"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
- Oscar Wilde
So you’re out of work; maybe you have been for a
while. Well, as you probably know, you’re not alone. Like a lot of
other markets these days, the job market is in dire straits.
Let me introduce you to a new way of thinking about
job security: your job is never going to be secure – as long as you have a job.
Working for someone else is always just that, and the only way to insure
your job security is to start working for yourself. The good news
is, you can start today.
It’s said that there are currently
five job-seekers for every available position, so looking for work in
this market may be time-consuming and fruitless. If you decide
that from now on, you're going to be self-employed, then instead of
looking for work, you go to work right now, and start looking for money
(or business) instead.
I don’t mean just looking for money laying in the
streets, I mean looking for cash now, as opposed to trying to find
someone willing to commit to paying you every week of the foreseeable
future.
Let me give you three examples of people who have
gone out and done just that.
Recently, one of my wife’s friends, Laresa, lost
her job as an accountant. Like a lot of people, she'd have happily
taken another job just then, she had accounting skills, of
course, but she saw that her field was crowded with other applicants.
Besides the work was occasionally stressful,
and she'd often yearned for more autonomy.
Desperate for cash, she started perusing the “Jobs”
section on
Craigslist, and she didn’t just read the ads for her specialties
(besides working as an accountant here, she was trained in Russia as a
geologist and had worked there as an economist). She looked at everything
available including part-time jobs. One of the things she found was an
ad placed there by a working woman who needed someone to clean her
house.
Well, what the hey, it was money, which she needed
right away, so she called the lady up, made an appointment and took the
job.
She cleaned the woman’s house, taking care to do an
especially good job and
charged the
lady $15 per hour. To make a long story somewhat shorter,
Laresa realized that even given her special attention, she’d made more
per hour than she would have made working at her old job.
Plus, her new client, who'd been hiring a
maid-service before, was much more satisfied with her work. Laresa
found it was not hard to do a better job working for herself than
someone else's employees had been doing..
So she started placing her own ads, looking for
other women who wanted their homes cleaned while they were away at
work. It wasn’t so long before she’d lined up quite a few more new
clients through Craigslist ads, and through the word-of-mouth referrals she got
as a result of doing a good job.
Next, she introduced a whole new concept: to her
nascent business, while
she’s in the client’s home doing the weekly cleaning, she also balances
their checkbooks and takes care of some bill-paying chores, for an additional fee, of course.
Her business is booming, she’s raised her standard
fee to $25 per hour and she’s making more than she did as an
accountant. Perhaps more important, she sets her own schedule, runs
her own life, and even though she sometimes loses clients,
she never
loses them all at once, so she’s never without work.
If you have a skill or a service to sell, and it’s
hard to imagine any adult who’s worked for any time at all who doesn’t,
then you only need to find a way to market what you do or what you have.
Now, I know that a lot of people are uncomfortable
trying to sell anything, even themselves, in a product or service. They
feel that selling is hucksterish and undignified.
Well, the fact is, that in order to get another
job, and maybe the one after that, you’re going to need to sell yourself
to your future boss. Remember your last job interview? I do, even
though it was almost forty years ago. Not so much fun. In fact, it
can sometimes seem a little like begging. Not only that, but in a
way, you need to keep selling yourself every day when you go to
work.
