How to Find the $1,000 Skill You're Already Sitting On (No New Training Needed)
5 steps for turning decades of experience into portable income
Years ago I remember watching a Gary Vee video where he said ‘own your ego’.
What he meant was - own what it is you want. Don’t hide your dreams because others might diminish them. Be proud of the fact you want more, no matter what it is and own your goals.
One of my favourite quotes of all time is from Jen Sincero’s book ‘You Are a Badass’:
“When you live your life doing the things that turn you on, that you’re good at, that bring you joy, that make you shove stuff in people’s faces and scream, “check this out!!!” you walk around so lit up that you shoot sunbeams out of yer eyeballs. Which automatically lights up the world around you. Which is precisely why you are here: to shine your big-ass ball of fire onto this world of ours. A world that literally depends upon light to survive. You”
So for the love of all that is holy, why oh why do we hide our talents behind big fat bushels??
If you are reading this you are minimum 45+ (my recent survey told me so), and most likely 55+.
That means you are sitting on DECADES of experience, knowledge, problem solving, wisdom and everything in between.
Much of which others, who don’t have your specific skills and insights, would pay to know.
But somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that not only don’t we know as much as we thought we did, but surely most of what we know must be common knowledge right? And even worse, now AI knows what we know so what value are we to anyone anymore.
I know this because I’ve spent the last couple of years doing exactly the same thing to myself.
With 20+ years experience in building businesses, multiple 6 figure course launches under my belt, three 7 figure businesses, (digital products over 5 years, e-commerce business within one year and one offline business I rarely raise because after the recession it drowned, so I count it as a failure event though it hit 7 figures in income 2 years running - “oh female brain, I beg thee to love thyself more!”).
And yet after Google sunk my blog with the helpful content update (which was generating 5 figs a month by then - another venture I deem a ‘failure’ 🙄), I quietly tiptoed onto Substack as if I were a complete beginner.
I didn’t ‘own my ego’. I didn’t come on to the platform with confidence and gusto and proudly announce how I could help others with my DECADES of knowledge. I slunk about writing quiet articles, flipping and flopping my topics, changing my bio a hundred times and changing my strategy every 5 minutes.
I convinced myself that because I didn’t have any ‘current’ million dollar money making ventures I wasn’t worthy of helping anyone.
That’s like a football coach saying that because he’s ‘currently’ not playing football he’s not qualified to coach it.
Seriously?? The stories we tell ourselves.
Is This You?
So I ask you my fellow adventurer.
What have you spent the last 10, 20, 30 years doing?
What have you got good at?
What do you know now that you didn’t know when you started?
What problems have you solved?
What patterns have you noticed?
What have other people asked you about, again and again, over the years?
You are without doubt sitting on a body of experience that you could turn into freedom funding income.
A business.
A publication.
A consultancy.
A product.
A platform.
A second income.
A first income, even, depending on where you are in life.
The First $1,000 Maths
Now let’s make that number real, because “turn your knowledge into income” is one of those phrases that means everything and nothing.
Here is what $1,000 looks like in the real world:
10 people paying $97 for a 90-minute workshop on the thing you’ve done a thousand times
4 calls at $250 with someone five years behind you on the exact road you’ve already walked
37 copies of a $27 template, checklist or mini guide
One small retainer client at $250 a month, kept happy for four months
Look at those numbers again. None of them need an audience of thousands. None of them need a funnel, a personal brand, or a single dance on TikTok.
The workshop needs 10 people. You likely already know 10 people who ask you about this stuff. They might even be in your phone right now.
So before we go through the steps do this exercise.
Open a note on your phone and list:
10 things people have asked you about more than once. At work, at family dinners, in Facebook groups, over the fence. If two different people have asked, it goes on the list.
5 problems that took you years to solve. The pension maze. The difficult team member. The sourdough. The teenager.
5 things you do on autopilot that others seem to find hard. These are the sneaky ones, because familiar things feel ordinary to you even when they’re far from ordinary to anyone else.
Now circle the three that appear more than once across your lists.
Of those three, star the one you could talk about for an hour without notes.
That starred item is your first candidate. You’re picking a starting point, and starting points can change, so don’t agonise. My first starting point was Facebook fan page templates. I promise you it evolves.
If you'd rather do this on paper, all of these exercises are in “The First $1,000 Workbook”, waiting at the bottom of this post.
What comes next is turning it into income you can run from anywhere, and that’s the rest of this post: your core message, your who, your delivery model, and the step where most people give up (plus how not to).
5 Steps For Turning What You Know Into Freedom Funding Income
Once you’ve named the thing, here’s the work.
1. Recognise the value you bring
What do you know?
The beauty of the online world we now live in is that there’s an audience for everything.
If you’ve spent 20 years as an accountant, teacher, organising your home, baking for friends, raising teenagers, working in retail, managing teams, painting for joy, learning new languages, reading personal development books - you name it, you know stuff other people don’t and would love to.
Whether it’s been your profession or a hobby, that knowledge has real value in the marketplace.
Here are just a few examples of people who’ve turned lived experience into portable income:
Barbara Costello (Brunch with Babs) — a grandmother in her 70s who spent decades cooking, raising a family, and running a household. She started sharing practical home, cooking, and life tips on TikTok and built a business around the wisdom she’d accumulated over a lifetime.
Vanesa Amaro — a professional house cleaner who began sharing cleaning tips and hacks online. What started as everyday knowledge from her job grew into a social media audience of millions and a personal brand.
Margaret Manning (Sixty and Me) — after a career in corporate communications, Margaret launched Sixty and Me in her 60s, sharing conversations about life after 60. She turned her experience and perspective into a thriving media business.
Alicia Katz Pollock — an accountant and QuickBooks expert who transformed years of financial and bookkeeping knowledge into online courses, books, workshops, and educational content for small business owners.
Notice what none of these women had to do: invent a new skill, retrain, or start from scratch. They took what they already knew and packaged it for people who wanted to learn it.
That’s what most of us are actually sitting on. Not a gap in our knowledge, but a failure to recognise that the knowledge is already valuable.
Stop describing yourself as someone who’s starting out or figuring it out unless you genuinely are. Own the experience you actually have.
2. Find your core message
There’s a big trend right now toward being nicheless. Being able to write about whatever you fancy on any given day, no constraint.
I get the appeal. It’s attractive to think you can talk about anything you want and call it a business.
Tim Ferriss referred to it recently on a LinkedIn post - the difference between being a specialist and a generalist. (And then linked to an article written in 2007 I might add when the internet wasn’t as noisy)
The trouble is, in todays very noisy world, unless you’re so good from the getgo it’s hard to ignore you, you’re going to struggle to break through.
If you start a YouTube channel with no clear message, the algorithm doesn’t know where to put you. If you launch a Substack publication with no clear message, readers don’t know whether to subscribe because they can’t tell what they’re signing up for.
Without a core message to hold everything together, the algorithms and the humans both struggle to place you, and your work doesn’t compound.
But a core message isn’t the same as a narrow topic.
