A Contrarian Approach to Choosing a Career

Most people choose a career based on their previous experiences and successes. But I'm wondering if a case can't be made for choosing a career that is completely different from what the person has done in the done in the past.

If someone has been painfully shy all her life and avoided people both in career and personally, mightn't it be exciting, motivating, for her to choose a career that put her in front of people--for example, a salesperson or even a performer?

If someone has spent his life decrying capitalism, might he--if he allowed himself to admit it to himself--be intrigued by the notion of working for a Fortune-500 corporation?

If someone has been a science-centered person, mightn't she enjoy applying her mind to something artistic--for example, creating breakthrough, stunning store displays?

Most of us are attracted by doing something new and/or by exploring a yet unexpressed part of who we are. So I'm wondering if people wouldn't be more motivated to make the significant effort to prepare for a career and then land a job in it if their goal was something other than to build on their experiences and already expressed strengths.

What do you think?

A good source of passive income?

What do you think of this no-cash-required approach to earning passive income?

Every month or two, search google.com/trends, which lists the currently most searched terms.

Pick out a hot topic that intrigues you but is likely to fade in popularity in six months to a year.

Quickly crank out a 25-page ebook on that topic. That's not as difficult as it may seem. It's like a term paper using reader-friendly rather than academic-stuffy language, with no citations required. Use Google as a key research tool, which speeds the process.

Sell your ebooks on Amazon, eBay, and Scribd. Money should start rolling in.

You'd get your book to market long before a traditional book publisher could or would--By the time such publishers would get the book out, that trendy topic would have faded.

Sure, this is not a totally passive income source--After all, you have to write the ebooks. But the only truly passive income sources require a cash investment, on which you hopefully get a return. I'm assuming you don't have enough to invest that you can live off investment income. Writing ebooks on trendy topics requires an investment of $0 and, like all passive income, brings in money while you sleep.

I'm Looking to Hire Someone to Get More People to Read My Stuff

People who read my articles, blog, and books say they're very helpful. I'd like more people to read them.

I should spend time marketing them but my workweek is already too long and I choose to spend it on counseling, writing, and my radio shows rather than on marketing. So I'd like to hire someone to get my articles well-placed, and to increase traffic to my site and blog.

I envision that person doing that via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and perhaps more important, by intelligently pitching key magazine, newspaper, TV, radio, and website editors and producers. The ideal candidate would already have strong relationships with them but more important is intelligence, drive, and an easy-to-work with personality.

The person would also have to be enthusiastic or at least comfortable with promoting not only my writings on career issues but my "males are treated unfairly" articles, my libertarian-leaning politics, my approaches to reinventing education K-20, and my New York Jewish personality.

I'm expecting to lose money on this but that's okay. I'm viewing this as a charitable effort. However, I'd not feel good about hiring someone who's charging big bucks, both because of the money and because that person and I probably wouldn't be very compatible personally.

Would you like to recommend someone? If so, have that person email me a letter of interest including a phone number. My email address is mnemko@comcast.net.

Getting Motivated, Unstuck, Overcoming Procrastination

I've just written an article on getting motivated, overcoming procrastination. It's perhaps too cutesily called Light Your Fire: A Matchbox of Ways to Get Motivated.

It will appear in Mensa's national magazine in November but HERE's an advance look.

I'd appreciate your feedback. This is a draft and I hope to make revisions based on your input before I submit it for publication.

The Government Is Wasting Ever More Of Your Money

We get so little for our tax dollars. And ever less.

Our government has long made us pay so much in taxes, fees, fines ($300 for walking my dog off-leash in an empty park?), etc for labyrinthine, wildly overlapping and redundant government bureaucracies, billion-dollar non-responses to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, wildly bloated space programs, and boondoggles like bridges to nowhere, $85 hammers, billions in Medicare and other fraud, government "businesses" that despite massive spending, go bankrupt (e.g., Amtrak, the Post Office, Medicare, and Social Security). And don't get me started on the endless pork-barrel spending: for example, The Big Dig, which cost you and me $14.6 billion to move a 3.5-mile road underground. (Tip O' Neill got it funded while he was House Speaker.)

Incomprehensibly, the waste of our money is accelerating, which can only mean higher taxes and/or printing more money, which endangers our future. We're broke and if China calls in our debt, we're finished). Especially at risk will be our children and grandchildren. And lest this sound like catastrophizing, a bond rating agency in China has already lowered the U.S.'s credit rating!

If you had control of your tax dollars, would you spend on these current mammoth-ticket items that the people you've elected are now spending your money on:

• A trillion dollars to invade and try to prop up a developing nation,Iraq.
• Enormous sums to do the same in Afghanistan.
• "Investing" in alternative energy schemes that have been rejected by every energy country in America. If such investments had a reasonable chance of paying off, even if it took a decade, at least one leading company would invest in it. Yet, with our tax dollars, the government chooses to invest in these "sloppy seconds," which the working and middle class, which pays the most painful share of taxes, wonders how they'll find the money to pay the rent. Examples: solar energy, without tax subsidies would die because they're simply never going to be cost effective. Another example: ethanol. The government gives huge taxpayer-paid subsidies to corporations like Archer Daniels Midland to grow more corn for ethanol, which lowers our gas mileage, gums up our engines, and, net, saves no energy. (Not to mention drives up food costs worldwide--which most affects the poor and starving.)
  
• Extending unemployment checks to 99 weeks, almost two years. Nearly every one of my career counseling clients who are on unemployment admit that each extension demotivates them from looking for work.
  
• The $814 billion "stimulus" package. President Obama promised that the unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent. Well, 18 months later, it's 9.5%, and at least double that if you count the people who have become so discouraged that they're not even looking for work. And the percentage of people who are underemployed is additionally enormous. And liberals speak of the need of yet more tax dollars for Son of Stimulus?! That stimulus would, yes, rebuild some roads. But again, with so many people un- and underemployed, worrying about how they'll pay the rent, the government wants to take their money and repave a road, or as one Midwesterner said, "Replace an old traffic light with a new one?"
  

We desperately need legislators who would be as prudent with your money as they'd be with their own.

In Defense of Corporations

Corporate bashing is accelerating, a reflection of America's moving leftward and the media's maxi-covering corporate mistakes, from Enron to BP.

And America is not just bashing corporations; it's bleeding them. Is it truly fair that for its risk miscalculation (when there had never been such an event in history,) BP should be forced to pay tens of billions of dollars? Is it truly fair, as ObamaCare now mandates, to force all corporations to pay for health care not just for its employees but for non-employees? Is it fair to force corporations to give workers up to 12 weeks off each year (Marriage and Family Leave Act)? Is it fair to force corporations to retain employees with mental illness? If you ran a business, how would you feel if you were told that unless you do all of the above plus comply with a mountain of other government regulations and taxes, you will be forced out of business?

But you insist, corporations are evil--"a military-industrial complex that wrings as much production from its workers as possible and distributes the profits of their work to fat-cat executives and shareholders. If an American becomes cost-ineffective, he's replaced, perhaps with a 20-something in India willing to work for $5 an hour." You also rail, "Corporate advertising makes us buy crap we don't need, polluting our air and water in the process. What could be more evil?"

Fact is, while it's easy to point to corporations' weaknesses, I daresay that if corporations were eliminated in favor of small businesses, family farms, etc., you'd beg for corporations' reinstatement. Consider the following:

So much of what you buy and need would not be made or made affordably and with good quality in the absence of big corporations: The computer and screen you're reading this on, the car you drive or the mass transit you take, your refrigerator and what's in it: from milk to mayonnaise, Clementines to Quaker Oatmeal, bananas to the baking soda that keeps your refrigerator from stinking. Then there's the chair you're sitting in, the air conditioner that's keeping you comfortable, your coffee maker, your phone service, your iPhone, Google (which you probably used to get to this article,) not to mention the medication you take: from aspirin to heart medicine.

To make and distribute those products that you would not want to do without, corporations pay tens of millions of people a living wage, and many millions of those people, much more than a living wage--plus benefits. And of course, corporations are also forced to pay billions of dollars to comply with the aforementioned mountain of government regulations, the cost of which is passed on to all of us.

I don't have statistics but, anecdotally, I've seen again and again, that the pay, benefits, and working conditions of large corporate employees are usually better than those provided by the tiny businesses the anti-corporate crowd adores. People vote with their feet--job seekers wouldn't, for example, be lining up by the thousands (literally) whenever a new Wal-Mart opens if they felt that small companies were offering better jobs.

Workers' preference for jobs in a corporation rather than a small business is true not just in the U.S. but true of the supposedly taken-advantage-of workers in developing nations. When a U.S. corporation opens up shop in Asia, people usually flock to work for them because the pay, benefits, and working conditions are better than local businesses provide.

Of course, all enterprises--small business, corporations, nonprofits, and government--would benefit from living by loftier values but liberals' disproportionately heaping opprobrium on corporations is merely another example of their bashing society's "haves" without regard to their merit.

Men are More Valuable Than Women?!

As I've documented elsewhere on this blog, so many books and articles (not to mention jokes) argue that the world would be better without men.

This video makes the politically suicidal assertion that men are more valuable than women, much more valuable. And it makes it convincingly.

Yes, I wish it didn't start off with a woman's orgasm. Yes, I wish it acknowledged women's contributions, but I believe it's a must-watch, especially for beaten-down men and for boys in the process of being brainwashed by schools, media, and females that they are decidedly inferior.