Searching new sources of income after loosing my job

[DarkWoods]

Hi everyone.

I lost my job about six weeks ago and I have plenty of time now to focus on creating new sources of income but I'm stuck. I don't really know what to do.

Here are my strengths:

- Writing (in both english and mostly french, my native language).
- Public speaking.
- Teaching and coaching.
- Proofreading.
- Explaining things about nature and wildlife (my specialty).
- Creating ecological and low-maintenance garden to attract birds, bees and butterflies.

If you can help me it would be very appreciated.

[cool7hand]

Check out Seth Godin's work. He's excellent about explaining how to identify your own niche.

[daverobev]

Where are you? There are lots of bilingual jobs out there, and being bilingual is somewhat rare.

[DarkWoods]

Check out Seth Godin's work. He's excellent about explaining how to identify your own niche.

Do you have any book in particular to suggest on this subject?

Where are you? There are lots of bilingual jobs out there, and being bilingual is somewhat rare.

I am from Québec. In fact, I would prefer to start a side hustle or a business.

[Green_Tea]

Hi everyone.

I lost my job about six weeks ago and I have plenty of time now to focus on creating new sources of income but I'm stuck. I don't really know what to do.

Here are my strengths:

- Writing (in both english and mostly french, my native language).
- Public speaking.
- Teaching and coaching.
- Proofreading.
- Explaining things about nature and wildlife (my specialty).
- Creating ecological and low-maintenance garden to attract birds, bees and butterflies.

If you can help me it would be very appreciated.

Lovely! You could write a blog or a book about creating ecological and low-maintenance gardens to attract and support wildlife! (could also include explaining things about nature and wildlife as well as public speaking, could also lead to working with people or businesses to develop solutions for their gardens / public spaces or, if you are so inclined, a business selling useful things)

[Rusted Rose]

I suggest listening to podcasts on creating businesses. There are a ton of ideas out there and one or more of them might feel like just the right thing using some of the skills you list.

(On another note, from someone who has been a professional editor to someone interested in proofreading, beware of picking up bad spelling habits from English speakers. The word is *losing* one's job. "Loosing" is something else -- related, yes, but not what is meant here.

"Choose" and "lose," both present tense, do rhyme but have nothing to do with each other. We don't have a rule for spelling that sound the same way.)

Bonne chance en tout cas!

[KarefulKactus15]

Theres a book called "What color is your parachute".

Its a worksheet basically on finding your perfect match job wise.   And when I say job, that could be working for someone or doing your own thing. It isn't specific.

[UpScaleRetirement]

I can't recommend The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco enough.  Title sounds like a get rich quick scheme, but it's not.  It's about running a business that's founded on his 5 business commandments that form the acronym CENTS

C - Control.  You need to be in control of your business.  Are you fishing in a pond controlled by someone else? And what happens to your business when that pond is taken away?

E - Entry.   Identifies poor opportunities and crowded markets that should be avoided.  Simply put, the easier the opportunity, the worse it is.  If you’re an entrepreneur scoping for ideas, the best are the hard ones because the difficulty represents the opportunity. When difficulty doesn’t exist and the Commandment of Entry looms, another red flag is hoisted: you aren’t solving any problems.

N - Need.  The Commandment of Need states that if you own a controlled and entry-barred enterprise that provides relative value, satisfying needs or wants, you will win growth, profits, and possibly, passive income for life.

T - Time.  Abolishishes the causal relationship between your time and income. It's about creating a business that isn't directly trading your time for money.  You want to be able to generate income while you're sleeping or on vacation.  An example is selling a product online.

S - Scale.  To generate wealth, you need to impact many people.  You may be great at woodworking and many of your friends love the tables you make. But, if it takes you a week to make each one, you're only making 52 a year.  Your business needs to be scalable to reach thousands or even millions of customers.

The Millionaire Fastlane isn't about doing what you love or what you're good at.  The CENTS commandments is a way to test your business idea against.  I'm probably not doing the book justice, but I found it to be very eyeopening.

[SeattleCPA]

@DarkWoods, writing is a really tricky field to make a living from.

I would say that step one, if you choose to go this route? Get some sort of filler employment you can use to pay the bills and then write early in the morning, late at night, on weekends, etc. Making a living from writing--at least a dependable one--will take years.

To add context to the above remarks, I've been writing professionally for decades. My computer how-to books have sold millions of copies in English and been translated into a dozen other languages. (Search amazon on "Stephen L. Nelson" to see that list.)

I've started and run a publishing house. (Oh gosh, that was ton of work.)

I blog and sell e-books now. And you can do okay on that if you're in a special niche. But like regular book publishing, it's very hit or miss.

BTW, one other comment: The way writers actually experience what TV and the movies depict is by having a backlist of titles that still sell. (E.g., I have a couple of steady still in print, versions of QuickBooks for Dummies.)

[Metalcat]

I can't recommend The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco enough.  Title sounds like a get rich quick scheme, but it's not.  It's about running a business that's founded on his 5 business commandments that form the acronym CENTS

C - Control.  You need to be in control of your business.  Are you fishing in a pond controlled by someone else? And what happens to your business when that pond is taken away?

E - Entry.   Identifies poor opportunities and crowded markets that should be avoided.  Simply put, the easier the opportunity, the worse it is.  If you’re an entrepreneur scoping for ideas, the best are the hard ones because the difficulty represents the opportunity. When difficulty doesn’t exist and the Commandment of Entry looms, another red flag is hoisted: you aren’t solving any problems.

N - Need.  The Commandment of Need states that if you own a controlled and entry-barred enterprise that provides relative value, satisfying needs or wants, you will win growth, profits, and possibly, passive income for life.

T - Time.  Abolishishes the causal relationship between your time and income. It's about creating a business that isn't directly trading your time for money.  You want to be able to generate income while you're sleeping or on vacation.  An example is selling a product online.

S - Scale.  To generate wealth, you need to impact many people.  You may be great at woodworking and many of your friends love the tables you make. But, if it takes you a week to make each one, you're only making 52 a year.  Your business needs to be scalable to reach thousands or even millions of customers.

The Millionaire Fastlane isn't about doing what you love or what you're good at.  The CENTS commandments is a way to test your business idea against.  I'm probably not doing the book justice, but I found it to be very eyeopening.

I have to agree.

That book is really good at explaining how the idea doesn't really matter, it's the systematic execution that matters. This is well explained on the large corporate scale in "Built to Last" by the same guys who wrote "Good to Great".

The business idea is really such a minor factor compared to the execution.

However that's all on the entrepreneurial side of things, which sounds like the direction OP wants to go in, but isn't clear.

There are tons and tons and tons of careers out there that use that set of skills that don't require starting a business.

[Smokystache]

You could offer very short online classes on Outschool https://outschool.com/. The down side is that this is a "trade your time for money" situation. But I think the advantage is that you could discover what topics and age/expertise-level you connect with and if there is any demand. If you build up enough of a library of topics, you could have an entire online nature/wildlife school and record everything in English & French and expand your markets. There are so many parents/children using remote learning right now that you may have a much larger potential audience than you think.

This is my attempt to try to stay within your stated interests and eventually create something that could be scalable.

[fixie]

Given your skills, you could offer your skills to companies that produce a product that needs a manual.  I often find manuals to be full of errors and poor syntax, as well as being written by non-english speakers.  Drives me up the wall, so much so that I have offered and made a small amount of income on products I purchased which had crappy manuals.
-fixie