Tag Archives: passion

Great and glorious job search!

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today, I knew it then as purpose.  (Davis)

Can your job search be like General Grant’s assaults on the Confederacy? You certainly can’t start from a worse personal position than he did.

Robert E. Lee said, “We all thought Richmond, protected as it was by our splendid fortifications and defended by our army of veteran, could not be taken.  Yet Grant turned his face to our Capital, and never turned it away until we had surrendered.”

Abraham Lincoln was strongly urged to remove Ulysses S. Grant from command by Grant’s two senior leaders.  Lincoln replied, “I cannot spare this man, he fights.”

Grant’s first army unit as a General had driven away two other Generals in the previous month.  The unit was insubordinate, untrained and outright rebellious.  Yet they followed Grant.

The year before the US Civil War, Grant was an alcohol abusing store clerk who only kept his job because he worked for his father-in-law.

What changed in Grant? Passion, focus, and high purpose.

Do you have a career plan? A job search plan? One that really suits your talents and skills?  If one plan of attack fails are you willing to immediately switch to another?  As the job market changes are you ready to take advantage of previously unseen opportunities?  Are you constantly preparing?

Your passion may be your family, church, job, or club. It is probably a combination of them.  If you take the time you spend on your job, concentrate, plan and execute, you can do wonders.  If you slackly follow orders, give the minimal possible and expect to get a raise before you work harder, you will stagnate.

Where can you go to succeed?  What can you do?  Do you have to relocate your family? Do you need a new job?  A new career path? What can be your great purpose at work?

Acres of Diamonds can give you some directions along that path. You can read it or listen to the author tell it at this link.

Something To Do Today

Read or listen to Acres of Diamonds .  Read it.

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Later: Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

How you create your future with your passion

“The future is not something we enter.  The future is something we create.”  (Leonard Sweet)

I have worked for more than 30 companies.  Each one could have been a new career.  Okay, so I was 12 when I got my first newspaper delivery job, but I could have kept at it. I could have become a delivery supervisor or a reporter.  My job as a movie theater usher could have led to a lifetime working as a theater manager. I could have gone back and gotten my MS or PhD in Geology.  I could have worked my way back onto the remaining oil rigs after 3/4 of them were shut down in one month, and continued there.  Instead, I got into computers.

The job world really does reward you for your experience and what you persist in.

Shrinking and growing happens in all industries.  After each war, as the military shrinks, generals become colonels and majors.  Most officers just leave the military. Patton and Eisenhower took demotions after the first world war. They stayed with their beloved career.  They rose again.

Dot.com turned into dot.bomb in 2001. 2002 saw thousands of computer pro’s unemployed. That changed. In February 2006 more US workers were into computers than there were working with computers at the peak of the dot.com boom.  Persistence during the bad times has created a lot of opportunities.

One friend of mine sold a computer company for millions.  Then he lost all that money in Enron and other bad investments.  So he retrained in VB.Net and took a job for $24,000 per year.  A year and a half later he was earning $70,000 per year.  He has another company doing amazing things for the iPhone now.

If you are in a field you love and are willing to roll with the good times and endure the bad, you will be able to stay in that field.  Your pay may vary from great to poor, but in the end you create your future.

Industry hopping and career changes aren’t bad if you are still looking for your love.  If you have found your love, embed yourself within that industry.  You may have to switch companies and jobs, but let your experience build until people look at you and say, “We have to hire him, he’s worth two of anyone else.”

Something to do today

Learn more and do more if you want to stay in your industry. Be a ball of enthusiasm and a tower of dedication.

If you don’t want to stay in your industry, get into a new one NOW.

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Coming up

Give a monkey a gun

Salary toy

Working for the Fortune 50

Scrabble and muck and get ahead

When to give up and go elsewhere