How to Make Money Doing What You Love Learn advanced self-improvement techniques that will get you out of the job you hate and into making money by doing what you love.

Learn to study your competition. Let’s say that what you love to do is to become a UFC fighter or a professional wrestler. Who do you think your competition is? Other UFC fighters or wrestlers? That’s just one way of looking at it. However, I want you to look beyond that.

Imagine that I’m sitting on the couch at home and I’m flipping channels. On one channel I have a UFC event and on another channel I have Jack Bauer in the latest season of the show 24. Which show do I want to watch; a couple of guys in the octagon fighting each other, or Jack Bauer taking on a building full of armed terrorists? You’re competing for my attention, so how will you compete against Jack Bauer? Starting to see what I mean?

Let’s say you want to get into the coaching business. Your competition might be self-improvement books, or even a person’s friends and relatives, as opposed to other coaches. So let’s say that there are 5 coaches in your area and you’ve been to all of their websites and you’ve got the best one out of all of them, so you think that you’re ahead of your competition. Is that really true? What about that person’s best friend? Do they not go to them for advice when something happens? How could you compete with them? What if you offered 9am to 9pm guaranteed on-call coaching support to your clients for a premium? Who cares if no other coaches offer anything like that. Be the first. I’m not saying you need to do this specifically, it’s just an example, but I want you to start thinking a little bit outside the box as to who your real competition is.

If you want to write children’s books, don’t just look at other books as competition. Look at what other resources parents have to entertain their kids. Go to a Toys’R’Us and see what’s on the shelves. How does your book compete with dolls or video games or DVD’s? Would a parent rather read your book to their 2 year old or plop them in front of the TV? What if every book you sold also came with a audio CD with a reading of the book with sound effects etc.

The idea here is to look for unique and creative ways to offer what you love to do differently from those in your industry. Think of the word “experience” rather than product or service. Look at the success of stores like Build-a-Bear Workshop compared to other stores that sell teddy bears. When you walk in there, it’s a whole experience that the kids love.

I’m not going to go on and on with too many examples of what I mean here, but if you’re a bit stuck of seeing who your real competitors might be outside of the obvious circle, why not leave a comment and tell us what you love to do and we’ll see if we can think of where you may want to look.