Young Careers - Action Plan

No Time Like Now

Young Careers is about growth and development while you’re working. We won’t wait until you get laid off or fired in one way or another. That’s not the positive dynamic to work with when we’re trying to make the best of your working life. An important phrase: ‘your working life’. Your working life can mean a job you’re doing anywhere. It does mean a job you’re doing wherever you are. Are you doing a job on school assignments, on extra curricular activities? I hope so; high school is where you develop the most options for work you’d like to do for the rest of your life. Then, you may be out of school as you read this; that’s okay. The process we talk about here can be used if you’re a student as well as if you’re working at a job. In short, anyone can use this process to take command of his or her working life. When you’re in control of your working life, you are managing your career, molding it, shaping it and doing those things that are necessary for your working life to develop the way you want it, or close to it. If you are not engaged in this process and are working, then, you are holding a job, doing what someone else tells you (although this can happen in a career, too), and accepting what others are willing to give you for your efforts, doing only what others want you to do. Your job controls you and determines what your working life will be like. You’re part of what someone else wants their life to be like.

So, in holding a job, you’re doing nothing to determine your own outcome in a most important part of your life – your work. Yeah, everybody talks about work and business until they’re blue in the face. You should listen and think and build your own ideas of what your work should be. Work is the action that pays the bills and you don’t get through this life without paying your way. Got that? No matter how noble the pursuit, we all pay our way through life, with money - that we earn from what we call work. How well we do this determines how well we enjoy our lives. Yes, enjoy. The wrong work can be a misery every day just as the work you choose, enjoy and focus on can be a joy. We spend about one-third of our life working. Wouldn’t you rather enjoy it? That’s kind of cold and in your face, but that’s the truth; money determines a lot of what our life is going to be like.

Have doubts? That’s okay. Think of everything you have now, everything you own or owe on and tell me what means of exchange got these things for you and what means of exchange will get you what you want next week or whenever. It’s just a fact of practical life. Money is not evil, it’s a tool, it’s the lubricant of our activities. It allows us to do things and, if we have enough of it, money allows us to do everything we want to. And we need enough of it even to do the things we must do. Accept the need for money as a fact of life and for our purposes forget about philosophizing about it. Money doesn’t determine the quality of our work; we do that. The choices of the admirable or mundane are ours. Money is just a tool, but, to get it, you need to be more competitive in the career markets. If we understand each other, we’re ready to begin your first assignment.

===========


“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with
problems longer.” – Albert Einstein


===========


Try:High School - Head On (highschoolheadon.blogspot.com/)

How to live, love, laugh and sweat to a big win in your
four years of greatest life-shaping opportunity.