Internships vs. Starting a Small Business

***This is an article that I wrote for {Branded} Online Magazine. Feel free to cruise on over and check out the great writers contributing to the publication (there will be another link at the bottom of this post).

Today’s job market is fierce and in order to be competitive I find a lot of people my age are looking into internships as an experience-based stepping stone into their post-college job. Adding some “real world” experience to your resume as you are exiting college is great – which is why I am suggesting that you take that same six months and start a small business instead.

Most people initially get soft about this kind of possibility because they have some notion of entrepreneurs as swashbuckling risk-takers. Not only is this gravely inaccurate, it also prevents a lot of capable people from exploring the beauty of creating and being at risk to learn something about themselves. Starting and running a small business poses no more risk than an internship while delivering an experience that is an order of magnitude greater than working for free at CorporateAmerica.com.

Internship	Small Business
Conduct an internet search to find companies that might want to hire your skill set.	Conduct an internet search to find people/businesses that might want your product or service (coffee, cupcakes, car-detailing, etc.)
Reach to your personal network to find connections within potential companies that you want to intern at. Often you are cold-calling companies, asking for interviews.	Reach out to your personal network to find connections with potential customers that would find your product valuable. Often you are cold-calling sales leads out of the phone book, asking for meetings.
Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of interviews, face more rejection – maybe you get some offers.	Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of sales meetings, face more rejection – maybe you get offers for a second meeting.
Land a position (maybe).	Get a sale (eventually).
Work long hours for minimal or no pay.	Work long hours for minimal or no pay…at first.
You are the office bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to get coffee and bagels and occasionally be a spreadsheet jockey.	You are your customers’ bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to deliver a quality product on time and make things right when mistakes happen.
Build skills necessary to be a peon in a corporate machine and that the only way to be successful is to be politically astute enough to place your name on winning projects and subtly shift blame when things go wrong.	Build skills necessary to be a manager by applying all your “boring” undergrad classes that are now critical components to make the whole business work. If you don’t you will run out of money...fast.
Learn to appeal to authority and pull a lever.	Learn that you are more self-reliant than you originally thought. You experience ownership, working smart and creative problem solving on-demand.
Maybe you get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Maybe your company shuts down, maybe it succeeds, or maybe it sits somewhere in the middle. – the cool part is that you have much more say about the enterprise’s outcome.
Repeat. Try to explain to new employers why you didn’t get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Repeat. This time it’s easier because you avoid all the mistakes you made last time.

See? There’s not much difference in the effort required to start and run a small business over interning at a company. From a learning perspective they are the same except that they are on opposite ends of the continuum. Both put you at risk to learn something about yourself. What you want to be at risk to learn is entirely up to you.

If you plan on getting a job in Corporate America, there is (seriously) nothing wrong with that. In fact, I recommend that you still start a small business instead of interning. The reasoning behind this suggestion is rather simple: everyone you are competing with has been interning at or has been laid off from Corporate America. Think of how easy it will be to stand out from the bland crowd and get a job when you roll in with some hard-earned entrepreneurial experience.

If you want to create your own internship and want some tips for the next steps, feel free to check out my other article on {Branded}: Start Up in a Box.

The 2011 Action Plan

Who says I can't get stoned?

Plan a trip to Japan alone.

Doesn't matter if I even go.

- John Mayer

Leading off from my last post about living intentionally and Seth Godin's recent post about how you are your own worst boss I'm going to share about why 2011 is going to be the first year of officially creating and enacting an action plan. I'm going create some of my own language around the use of an action plan (inspired by Seth's blog post):

"You wouldn't go work for a company that made up a yearly plan while hung over, you also wouldn't work for one that would abandon a plan after 2 weeks quoting that they were going to 'figure it out' as they go along.

Why do it: It declares the future that you want to live into. When you say that you are going to do something, what you are really creating is a new life that will be coming at you full on: one that you want to live. It provides the large things that you want to get done and allows you, through an action plan, to work backwards from that reality to today. I personally try to make mine as measurable as possible so that at the end of the year I can see what happened vs what I said was going to happen.

Most importantly I look at why? Was it not as important as I thought it was? Did something catastrophic happen? What? The reason for looking at 'why' is not so much whether or not the reason was valid but who I was in the face of that reason. What the data shows me is me. And I learn something about myself that I didn't see before.

Why no one actually does it: Because it looks like busywork or some homework assignment. They make themselves feel guilty when they break their diet once or forget to go to the gym. And rather than get back on the horse (what's 1 or 2 days, or even a week lost in the context of a year?), they would rather ignore the discomfort of sticking to behavior change than actually feeling the joy of the results they have gotten for themselves. By the way no one is holding you to the commitments you make except you. So if you quit nothing happens, literally.

Wait, one thing does happen: you learn that you are someone who can't be self-directed when no one is watching you.

In other words, you find out that you are person that can't follow through on their own commitments. Don't like how that feels or sounds? Then do the plan. Don't like how that feels or sounds? Well then good luck amounting to anything more than the rat race, my friend. Because the exceptional professionals I know are the ones that can show up and deliver especially when they don't feel like it.

Why I like it: It helps me offload the mental power necessary to remember, find motivation for and actually enact the behavior change. I simply declare what I'm going to get done, create an action plan, input the time into my Google Calendar to do it and then let my calendar dictate what I should be doing. I just follow the plan without thinking and happen to get the results that I want. It's not rocket science. Over time (say 5-10 years) I'll probably think less about the planning (because I'll get better at it) which means that think even less about the "doing", which in turn can allow me to start dabbling in tremendous things before the age of 35. Things in the ilk of Laird Hamilton and Shai Agassi. Why? Because that's what I chose for my life.

My challenge to you is to go check out Chris Guillebeau's blog about How To Conduct Your Own Annual Review. In the comments, let me know some things that you are thinking about working on this year - I might borrow some to try on as I roll out the first draft of my 2011 Action Plan.

Cheers,

Travis

Living Intentionally

No, No, No, No

I will never forget

No, No

I will never regret

I will live my life

Closer to the edge. - 30 Seconds to Mars

December for me has always been a time of reflection. I guess the holidays serve as a convenient mile-marker on the highway of my life; a time to take stock of everything and see how it compares with last year. Up until this year it was simply something I did in my head, unintentionally and it typically centered on trivial things like whether or not I had a girlfriend.

But since I have been introduced to some new management technology this year, I have a mechanism to be intentional with my review and the planning for 2011.

Why do I do this? Because I want to live as intentionally as possible. I don't to waste valuable effort and time thrashing about hoping one day that a miracle will happen and I'll 'make' it. This concern is something Seth Godin lays out perfectly in his blog post here. He says:

"Even if you're not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you're doing it poorly.

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you'd quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they'd fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under."

I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of people trying to make their way through the human experience: survive. It's actually a pretty reasonable way to go through life. With what's going in the world today, it gets pretty easy to slip into the mode of letting one's reasons run their life. With divorce, kids, work demands, car maintenance, sickness, death, etc it's totally reasonable to be in survival mode. In fact self-protection is an honorable act on behalf of self-respect.

So be unreasonable. Follow through on your commitments in the face of all of that. Because that's what being a professional human being. That what living intentionally is: being unreasonable. Doing the hardwork in the off season, when no one is watching, making tough choices and sticking to them longer than anyone else would. Seth goes on to develop this a little further:

"We are surprised when someone self-directed arrives on the scene. Someone who figures out a way to work from home and then turns that into a two-year journey, laptop in hand, as they explore the world while doing their job. We are shocked that someone uses evenings and weekends to get a second education or start a useful new side business. And we're envious when we encounter someone who has managed to bootstrap themselves into happiness, as if that's rare or even uncalled for."

Again, the question for all this is 'why'? Why try to live intentionally? Because if you aren't living intentionally, it's hard to say that you are doing anything other than coping. Coping means that you don't have a choice, that you are given a set consequences that you must manage the best you can. To me that's not living, I know because I did it for most of my memorable life.

Living for me is choosing to do what I want and following through on the commitments in the face of the things that I have no control over. The first cop out I hear around commitment is that something catastrophic happened. Look, if you knew that you would get a million dollars to follow through on one thing you said you would do, nothing - absolutely nothing - would stop you. Those 'reasons' and perfectly explainable barriers that stand in your way wouldn't look so hard to overcome, would they?

As I roll out what's next for me in 2011, my challenge to you is to think about what commitments you have that you keep derailing. And when you identify what you do to derail that, start thinking about what you unknowingly committed to (hint: it has to do with self-protection).

For more information about how this process works, I highly recommend checking out a book by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey on how to start looking at your natural immune system to change called How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work. Good luck. Have fun.