Review: Career Renegade

Do you want to make a great living doing what you love? I certainly do. The book Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields aims to help you achieve exactly that:

The simple truth is you can turn nearly any passion into a big, fat heap of money. However, it often requires mining aspects of those passions you never knew existed or bringing them to life in markets and ways that defy the mainstream.

I often write about the importance of passion for career (example), so I was excited when I received a review copy of the book.

Let’s look inside it.

Inside Career Renegade

There are four parts inside the book with a total of twenty one chapters.

Part 1. What Makes You Come Alive?

1. You Don’t Have to Be World Class to Make a World-Class Living

If you think creatively and work hard, you can make a great living from your passion without being a world class.

2. What’s Your Secret Passion?

To find your passion, you should look at your experiences. Then, select the ones that put you in the state of flow and allows you to be around the people and culture you like.

Part 2. What Kind of Renegade Will You Be?

3. Introducing the Career Renegade Paths

There are seven career paths you can choose to live your dream career which will be explored in chapter 4 to 9. The first two (in chapter 4) deals with finding opportunities in alternative markets or niche markets. The last five (chapter 5 to 9) deals with exploiting unsatisfied needs.

4. Turn Your Passion Loose in Unexpected Places

It may be difficult to earn a living if you just apply your passion in the common places. Instead, you should find different (often unexpected) markets where your passion is highly valued. Alternatively, you can narrow the existing market to find a promising submarket.

5. Got Information? Sell It!

One of the gaps you can exploit is information gap. What information do people want that you can provide?

6. Want to Teach? Expand Your Reach

Is there an educational gap regarding your passion? If there is, you can exploit the opportunity by teaching. With technologies you can reach much wider audience and leverage your time.

7. Exploit the Need for Stuff

Another gap you can exploit is the need of stuff. What stuff or gear do people need?

8. Exploit the Need for Community

People want to connect with like-minded people but perhaps the community doesn’t exist. You can become a community creator and bring people together.

9. Make It Easier for People to Do What You Love

You can also exploit access gap. Can you give people better access to the resources they need?

10. Planning and Protecting Your Vision

Depending on what you do, you might need to form a business entity and protect your creation with patents, copyrights, or trademarks. You also need to create a business plan.

11. Is the World Ready for You?

It’s not enough to have passion. You should be sure that there is a hungry market for it. In this chapter, there are a lot of specific techniques you can use to assess the market demand.

Part 3.How to Master Your Passion and Build a Worldwide Following

12. Are You Ready for the Renegade World?

You need to master your passion to be successful. Fortunately, there are a lot of free resources available on the Internet to help you learn. For better results, you should also invest money on your learning.

13. Launching Your Quest for Authority

Next to acquiring mastery, you need to demonstrate your mastery and thereby build your authority. Blogging and micro-blogging are two creative ways to do that.

14. Getting Social Online

You can also build authority using social media. Social media sites help you connect with other people and providing value through these interactions builds your authority.

15. Building on Blogging and Social Media

Besides blogging, micro-blogging, and social media, there are other tools that can help you build your authority. Two of them are podcasting and online press releases. Traditional media is also a good option.

16. Marketing that Won’t Break the Bank

Rather than relying on advertising for marketing, you should find ways to be remarkable and become a source of conversation.

Part 4. Let the Revolution Begin

17. Cultivate the Renegade Mind-Set

Having the right mind-set is essential because it fuels your actions. To cultivate the right mind-set, focus on success and not failure.

18. How to Be a Renegade without Ending Up Divorced and Penniless

When you decide that you want to switch career, you need to rally the support of the key people around you.

19. Don’t Do It Alone

Things will be much easier for you if you have the right people as your mentors. Invest your time in finding and nurturing relationships with them.

20. Hold On to Your Life Preserver Until You Can Swim

To make the transition smooth, you may need to live a double life for some time. Stay with your old career while building a new one.

21. Be Your Own Guru

Take the career that makes you come alive and be the person that you want to become.

Conclusion

Career Renegade is a powerful book on having a meaningful career. It covers every parts of the equation from finding your passion, finding the gap to make money, building your expertise, building your authority, cultivating the right mindset, and making the transition.

Furthermore, there are a lot of specific tips and techniques in each chapter to apply the principles. Chapter 11 for example, teaches you how to use tools like SEOBook, Google Trends, and Clickbank to assess market demand. Such tips help you take action directly rather than just reading.

Reading this book has been a rich learning experience for me. Having a career you love requires persistence and hard work, but a guide like this can save you a lot of time.