Author, entrepreneur, and career coach Dan Miller returns to Connecting Faith to talk about small business start-ups, home-based businesses, and developing your entrepreneurial ideas into profitable service and fulfilling work. He takes your questions about getting started, next steps, and overcoming the obstacles that hold us back from pursuing our dream. It’s helpful encouragement from the author of No More Dreaded Mondays, and 48 Days to the Work You Love.
Dan is the President of 48 Days LLC. He writes regularly for multiple magazines, and also has his own weekly podcast.
Not everyone is cut out to be – or should be – an entrepreneur, but everyone should see the broad spectrum of work opportunities available to them.
No one should feel as though they’re trapped, needing to duplicate what they’ve done before.
One common barrier to realizing our vocational potential is being unwilling or unable to see anything outside our own sphere. Dan says that no one is really successful on their own, and that collaboration is one of the key elements to unlocking our full potential. He mentions the usefulness of attending seminars and keeping an eye on the most creative thinkers in the field in which you’re interested. We also need to be staying up with the big changes taking place in our economy.
Conversely, we do need to be able to look at ourselves objectively and decipher the things at which we’re best. Dan recommends defining our two to three most marketable skills. Then, when we’ve done that, he takes us through analyzing if there’s a market for our skills.
“There has to be an indication that there is a market readiness for it.”
An interesting moment in our conversation centers on product development. For an inventor or a marketer, you not only need to create a product, but you also have to create a value for that product.
