20. Make money from doing something you love

There is one blog, I learned today, that managed to convert itself from online self-publish to commissioned book to ITV series earning its author, I expect, a shed-load of money in the process along with some controversy and a touch of infamy. That blog was Diary of a Call Girl. The series was broadcast on prime time ITV and it starred Billy Piper who had just played the ever-so-wholesome girl-next-door assistant to our very own bastion of propriety, Dr. Who, so an interesting juxtaposition of roles. Billy Piper’s portrayal of the callgirl Belle de Jour in a series aired just after the watershed showed that prostitution had clearly gone mainstream. Now I hope in some shape or form to make some money from writing my blog but I’m not planning, yet, on writing about anything quite so contentious or steamy and there is also the small matter that my hobbies and pastimes are slightly more wholesome and a whole lot less interesting. But it was a useful and inspiring little snippet of information and at this point you are probably wondering about the source of this pearl of wisdom and exactly what sort of website I was trawling. As it happens it was a throw-away comment in a webinar about having the courage to do the work you were born to do rather than spending your life doing something that just pays the bills which we all know is the vast majority of us. Now I, like you, might normally dismiss such radical and new age notions as nothing more than an attempt to make us feel even worse about our daily drudgery at the office our misery compounded by being at the beck and call of some narcissistic and sadistic boss whose promotion perfectly fulfills the criteria of the Peter Principle (that's alarmingly like a rant). But this webinar was being hosted by Rachel Elnaugh of Red Letter Days fame and her guest was Nick Williams – entrepreneur, speaker and coach. Now I have a lot of time for Rachel not only because of her ability to bounce-back from something that would have sent most people into the Siberian wilderness of business collapse but that she took the time and effort to reply to a survey on women entrepreneurs I was doing for my MBA dissertation last year. And Nick Williams, rather than being some sound-bite popping smug lifestyle guru looking for acolytes was instead a warm, erudite and generous spirit who has walked the walk of doing the work you are born to do. The ninety minute webinar passed in what seemed like a jiffy and unusually for me I felt sufficiently engaged with the presenters and subject matter to pose a question for which I got some sound advice – give up the blog, go back to the day job, be nice to your boss. I josh, the advice was sound and useable and I shall put it into practice right away. For anyone interested in entrepreneurship I would recommend registering for Rachel’s future seminars at www.rachelelnaugh.co.uk and once I finish my blog for this evening I shall be going straight onto Nick’s website to download his free e-course Discover the Work You Were Born To Do at www.inspired-entrepreneur.com .

Now I think I have discovered the work I was born to do and it will be interesting to see if my sense of ‘coming home’ is borne out by Nick’s e-course when I download it. But what I know is that the large tracts of time on my volunteering project where I had nothing to do were easily and diligently filled by writing. In fact writing my blog became as compelling than the volunteer work I was doing and that desire to write, that itch to sit at my keyboard in front of my PC and put words down on paper doesn’t appear to be going away. In positive psychology there is something called ‘flow’ which expresses the notion that when we are using our signature or core strengths we are fully absorbed by the task in hand to the point where time seems irrelevant and nothing easily distracts us. It was while doing a short course on positive psychology through the Centre for Applied Psychology (CAPP) that I came across something called the VIA survey – the V.I.A stands for Values in Action. This short questionnaire, free at www.viasurvey.org, measures which strengths are those that we like to use everyday and which make us feel good when we do use them – the ones that put us in flow. My own top five strengths were interesting to see:

1. Love of learning
2. Curiosity and interest in the world
3. Humour and playfulness
4. Judgment, critical thinking and open-mindedness
5. Industry, diligence and genuineness

Writing my blog fulfills all these desires and I can tell you now, I am in flow, big time and have been for the last two and a half hours. And I feel great. Tell me though, please someone, how exactly can I make money from this blog without having to resort to Belle de Jour titillation?

No. 7 Have Dinner at the Ivy

The Ivy is a London pre- and post-theatre dinner institution where A list celebs rub shoulders with mere mortals such as you and I. Located at the point where two West End streets 

converge it is a snug and classy bar and dining room nestled behind a discrete little entrance with a doorman that appears to materialise out of the ether. It is highly likely you will miss it the first time you go - I did - and as a consequence I looked like a dimwit as I stumbled up and down the road in my vertiginous heels attempting to find the door. I had hoped to make a gracious and refined impression or at the very least be taken for some B list celebrity but as the doorman appeared like a genie from nowhere and guided me into the hallowed space my heels skidded on the impeccable Italian tiles and in an attempt to stay upright I launched myself headlong at the reception desk. The young beauty behind it smiled at me as if this was the kind of thing that happened with guests all the time. I knew that my ruse had been rumbled though because I got a table squeezed right up by the kitchen door. Ho Hum. The Ivy prides itself on it’s egalitarian approach to its customers and when I last ate there six or seven years ago, it is fair to say that the staff were as arrogant and offhand with me as with anybody else. Actually I say that as a pun, the staff were beautifully professional and impeccably behaved and I am sure they only slagged us all off afterwards. But really, the twice I have eaten there before, once at a very early evening table with my beau of the time and the second time with friends after a show I had been appearing in at a small theatre in Covent Garden the food and service were as good as you might hope. The Ivy www.the-ivy.co.uk according to its many and effusive reviews remains one of the best places to eat in London and what makes it enduringly and timelessly appealing is the fact that it serves good old fashioned or popular dishes made with ingredients we can all recognise and at a surprisingly affordable price. And it’s for that reason I suppose that when I went online to book a table I couldn’t get anything before 11pm between now and August 6^th and they weren’t taking bookings beyond that. Not to be deterred I rang them direct and spoke to a sexy voiced west coast American guy in the reservations team (so sexy I rang back and got his name, it’s Manny) and who laughed, nicely, when I tried my charm on him because I KNOW that they keep back a couple of tables just in case of a last minute booking by which ever flighty big name is in town. I knew I wasn’t a flighty big name, he knew I wasn’t a flighty big name but we both pretended for a moment and then he gently let me down and told me to ring back in ten days time. And that, I suppose, is what I shall have to do during which time I shall use my time wisely by practicing my impersonation of, well, flighty big names currently in circulation. Send suggestions please.

<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/j7awwfkwg3" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

No. 9 Climb a Mountain

There are four things on the NeverTooLate List that are going to take some thought and some serious application. No. 1 – Learn to fly, No. 11 – Write a book, and No. 20 – Make money from doing something you love. But No. 9 – Climb a Mountain, and my particular aim to climb Everest, to the summit, probably requires the most thought of all. For that reason I have started thinking about it now and to consider whether I should be spending my money on going to see a therapist instead, as I clearly have a screw loose. I have been following the blog of a bloke called Ian Rogers who lives in my local town of Market Harborough. His expedition team went out with Altitude Junkies www.altitudejunkies.com and the team summited at different points over 19^th/20^th /21^st of May. Ian got as far as the Hillary Step and couldn’t continue due to vision problems but made it down and you can read his personal account on a blog called Climb4Life at www.harboroughmail.co.uk. Reading Ian’s account alongside those of other climbers really serves to make you take this most significant of decisions very carefully. Ed Viesturs, one of only five people on the planet to summit all fourteen mountains over 8,000 feet and without supplemental oxygen to boot so a bit of an authority on the subject reckons that people need risk. Now for most people that doesn’t involve scaling Everest but we all take risks every day whether we think about it or not. I’ve come up with a list of ten risks I think people take all the time without giving the slightest thought to the consequences but which given the wrong place wrong time theory, could have a pretty troublesome outcome:

1. Driving through an amber light
2. Eating out-of-date food in the fridge
3. Holding a mobile phone to your ear instead of using an earpiece
4. Changing all your credit and debit cards to the same PIN number and then writing it down
5. Crossing the road without waiting for the ‘green man’ to flash
6. Going out/going to bede and leaving the oven/washing machine/tumble drier going
7. Not having the boiler and electrical appliances checked and serviced annually
8. Drinking more than is good for us
9. Being overweight and not taking enough exercise
10. Having sex without using a condom

Risk is relative I suppose and the more risk you take and the harder you push yourself without negative results then the more risk you’re inclined to take. That’s why some climbers start with Ben Nevis and end up on the  summit of Everest......

No. 13 Reading War and Peace

What weighs 1 lb 9 oz, has a volume of 440 cubic centimeters and can double as a door stop or a paperweight? You guessed it, a paperback copy of War and Peace. Written by Leo Tolstoy during what can only have been a particularly long period of insomnia, it is allegedly one of the classics that every one should read in their life time. ‘Love and battle, terrors and desire, life and death. It’s a book that you don’t just read, you live’ says the rather gushing and flamboyant acknowledgement on the cover from Simon Schama. What’s the bet he hasn’t even read it? I tried it once and gave up and that’s saying something. There are probably only a handful of books I’ve given up reading over the course of my forty odd years and War and Peace is one of them along with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (what WAS all the fuss about?) and A.S. Byatt’s A Biographers Tale which was, in my humble opinion, a completely self-indulgent and unreadable bit of flaptrap. I found the Old Testament of The Bible more entertaining. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve read novels by all these esteemed writers before and have been completely absorbed and draw in but it just so happens that in every novelists career there is obviously a bummer that only gets there because you have a ‘name’ and these happen to be those. And who wants to sit reading a novel feeling that your brain cells are draining out through your nasal cavities? Not me. At the time I discard novels such as these I start to ruminate on the literary wonders of Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford. But only very, very fleetingly. But back to War and Peace, wayward Leo and his rather consistent and over exhuberent libido. Leo Tolstoy was born in Central Russia in 1828. Now Russia is rather a large place, in fact the largest country in the world. At 6,592, 771 sq. miles it is just under twice the size of the United States. Being born in “Central Russia” doesn’t exactly pinpoint Leo Tolstoys early beginnings very precisely at all. But I suppose given his rather dissolute youth not letting people know where to find him might have actually been a bit of an advantage. Tolstoy studied Oriental languages and law at university – a very, very early sign of forward thinking but just about 180 years too early. He joined the army in 1851 and found himself mobilised and in the throes of the Crimean War before he knew what was happening. Luckily for us (ever optimistic, I’ve not finished the book yet) he survived but perhaps not so luckily for his wife Sophie with whom he went on to have thirteen children and hence the comment about libido. Maybe that’s what war does for you – gives you this urgent desire to repopulate. Anyway, apparently this ultra-large family brought him great happiness (not sure about his wife) and led to his voluminous and creative output. Just being practical, I wonder if in fact he felt the need to bury himself away behind locked doors BECAUSE he had thirteen children, but just call me cynical. The preface in the book fails to mention his contribution to the household chores but after all this was nineteen century Russia so perhaps I’m asking too much. But whatever the situation, utopian or not, he graced us with two great novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) the latter of which I have read more than once and which I enjoyed very, very much so there is hope still for W&P.

I make my initial foray into the book by browsing the maps on page 1375 because that doesn’t require a huge amount of intellectual energy and I can play a silly game with myself by pretending I’ve finished it already. Map 1. shows the geographical location of the 1805 campaign, map 2. shows Austerlitz (where?), map 3. the 1812 campaign (ah ha, so there was more than one) and the final map is a kind of mish mash of lines and shaded areas which apparently shows the proposed and actual positions of the French and Russians at Borodino. I find myself yawning and start thinking about a cup of tea and a chocolate brownie but I have been applying myself for less than five minutes and so give myself a stern talking to for being such a lightweight. However the tea and chocolate brownie wins out. Back in front of the book I turn to page 1372 which sets out the key characters and historical figures which feature in W&P. I have forgotten that in Russian classical novels the characters always have more than one name and I have no idea why. But Pierre Bezúkhov, the son of Count Kiríll Bezúkhov, is also known as Pyotr Kirillovich or Pyotr Krillych. Now just will someone explain that to me? But whatever the reason it means you have to be alert and engaged for large tracts of the text and as I tend to read in bed at night by that time my brain is only half awake if I am lucky and switching off fast. I may have to make up nicknames for the characters if I stand any chance at all of keeping up. Next I turn to the section called On War and Peace which is almost a book explaining the book. I am not sure what value reading this will give me but I bumble through the first couple of paragraphs and find it really rather engaging and helpful. I wonder whether I have stumbled on something like one of those GCSE cheat sheets where someone has extrapolated enough facts and information to allow you to scrape through an exam without actually having read the book. I do hope so. But no, that’s not the spirit of the thing and I intend come what may to persist in this nevertoolate activity so that you, dear reader, may know once and for all whether reading W&P is worth giving up three days of your life for. Being conscientious can be so very wearing.

My NeverTooLate List

Today I printed off my list of NeverToolate adventures and stuck it to the wall in my office just above my To Do List and to the left of a large frame which holds a melange of photographs from my life. The pictures in the frame took a little while for me to choose when I sorted through my box of keepsakes and they are a combination of me on my own in various places - usually on some walking holiday somewhere like Ben Nevis at Easter 2002 or the Cares Gorge in the Picos Mountains in 2000 - or of me and groups of friends. Everyone is smiling for the camera ......... I wonder if one day I will be looking up at the same frame but with a photograph of me on top of Everest. This is both an exhilarating and overwhelming thought and one which makes me stop for a moment to really think about the things I have decided to tackle. It’s very easy to have good intentions and to think about things you would like to do, but quite another thing to actually achieve those things. This is uppermost in my mind as I’ve received an email telling me that a formal recommendation has been made to appoint me to the Doctoral Programme at Warwick and so instead of thinking about doing a PhD it is now becoming a reality. That means a day in Warwick every Thursday for the next three years and a bloody big paper to write at the end of it. I need to fully understand what a big undertaking this is, on top of everything else I want to do.