The Sokanu Blog

Helping you find your passion in life

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“It’s meaningful work that I am passionate about, that adds value to the world, that changes someone’s life for the better.”

Farnoosh Brock

What do you do?

I am a career expert, author, speaker, professional blogger and podcaster as well as a business coach who helps corporate professionals excel or make drastic career transitions from corporate cubicles. In other words, I am a full-time entrepreneur but only after an engineering path followed by a decade long corporate career. I am living my passions every single day now and deciding my life’s path consciously and with intention. I have made it my life’s mission to inspire you to live life on your own terms, no excuses, no limitations, no exceptions.

I also run a popular show on iTunes, The Daily Interaction, which helps you learn how to communicate so effectively that you get everything you want in life.

How did you get there?

With a lot of hardship, and after taking a lot of wrong turns and hitting a lot of dead-ends. With a lot of perseverance and awakening and acceptance that I had made mistakes at first but I could turn things around with the right mindset and the right set of beliefs.

I only ever knew how to be an engineer and a good employee in Corporate America… for 12 years! Then I woke up to realize that I am following an empty shadow and my dreams are not in the highest ladder in corporate america but in doing my own thing. So I gave up my 6-figure cushy job and perks and started my own company in 2011. I did this by first starting a side-hustle for fun, which has now turned into my company, Prolific Living. I started doing what I had been curious about: writing. I wrote blog post after blog post, then I expanded to writing guest posts for other blogs, then I started creating ebooks and then self-published books and then my own products and programs and services. 

It took a lot of preparation to build up my side-hustle and I did that while I still held on to my corporate job. I am now a published author, I speak at conferences, I write a professional blog and run a popular podcast. I coach people how to make drastic career changes, primarily how to either get promoted or get out of corporate america, depending on their desires and dreams.

I am also an expert in green juicing. In December 2011, I self-published my first green juicing guide on Amazon and it went on to sell thousands of copies. In November 2012, a traditional publisher approached us and less than 3 months later, I have a gorgeous hard-cover published book, The Healthy Juicer’s Bible, in all national bookstores and Costco’s, thanks to following my heart and my passion.

This past December, my business has grown so much that I had to hire my husband out of his corporate job. We made the most drastic shift from working in a safe company to working on our own without any business experience but with faith that we can make our dreams come true, that we will figure it out and be able to do what we LOVE to do. Now we own our own business, we travel internationally several times a year and we are making a difference with the products and services we create.

Why do you like it?

Because it’s meaningful work that I am passionate about, that adds value to the world, that changes someone’s life for the better. Because I love creating, whether it’s a blog post or a new episode for The Daily Interaction show or photography for my new product or writing my next book. I find it fascinating that we have so many tools and resources at our disposal now and how few take advantage of this outrageous opportunity in front of us.  

And because I did not want to waste my life doing something that I was supposed to do and wonder for the rest of my days why that work is making me so miserable.

Because we have a duty to live our best, highest potential and if we waste it away and never realize it, I think it’s just a shame. So I love what I do because it gives me an opportunity to leave a footprint behind, and to be able to say that my life and my time was worth it! Maybe others can say that too if the work I leave behind impacts them in a positive way.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I don’t know so much what I wanted to be when I grew up as much as I wanted to be free. I was born and raised in Iran and at the time of my childhood, there was a terrible war and a horrible revolution and our life was terrifying for a while until we were able to get out. All I wanted was freedom and happiness and my biggest dream was to come to America and to live in the land of freedom. I am glad to say that dream has been realized and I am immensely grateful for it.

Beyond that, I didn’t want much of anything. Well, I do remember enjoying clothing design a great deal, thanks to my fabulous grandmother who taught me. Someday, I still want to design clothes and take up knitting again but perhaps that’s a dream for another life. For now, I am quite happy living in my own reality.

 

Website: http://www.prolificliving.com/blog/

Farnoosh’s podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-interaction-podcast/id454329228

Sokanu is the place to help you discover what you want to do with your life—and today we’re releasing updates to each of our careers that reveal what a career is really like. At a glance you can see what the future of a career looks like, how compatible you are, and the average happiness rating of each career.


Explore and learn about a career today

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Choosing the right career with Sokanu is about scientifically identifying your unique calling. Your happiness, fulfillment, professional performance, and unique abilities are all interconnected. See how you match up (or don’t match up) with each of our careers.

Find a career and see how you match up

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Read real reviews from people who have worked in a career—find out where they are now, how they got started, and why they liked or disliked it. Write your own review—or several! Your story might be the one to spark someone’s interest, clarify their direction, or give them courage. It’s amazing how powerful shared experiences and first-hand accounts can be.

Browse careers for a captivating story

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How you decide which career is meant for you should be discovered in the most sincere way—from real people like you. With a more honest look at what a career is really like, we hope to get you closer to finding the perfect career. 


The Sokanu Team

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Another amazing article from the zenhabits blog

‘You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.’ ~Mike Murdock

By Leo Babauta

Start with a simple statement: what do you want to be?

Are you hoping to someday be a writer, a musician, a designer, a programmer, a polyglot, a carpenter, a manga artist, an entrepreneur, an expert at something?

How do you get there? Do you write your intention on a piece of paper, and put it in a bottle and launch it to sea, hoping it will manifest? No. The universe isn’t going to make this happen. You are.

Do you set yourself a big goal to complete by the end of the year, or in three months? Sure, but that doesn’t get the job done. In fact, if you think back on most examples in your life, it probably doesn’t work very often. How many times has this strategy been successful?

I’m going to lay down the law here, based on many many experiments I’ve done in the last 7 years: nothing will change unless you make a daily change.

I’ve tried weekly action steps, things that I do every other day, big bold monthly goals, lots of other permutations. None of them work except daily changes.

If you’re not willing to make it a daily change, you don’t really want to change your life in this way. You only like the idea of learning to draw/speak Japanese/play guitar/program in php/etc. You don’t really want to do it.

So make a daily change. Let’s dig into how it’s done!

How to Turn an Aspiration Into a Daily Change

Let’s name a few aspirations:

  • lose weight
  • write a book
  • stop procrastinating
  • fall in love
  • be happy
  • travel the world
  • drink more water
  • learn Spanish
  • save money
  • take more pictures
  • read more books

How do you turn those lofty ideas into daily changes? Think about what you could do every day that would make the change happen, or at least get you closer to the goal. Sometimes that’s not always easy, but let’s look at some ideas:

  • lose weight – start walking every day, for 10 minutes at first, then 15 after a week, then 20 … once you are walking for 30-40 minutes a day, make another change — drink water instead of soda.
  • write a book – write for 10 minutes a day.
  • stop procrastinating – I can already hear the ironic (and original!) jokes about how people will deal with procrastination later (har!). Anyway, a daily action: set a Most Important Task each morning, then work on it for 10 minutes before opening your browser/mobile device.
  • fall in love – go somewhere each day and meet/social with new people. Or do daily things that make you a fascinating person.
  • be happy – do something each day to make the world better, to help people.
  • travel the world – save money (see next item). Or start selling your stuff, so you can carry your belongings on a backpack and start hitchhiking.
  • save money – start cutting out smaller expenses. Start cooking and eating at home. Sell your car and bike/walk/take the train. Start looking for a smaller home. Do free stuff instead of buying things.
  • drink more water – drink water when you wake up, then every time you take a break (once an hour).
  • learn Spanish – study Spanish sentences in Anki and listen to Pimsleur tapes 10 minutes a day.
  • take more pictures – take pictures at lunch (but dear jeebus, not of your lunch) and post them to your blog.
  • read more books – read every morning and before you go to bed.

You get the idea. Not all of these are perfect ideas, but you could come up with something that works better for you. Point is, do it daily.

How to Implement Daily Changes

This method is fairly simple, and if you really implement it, nearly foolproof:

  1. One Change at a Time. You can break this rule, but don’t be surprised if you fail. Do one change for a month before considering a second. Only add another change if you were successful at the first.
  2. Start Small. OK, I’ve said this two bajillion times. No one ever does it, though. Start with 10 minutes or less. Five minutes is better if it’s a hard change. If you fail at that, drop it to 2 minutes.
  3. Do it at the same time each day. OK, not literally at the same minute, like at 6:00 a.m., but after the same trigger in your daily routine — after you drink your first cup of coffee in the morning, after you arrive at work, after you get home, after you brush your teeth, shower, eat breakfast, wake up, eat lunch, turn on your computer, first see your wife each day.
  4. Make a huge commitment to someone. Or multiple people. Make sure it’s someone whose opinion you respect. For example, I made a commitment to studying/coding PHP at least 10 minutes each day to my friend Tynan. I’ve made commitments to my wife, to other friends, to readers of this blog, to readers of a newspaper on Guam, to my kids, and more.
  5. Be accountable. Taking my programming example with Tynan … each day I have to update a Google spreadsheet each day showing how many minutes I programmed/studied each day, and he can (and does) check that shared spreadsheet. The tool you use don’t matter — you can post to Facebook or Twitter, email someone, mark it on a calendar, report in person. Just make sure you’re accountable each day, not each month. And make sure the person is checking. If they don’t check on you, you need to find a new accountability partner or group.
  6. Have consequences. The most important consequence for doing or not doing the daily habit is that if you don’t, the people will respect you less, and if you do, they’ll respect you more. If your accountability system isn’t set up this way, find another way to do it. You might need to change who you’re accountable to. But you can add other fun consequences: one friend made a promise to Facebook friends that he’d donate $50 to Mitt Romney’s campaign (this was last year) each time he didn’t follow through on a commitment. I’ve made a promise to eat whale sushi (I won’t fail, because eating a whale is repugnant to me, like eating a cow or a child). I’ve promised to sing a Japanese song in front of strangers if I failed. The consequences can also be positive — a big reward each week if you don’t miss a day, for example. Make the consequences bigger if you miss two straight days, and huge if you miss three.
  7. Enjoy the change. If you don’t do this, you might as well find another change to make. If the daily action feels tedious and chore-like, then you are doing it wrong. Find a way to enjoy it, or you won’t stick to it long. Or find some other change you enjoy more.

That’s it. Seven pretty simple steps, and you’ve got a changed life. None of these steps is impossible — in fact, you can put them into action today.

What daily change will you make today?

‘A year from now you will wish you had started today.’ ~Karen Lamb

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