BONUS Episode: Supercharge Your Career in a Sh*t Economy (Virtual Event by Career Hackers)

Ryan: Aloha folks and welcome back to Degree Free where we teach you how to get the work you want without a college degree. I'm your host, Ryan Maruyama. Before we get into today's guest and into the episode, I did have one ask of you guys and that is Add me on LinkedIn. If you haven't already, Ryan Maruyama on LinkedIn.

I will leave a link to my LinkedIn. In the show notes, so you definitely go check those out. So let's get into today's episode. Today is gonna be a bonus episode. We have Joel Bein from Career Hackers back on the podcast. He is the CEO of Career Hackers and they are doing a special two day event. It's called Supercharge Your Career, October 19th to the 20th.

Superchargecareer.com and careerhackers.com. In this episode, we talk about all the guests that they'll be having, and then we also talk about how we think that now and we also talk about how we think nowadays maybe it is time for everybody to consider themselves entrepreneurs. Definitely give this episode a listen and check out Joel Bein at careerhackers.com.

All right, enjoy the episode.

Aloha, folks, and welcome back to Degree Free. I am super stoked to have on our very first return guest actually. Joel Bein, you might have known him from a few episodes ago where we talked about career hackers and super hacking your career. He had since gotten a title promotion to ceo, so glad to have Joel by the CEO of Career Hackers on with us today. Welcome, Joel.

Joel: Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it.

Ryan: And Joel, I kind of wanted to dive right in.

We did this meeting because, or we did this recording because you have something super special going on in a couple of weeks, and I was wondering if you could kind of tell everybody about your event that you're doing.

Joel: Absolutely. Yeah. We're really excited to put on a big two day live virtual event for job seekers, for career builders, for career shifters.

Whatever the case may be. It's gonna be called Supercharge your Career in Blank Economy. I dunno if I can swear on this podcast, but-

Ryan: I think everybody's got it. Yeah. .

Joel: Yeah. You'll see.

You'll see it if you go to superchargecareer.com. You can see the full scope of the event, but the aim is to empower people in this economy, and whether that's landing that job, standing out in the job hunt, learning to sell yourself, learning to cut through the noise.

Create that video pitch or building that portfolio of projects and not relying on, , the standard pathway, the standard credentials or degrees or resumes and say, Hey, you can prove your value and cut through the noise. So we're gonna be catering to Git towards that leg of careers, landing the interview, landing the job.

And then it's also broader for anyone who's just looking to level up their mindset in their career in general, and to become your own job security, right? Where you can look at the world at large and you're like, Wow, this is a wild world out there, isn't it? And what's going on with this economy?

And, well, the reality is, No matter what's going on outside in the external world, , you always have the power to take the grab life by the horns in your mindset between the ears. And if you empower yourself, you can bulletproof your future in your career. Because at the end of the day, companies want people who can create value.

And if you can become what Seth Godin calls an artist, and going above and beyond and creating value without permission and becoming more entrepreneurial, right? Like my vision. For the bigger picture in the 21st century is people are entrepreneurs, no matter if they're owning a business or not, but you're thinking of yourself as you're the CEO of me Incorporated, right?

You have value, you have services to market, and that type of mindset of pitching yourself, becoming in that sales marketing mindset for your own. Value. That's the way to, to be very secure in your future as well as more fulfilled, right? Like our mission at Career Hackers is to help people discover and do what makes them come alive.

And we want people to look forward to Mondays. Like that's the vision I have. That's what lights me up. Can you imagine the whole world is like right now? It's like 65% of people are dissatisfied with their job. That's sad. People are doing stuff like this quiet, quitting phenomenon. People are showing up to work and just doing the bare minimum as sort of like almost passive aggressive thing.

Cause it just, they don't like their job. I can have empathy for that frustration and for my vision is how can we transcend that? And actually align ourselves with opportunities that are bringing us energy and fulfillment. And then you want to go above and beyond. You want to do that extra mile because it's fulfilling to you.

So that's the kind of bigger picture of the philosophy. And we're gonna have some amazing speakers at this two day event. Totally free to attend. By the way, career thought leaders, we're gonna have Lindsay Mustain, who's an ex Amazon executive who helps people like boost their salaries by a hundred thousand dollars.

She's like, we're gonna talk about, she's gonna sit down with me for a fireside chat and talk about that. Madeline Mann, who's got lots of experience in HR and she's got a big TikTok, youTube following and we're gonna talk about the secrets to crush the interview cuz she's been on the other side of the hiring process.

She's got so much nuts and bolts tips. We're gonna have Jed Marley, who's an emerging sales thought leader, talk about how to sell yourself on the job hunt and getting that sales mindset. Uh, we're gonna have Derek Silvers, who's founder of CD Baby, just amazing philosopher, entrepreneur, musician. He's been all sorts of things in his life, and he's gonna talk about this, that broader mindset of creativity.

Like, I mean, he inspired me to write a little book I wrote last, the beginning of this year. And he talks a lot about this idea of consuming versus creating and how can you get in that mindset of not just listening to podcasts, but creating podcasts, or not just consuming information, but creating information.

And if you create, then you create value in the marketplace. And that's the essence of what it needs to be entrepreneurial. So that's the full sort of thorough overview of it and would love to, to dive deeper if you wanna ask questions.

Ryan: I would love to jump in here. You know what's so interesting?

There's a couple of things that I want to dive a little bit deeper in. When you were talking about the mindset, I really gravitate towards that because I've always had this saying, it's always my fault. And I think that's like very one that's very Asian. It's very Japanese to say that, but like, I always had that mindset because I can only control what I can control, right?

And if something happened to me or something happens, like I always just say, well, It's my fault because then it turns the lens on me like, what could I have done? Like say if I got, let's just take an extreme example. Say if I were to have gotten into an accident or something like where that person that hit me ran a red light, I would sit there and think like, Okay, well, What could I have done better to have prevented this accident?

Cause I couldn't prevent him from running the red light. And so that's an extreme example. And so maybe poor in this thing, but I've taken that everywhere in my life and I think it really helps once you nail it down. I think there's also, I will say, I'm learning that there's a middle ground too, because some things are not always your fault.

and so is there. I think you, when you're first learning that mindset, it's helpful to take it to the extreme and then when you realize like, okay, maybe not everything is your fault. Maybe you couldn't have done anything to get hit, to not get hit by that person running the red light, and then maybe you taper it back a little bit, but when you're first learning it, that's something that really helped me was just taking, you know, extreme responsibility over the outcome of my life and what I can affect change on,

Joel: Yeah. I love the way you, you shape that extreme approach can be really valuable, even just as ,a thought experiment. Like, what if for the next 30 days I tell myself that literally 100% of things that happened to me were created by me, and how could that be the case? And then it becomes this game of hyper awareness of every thought and action you're having and how that's potentially affecting your reality.

And I'm more and more fine into that mindset, but absolutely, at the same time, it's not healthy to take over-responsibility and something like this economic climate, that's a big complex. There's many factors into why the, like the economic climate is what it is. And so, there are these bigger pictures that we were sort of, we sort of were born into in a sense, like we kind of inherited these problems even so from a lot of sort of, Destructive choices, I would say in the bigger societal political landscape, but okay.

So that is, is affecting your individual life. It is affecting, your career. It is affecting your ability to get hired, but you can still maximize. No matter how much the world is closing in on you, no matter what's going on, you have 100% ability to choose your attitude.

Ryan: So kind of just to solidify this and I'll tell a story, it's not my story, it was actually Hannah's and this is really where she, her career started to take off. She was working at a call center basically making like $28,000 a year before Covid hit. Right. And it was in the hospitality industry. And we were living in Hawaii. And $28,000 a year is like, not a lot at all. Like it's actually in Hawaii. It's below the poverty line. Right. And so she got fired or she got laid off rather because, long story short, because of Covid, right?

Like she ended. Being next to sitting, she has desk mates to one of the first like 14 people in Hawaii that got confirmed with Covid. And so she got let home two weeks early before everybody else, before the whole department just disintegrated. And she came home that day and she's like, my job's never coming back.

And she, instead of like crying over spilled milk, like, which we did for a little bit cuz we were thinking, Man, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? She went and she did a Salesforce course in 31 days. She got her Salesforce certificate and then like 30 days later she was making $70,000 a year, like, and that was within the span of like two months just because she decided to have the mindset like, Okay, well it's not my fault that I lost my job. You know, like literally that department, in that company we're still friends with people that run it. It doesn't exist anymore. Like that department still doesn't exist and. She went out in 60 days, completely changed the trajectory of her career and of her life.

Joel: I don't know. I don't wanna steal that story.

I love that so much.

Ryan: One other thing that I wanted to touch on there, and it's something that I've been thinking about myself when you were talking about like, you're talking about Seth Godin and everybody, you and I spoke about it last time on when he came on the podcast about Lynchpin, the book that he wrote.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And I have been having a thought. Basically exactly what you said. So what I used to say was that not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur. Not everybody is meant to do it. And because like my thought was that you always have to have like worker bees. And now I'm starting to think, and I've actually had this conversation with Cameron Sorsby before, actually it's kind of gonna be confusing for listeners, is that that episode's gonna come out, after this episode, but I'm thinking that now what you said is correct, like everybody is an entrepreneur. Like whether it. In their own careers, but even like starting side projects, like we talked about before in our first episode, like whether it's starting side projects and just maybe not with the intent of making money and doing it full time, but with the intent that I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna learn things so that I can have projects so that I can put it on resumes while I know that you don't believe in the resumes, but I can put it in my video pitch, I can put it on my professional portfolio.

and I don't know. I guess there's really no question there. I'm just kind of bouncing an idea back and forth. Like what do you like? What do you think?

Joel: Yeah. This is actually a relatively recent shift for me to actually see everyone as an entrepreneur, whether you choose or not , when you realize that you are, I mean, if you're seeking to bring in income, if you're seeking to trade value in the world, you are, you have services to offer, then you are seeking customer.

And that customer might simply be one customer, which is a company, and then you have your Business Me Incorporated, and you have one customer, that company, and that's, you are now providing services at that "job", but you're creating value and then you receive revenue, from that customer, which is your salary.

But we tend to grow up and we think about this idea of obeying the authority to do what you're supposed to do. Cog in a wheel, right? Assembly line, all this 20th century stuff. And we show up and check the boxes and we think that is what it means. But at the end of the day, you are empowered and you're an individual to make your own choices.

And you're not a slave to any company. You're choosing to enter in a two way street, right? And so, that's the direction I wanna see the world go. And I think it already is going. And one of our guests, Taylor Pearson, for this event, he wrote a book a few years ago called The End of Jobs. This was back in like 2015.

And he talks about the macroeconomic trajectory we're going in, where we're moving away from this to show up from nine to five. And it's on you. You have an opportunity to have more freedom and think more entrepreneurly and bring in, you know, there's different ways you can skin the cat, so to speak.

Like you can have that one customer work for one company. You can have side projects, you can start your own business. You can, I mean, especially with remote work now, there's just so much opportunity and so it really becomes, I think like, 30, 50 years from now, people are gonna look back and see more clearly what's evolving right now in the way people work and in the marketplace.

And so that's all to say that yeah, you have the choice to like fully embrace the fact that you own yourself and you have the choice to be. In the driver's seat of Me incorporated. And if you choose to fully embody that, then you can be more empowered.

Ryan: I agree with what you're saying about like, there's basically a paradigm shift happening right in front of our eyes and with especially with the proliferation of remote work, right?

Covid accelerated that crazy. Right? 60% of job seekers out there right now are looking for remote work and there's a bunch of companies right now that are trying to pull people back into the offices and there are people that are just not having it. Right. And so I think the paradigm shift underneath all of this is that people, companies are going from a more time centric, Like base of unit of account.

Like you're there for from nine to five and they're going to a more value based unit of account. And where it's like it's, this is the beginning of-

I'll use myself for example, like I have a small team that I run. I don't care like how long, if they do the tasks they need to do in an hour, you know, and they're done.

Perfect. Like that's great, right? And I think that more and more companies are going towards that and more and more companies are going away from like basically being counters and like nine to five. I mean, granted, there's gonna be some things like firefighters or 24 7 customer service reps that you're gonna have to be there.

But for the most part, in, in almost every other role, we're seeing a shift to more value based accounting. When it comes to your value.

Joel: Yeah.

And I believe that puts the power in the employee, where it's not, Again, it's not just, you look to the authority as what you, What am I supposed to do? Check the boxes, right?

It's actually you because you have so many opportunities now as an entrepreneurial employee, we'll call it .Then companies are like incentivized to give, to treat you more, I believe, and this is gonna continue to play out. I believe like companies are more actually incentivized to become more attractive places to work.

Because you have so many options. Yeah. I think this is emerging and this event, we're trying to kind of like activate this and say, hey, let's double down on this. And I mean, there's still a lot of people out there who are not familiar with this at all. It's still, there's still kind of in this standard mindset of I got my degree now I need to just show up nine to five and get on, do my job.

And that's why I think we have the 65% people are dissatisfied and so, we're hoping to set this trajectory, like accelerate this. This is our first time we're doing this event, but we're hoping to make a big splash and continue to build momentum and do more of these and yeah, like again, create a more alive world, more entrepreneurial world, and more creative world.

Ryan: Awesome. Awesome. Joel, how do people attend this event? How do they learn more about what you guys are doing over there at Career Hackers? What's the details? What can I send people?

Joel: Yeah, thanks. So for the event, it's superchargecareer.com and you can just register for free and we'll send you all the info and you can attend for the whole two days you're gonna attend for a few sessions.

There's gonna be opportunities to network and meet new people. So I definitely recommend registering and checking it out in one way or the other. And then our website for Career Hackers is careerhackers.com, and we have just articles, resources, tools, communities, all sorts of, that's a huge library of resources for empowered careers.

And then we have our daily newsletter just kind of giving you that dose of motivation every morning. So we'd love to see you over there and dive in. There's just hundreds of pieces of content over there at careerhackers.com.

Ryan: Yeah, and for everybody listening, the notes to everything will be at the show notes, degreefree.co/podcast.

Joel, I am looking forward to this event that you're putting on. Thank you for coming on and sharing this with the audience, and hopefully everybody go to superchargecareer.com and sign up the event once again is October.

Joel: Just to be clear, it's no, there's no yours.

Ryan: Oh,

Joel: and I've made the same mistake myself.

Supercharge career,

Ryan: Supercharge career.

Once again. It'll be in the show notes everybody. And October 19th to the 20th. Those are the two days of the event everybody. Once again, Joel, thank you so much for being there, being here. We really appreciate you coming on.

Joel: Thank you Ryan. Really appreciate what you're up to with degree free and thanks everyone in the audience to, to tuning into this.

Ryan: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Everybody. Before you go, definitely add me on LinkedIn, Ryan Maruyama. The link to my LinkedIn will be in the show notes, degreefree.co/podcast and, if you haven't already, please sign up for a newsletter degree free.co/newsletter and rate us wherever you get your podcast. It's the best way to show support for the podcast and then also share this episode with people that might find it helpful. Until next time guys, Aloha.