once you find some success as an independent business owner and you build some confidence in that arena of life, you probably are not going to want to look back.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in this case, I think that leaning into your bookkeeping business sounds like a great potential step toward your dream.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Preston, I hope this is helpful.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for the question.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a little bit of a longer episode.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I wanted to unpack these several things here because I think a lot of people are wrestling with these kinds of issues.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh to everyone listening, I appreciate you tuning in.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: As always, keep writing, keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.