There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. Knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment toward what we want. Believe me, it’s a crazy, complicated journey. It’s trial and error. It’s opportunism. It’s quite literally, ‘Let’s try lots of this stuff and see how it works.’

Dame Anita Roddick 1942–2007, founder of The Body Shop

You should now have some idea of the talents you have to offer and a shortlist of options of how to put them to use. In this chapter we’ll look at how to put it all into action right away and launch your journey to get paid to play. In order to do that, you’ll need to embrace a new, more playful way of approaching work that does away with five-year plans and long-term goals. If you can do that, you might be surprised – and delighted – just where your work ends up taking you, as young entrepreneurs Sam Bompas and Harry Parr have discovered.

Most of the players I have interviewed, including Bompas and Parr, are fully engaged in an exciting process of playing out their work but couldn’t say where it will take them in five years’ time. This is a very different approach to careers to what most of us have been taught.

As my friend, Mark, said when he saw me reading a careers book, ‘Why do you bother? Don’t worry about a “career”, just pick an interesting project and go do it. And when you’ve done that one, see where it’s landed you and pick the next one.’ This process has led to him becoming an expert in his field (teaching English as a foreign language) and travelling all over the world with his work. He’s currently in Vietnam setting up his own English school.

Beware the ‘good career move’ or the business chosen purely for the financial rewards. This is not the route to a happy life. Billionaire Warren Buffett was once asked for careers advice by an MBA student. The student thought he should go work in finance for a while just to make money then do what he really wanted to later. The billionaire thought this was a ridiculous idea, and said, ‘That’s like saving sex for old age.’ Besides, it’s very difficult to get rich by doing something you don’t enjoy. You can’t really excel at something when your heart isn’t in it.

Two of my best career moves were instinctual and turned out very well. Straight out of college, I joined a tiny software start-up of three people which went on to become one of the best-known names in their industry, creating systems to automate TV stations all over the world. Then I moved to a small start-up making special effects software. The week I joined they were bought by the biggest name in the business. This led to me having an extremely impressive CV without any deliberate planning.

So was I just lucky? Perhaps not. Even if I couldn’t describe my criteria at the time, I was joining early-stage companies with smart people doing very original work. And smart people doing very original work often go on to become industry-leading companies (or get bought by them). When later I joined a ‘Big 5’ consultancy because it seemed a ‘good career move’, I gained an impressive job title but I was miserable.

If you pursue the projects that you enjoy and that feel important to you, it’s more likely to lead to success and financial riches than plotting for some far-off end goal and making compromising ‘good career moves’ along the way.

The problem with goals

But shouldn’t you at least set some goals? If you’ve ever worked with a coach or read a book about success, you’ve probably been advised to set goals. Well, if goals were so powerful, a lot more people would reach them – and everyone who did would be happy. There are a number of problems with this incessant goal setting. It places a focus on the future and suggests relentless action and compromise in the present to get there. When you achieve that goal, you allow yourself a brief period of rejoicing and then set a new one. Ugh! I can feel the existential desolation just writing that. It’s all very mesomorphic, by which I mean action-focused. What about how you want to be or feel from moment to moment? There’s no goal you can tick off for that.

It’s not your success that will create your happiness. It’s your happiness that will create your success. And you can’t create happiness in the future by consistently creating misery in your life now. If you can’t create what you want in some form today, it’s likely you will never have it. I’m sure you’ve seen the kind of person who is always running faster and faster in the hope of creating a more relaxed future and of course never gets there.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is Life itself, it is an insane way to live.

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power Of Now

The healthier alternative is to create a good present that grows into a great future. Turn your focus from far-off goals to the present day and create some of the experience of your dream life in the here and now – even if it’s scaled down to start with. Play out the unfolding of your life’s work; pick a project that will give you more of what you want – and start it right away.

When you focus on getting into flow today – doing what you enjoy and what comes naturally to you – you’ll be amazed just how fast you’ll find yourself progressing.

The problem with thinking

Thinking is overrated. And most of us do far too much of it. Successful people apparently have fewer thoughts; they don’t engage in endless deliberation. Perhaps this is because the research shows that over-thinking makes you miserable and unmotivated.

Over thinking (i.e., rumination) ushers in a host of adverse consequences: It sustains or worsens sadness, fosters negatively-biased thinking, impairs a person’s ability to solve problems, saps motivation, and interferes with concentration and initiative.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How Of Happiness

If you’re truly stuck in your life and can’t seem to move forward, chances are you’re thinking too much. A lot of people who turn up at careers workshops are stuck in the thinking trap. I know it well: I’ve wasted years there myself. It’s the belief that if we sit and think about something for long enough, the light will shine down from above and we’ll find some new answer not available to us before. Unfortunately, this very rarely happens. Why do we even think it would? If you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes and not found the solution, more time spent sitting alone thinking without any new input is very unlikely to bring fresh insights.

I guess it’s school that taught us that thinking was the solution – if you don’t have the answer at first, think harder. This might work for a maths problem but it doesn’t work very well for life decisions. The problem is that we think within our own limits of what we know and what we believe is possible. Career problems are very rarely problems of external limitation; they are more usually a reflection of the limits of our knowledge and beliefs.

The solution? Stop thinking and start playing. Here’s how to do it.

Pick a play project

It’s time to stop trying to find the perfect answer for what to do with your life, and start today doing something you really want to do. Look at the shortlist of options you produced in the last chapter and the one that you marked out as most exciting to investigate first.

What small project could you start straight away that will launch you into this line of work, or at least allow you to try it out? This is your first play project. It should be something you can do in a few weeks or a couple of months. You may have already had a taste of this activity in your first experiment with Play Wednesday as explained in Secret one. The point now is to define something that will give you a tangible result and with a clear end point. If this is a new activity for you and you’re not sure how much you’ll enjoy it, choose something small enough that you can finish before you get bored. Break it down if it’s currently too large.

The content of your project will depend on what stage you are at in your search. If you’re still weighing up possible options, your project should help you explore and experience this option. If you’ve already got some idea where you want to head, this project should launch you right into doing it.

Philip’s first play project was to sell one of his inventions for the first time. For Juliette, it was to write a book proposal (which then turned into a website, freshairfix.com). For freelance marketing consultant Karen, it was developing her writing and her ideas in a blog. For Roshini, it was to experiment with drawing comics.

How to choose your project

Don’t obsess about what project you should do. It doesn’t have to represent the future direction of your entire life, it’s simply to give you an experience of one of the options you chose in the last chapter. The point is to get into motion. You can always correct your course on the fly. If it’s something that calls to you right now and you think you’d enjoy doing it, go for it. If it will take you somewhere interesting or you will learn something in the process that will be useful to you for subsequent projects, then all the better. Whatever you choose, you’re likely to learn reusable skills even if your next project is completely different – skills such as how to ask people for help, how to collaborate, how to keep going when you feel stuck and how to manage your motivation, creativity and time. You’ll also get to experience your own ability to manifest something that you want in your life. This is a wonderful thing in itself if you’ve been feeling powerless about improving your work situation.

Make sure to choose something that is likely to be enjoyable to do, not just for the result. The bottom line is if it didn’t give you the results you hoped for and doesn’t make you rich, would you still be glad you did it? Aim for a project that will give you an experience of being in flow, perhaps centred on something you know is a moment of magic for you. But bear in mind that the best projects are a step up for you and might be a bit scary to take on. We’ll see later how to manage your anxiety about taking on new challenges.

The project you choose will depend on where you are right now in your shift from worker to player. Here are three specific options for common situations.

If you’re in career paralysis

If you’ve got completely stuck on what to do with your career, almost any project you feel excited about will have the benefit of getting you moving again. Don’t worry too much about how it might lead to making a living. You can focus on making money or progressing your move with later projects (Secret five will help you with this). The main thing for you is to get into play and indulge yourself by becoming immersed in something you’ll really enjoy.

I meet people all the time who long to be, for example, a writer but have been deliberating whether it’s possible for them. If you want to be a writer, grab a pen and paper and start writing. Congratulations, you’re now a writer! If you’ve been dabbling with writing for a while now, make your project to enter a writing competition, or to write an article to get published on a website. Even if you don’t end up making a career out of writing, you will have had the experience of doing it and will have learned what that’s like for you. You’ll probably also have come up with a few new ideas of what to try next.

If you’re self-employed

If you’re already self-employed, use your project to open up a new line of business that’s closer to your heart, that keeps you in flow, and that feels more like play. Think about the pieces of work you have done in the past that you have most enjoyed. How could you run a campaign to focus on winning more of exactly that kind of work now? It’s surprising how few people do this! You could also use your play project to open another channel of contact with your target market such as writing a blog, using social media, or starting a live event. Or you might use it as your first foray into passive income and try out making money without turning up (more on this later).

If you’re moving into a completely new field

If you’re looking to enter a completely new line of work, use your project as a chance to immerse yourself in it and start exploring. Here’s how.

1. Start to live this new line of work. Read books about it and autobiographies of leaders in this field. Read magazines and watch DVDs about the topic; go to exhibitions.
2. Get in the mix. Go out to networking meetings, talks and workshops. Talk to others and learn what’s hot in this part of the world.
3. Take any chance you can to experience doing the kind of work you’re interested in, even if unpaid to start with.

Once you know the field you want to enter, if you’re aiming to land a job rather than go self-employed, choose a play project that could get you noticed by possible employers: interview thought leaders in this area and write an article on what you find out, or help out at an exhibition or conference.

Even faster than Google

Once you’ve researched the basics, here’s something even faster than Google. Think of a key question you need the answer to – something that could move you forward significantly. Then find someone who could answer it for you: someone who is actually doing the kind of work you’re interested in. Try to choose someone who is successful at it and enjoys it. You’ll be amazed just what you can find out in ten minutes speaking to someone knowledgeable. Most people will be quite happy to help you by talking about their work for ten minutes.

Here’s how to approach it.

• Decide what’s the one question you would most like an answer to right now. Be specific so it’s easy to answer. Don’t ask, ‘What’s llama farming like?’ Say ‘I want to get into llama farming, can you tell me what your typical day consists of?’ Don’t ask the basic stuff you can find on the internet, focus on asking about the things that come from real-world experience.
• Who do you know who might be able to answer your question? If you can’t think of anyone, who do you know that might know someone who can? We all know as many as 200 people. By asking friends to ask their friends and colleagues, you immediately access 40,000 people.

Use what you find out in your ongoing research and when you’re ready, think of your next question to ask.

Think big, start small

Have you got a grand vision for a business or a creative project? The key is to break it down into something small enough to be manageable. Here are some quickfire examples.

If you want to a write a book, you could start writing your ideas out as a blog and assemble them later into a book. I started writing a blog to experiment with my ideas about getting paid to play and this led to the book you’re reading right now. If you want to write a novel, start with a short story, or write an outline of your novel ready to show to a more experienced novelist and get feedback.

Want to write an album? Make it your play project to create one track good enough to play to a friend. Then create two more and you have a single. Put it on MySpace. Seven more tracks and you have an album. Sell it using one of the dozens of services on the web designed for the purpose.

If you want to start a business, you could start by exploring the idea or the brand on the web – blog about it, assemble images in a tumblelog (a simple form of blog), twitter your findings 140 characters at a time. You’ll be able to play out your idea, get feedback, attract collaborators and at the same time you’ll be building followers who later could become paying customers or clients. Or you could sketch out the proposition, then go find a test customer and win your first playcheque. More on this later.

If you want to sell goods or trade international crafts, start on eBay, move on to your own eBay shop and then graduate to your own website. If you’re making your own handmade crafts, go to etsy.com or similar site to sell them.

If you already have your own business but want to nudge it towards something that feels more playful to you, choose a project that will explore a new, more enjoyable, income stream. Look for that sweet spot of doing something you really enjoy which fulfils a need your customers already have. You’ll know when you’re on track as you’ll find you attract interest quickly.

Artists, turn your home into a gallery. Julian Bolt from London is a great photographer but prone to getting creatively blocked. With encouragement from his creativity group and his wife Sonia, he decided to hold the first exhibition of his work. Since he didn’t have access to a gallery he held it in his small basement flat in an unfashionable part of London. He and Sonia stayed up late for many nights, clearing up the flat, printing his images and mounting them on the walls. He received plenty of positive feedback from the constant stream of visitors and sold nearly £3,000 of photos. One of the visitors was a gallery owner. She agreed to give Julian his own exhibition in her beautiful art gallery in the heart of London’s gallery quarter. His next exhibition after that was in a Parisian gallery.

Want to launch a regular event? I run a monthly London event called Scanners Night for creative people who want to do lots of different projects. I often get requests from people asking me if I can run one near them somewhere in the UK or elsewhere in the world. Although we are considering taking Scanners Night national, until we do, I give the following advice on how to start your own; it’s exactly what I did when I started. Put a notice on a bulletin board where the people you want to invite hang out and also put a listing on Meetup.com or craigslist. Invite people to meet in a pub or café to chat. You might base it around a particular topic of discussion or give a brief talk yourself, or meet at an interesting exhibition. If you’re worried you might be sitting on your own all night, call a couple of friends to come along. The worst-case scenario then is that you spend a pleasant night talking with your friends. Grow it into a regular event that you could eventually start charging people to attend.

Want to change the world? Take a tip from Mohammed Yunus, creator of the Grameen Bank which pioneered microloans to some of the poorest people in the world. In 1976 Professor Yunus loaned $27 out of his own pocket to 42 women in a village in Bangladesh. The women were making furniture and were forced to pay all their profits to loan sharks for the bamboo they used as raw material. The tiny sum allowed the women to pay off the loans and start to pull themselves out of poverty. Today Grameen Bank has over 7 million borrowers and has loaned over $6 billion with a 98 per cent recovery rate. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

What can you do as a project in just a few weeks that will set you on the path to your grand vision? Using the above examples as inspiration, write down your larger objective and then sketch out a small project that allows you to take your first step.

Some of my entrepreneurial clients hate the idea of starting their business in this incremental way. They believe they should go for the big splash and launch with a fabulous website and branding from day one.

This is OK if you have a couple of successful ventures under your belt already or you have the money to do formal market research but it’s a bad idea for those of us just starting out. Why? Right now as you begin your business or creative project, you think you know what it’s going to be, but the truth is you don’t. As soon as it’s exposed to the atmosphere, it changes. When you put your idea out into the world, it morphs and evolves as you interact with the potential market or audience; it must if you want to create something successful.

Even if you happen to have a great idea, you might not realise where the real value is in it. You might design a brand at an early stage that’s all about how your product has a cool design but you might discover that people buy it because it saves them the expense of buying a higher priced alternative. Even big companies get it wrong sometimes. When the mobile networks enabled text messaging, they expected it to be used simply as a replacement for a pager but text messages now outnumber calls and account for over $50 billion of annual revenue.

Get your idea out there and evolve it on the fly.

Kick off your play project

Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.

Liz Smith, columnist

Start on your project as soon as you can. Why not now? Even if you only have ten minutes right now, feeling you’ve made a start will make a big difference to your motivation. If you have no time now, take out your diary and make an appointment with yourself in the next few days to start (we’ll look more at managing your time in the next chapter). When you’re ready, ask yourself what task you could do in the time you have available that would make the biggest impact on your project and begin it.

Use Play Wednesday as a day to carve out some time for your play project and start to move your working week a little closer to your vision of a year out. Having set days or times when you work on your play project also makes it far more likely you will make a habit of it.

Commit to your play project. Don’t just dabble. Have you got into the habit of fiddling with lots of things but dropping them before they reach a conclusion and before anyone else gets to benefit from them? The creative act is incomplete without an audience. How many pieces of writing sit languishing in drawers? How many songs remain only in the singer’s head? How many business ideas have never been shared for fear of someone stealing them? Don’t be one of those that as Henry David Thoreau said, ‘go to the grave with the song still in them’.

Follow through on your project until it’s done. Create something tangible and share it with the world. The sharing could be as simple as playing your finished music to a friend, putting your short story on a website somewhere, talking your initial business idea over with an expert, or emailing the description of your ideal job to everyone you know.

When you’re not used to finishing things, you may not realise how much there is to learn by doing so. That last 10 per cent you need to do to finish your project is actually 50 per cent of the work. At the point you realise you are going to share the output of your project, you are forced to round off the rough edges and make sure it’s in a form that others will appreciate. It’s also in the sharing that much of the learning takes place – you have to marshal your nerves to make your work public and dare to hear the feedback.

Decide how you will share the results of your project and set a date to do it. Write this down now in your diary as your release date. Also put it some place you will see it every day so you don’t forget. Then arrange this date in advance. Let the people you’ll be sharing your project with know now. This will help keep you focused. You can always renegotiate it if you absolutely have to.

Plan now how you will celebrate reaching your release date and completing your project. If you march on without acknowledging what you’ve done, you reduce your motivation for reaching your release date next time around. What will you do to treat yourself? Take a day off, go for a celebratory meal, treat yourself to a massage, or buy some gadget you’ve been longing to own? Write this in your diary next to your release date.

For some projects, it is not possible to predict when you will complete it; for instance, winning your first piece of self-employed work. You can still get clear in advance though how you will celebrate it and it can be useful to estimate how long you expect it to take.

The benefits of being in play

When you finally stop sitting around thinking and get into motion, wonderful things happen. Firstly, you get lots of feedback – both internal and external. The external feedback is about what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. The internal feedback is how it felt, what you enjoyed and what you didn’t. Record it all in your playbook.

The other thing is that once you’re in motion, the view is completely different. Just like the view is different for the person who gets on the train compared to the person who stays behind on the platform. In transit, all sorts of opportunities present themselves that aren’t visible when you’re sitting at home researching on Google. You run into people who can help you on your project; you get recommendations for books you can read and websites you can use, and people ask you to help them with their projects. You might even make some money or get a job offer before you’ve really tried to!

Having a project you’re committed to gives you definition, direction, a mission. And having a mission is attractive. Like me, you’ve probably met people who say, ‘Well, I’d quite like to do x but then again I also might do y’. Your attitude towards them is very different from that with someone who says, ‘I’m creating this event that’s happening in a month’s time’. You’re much more likely to be able to offer helpful contacts or advice to the latter person. The clearer the purpose of your project and the more committed you are to it, the more you’ll find that people step forward to help you.

Remember, when you find yourself in a café enjoying writing or you have a moment when you know you’ve really enjoyed helping someone, or when you’ve created a piece of code that works like a charm and people are using it live on the web, take a moment to appreciate it. Because as soon as you are in play, you’ve already arrived. You’ve created some of the life you wanted. Yes, it might be making you very little or no money; yes, it might not be the perfect experience; yes, it might have been a stressful ride to get here. Put the ‘buts’ aside for a moment and appreciate what you do have. It might take a while before your play turns into something that makes you money or gives you the status you’d like, but if you’re having fun along the way, you will at least be enjoying the journey.

Now imagine this: what if everyone stopped waiting and hoping for their dreams to come true and simply started a project that will get them a little closer to living their dream life in the here and now? Wouldn’t that be a better world to live in?

In the next chapter you’ll find out how to cope with the ups and downs of getting paid to play and how you can guarantee that you get there in the end.