First of all, let’s get all this further education stuff off the table. Let’s talk about you, and this life thang…
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Honesty and Openness. No huff, no puff, just be real, one little soul with a chance at life, trying to do your best with the gift of being. This is not a time to have answers; it’s a time for questions, the most important being Who Am I, and What’s The Point Of Life. You don’t know how much you don’t know about how much you don’t know. It’s not shameful, it’s the way God set it up. Pride and fear are your enemies here. Humility and earnestness are your friends. To be honest and open is to be teachable. Unlike school, life does not spare the rod for bad students.
Personal Standards. If you are a quality person you will find a job. Why? Because quality is rare.
If you are dependable, honest, and fair you will rise faster and last longer than inferior people with multiple degrees. I promise, I swear.
Be a flower and await the gardener.
Keep Your Options Open. Debt is a barbed wire fence, and cash is the great wide open. Don’t lock yourself into a bunch of notes that make you keep a bad fit job just to pay the bills.
Deferred Gratification: It’s a grownup thing. You want something? Wait for it. Earn it. Don’t cheat to get there. Life is not a sprint.
Act Like You Own The Place. All day, every day, ask yourself what you’d be doing if this was your business. Would you arrive late, would you stretch out lunch, would you go through the motions of looking busy? If the boss wouldn’t do it, then you don’t do it, and guess who will notice…
Get Your Nouns Right. You’re not looking for a job – you’re looking for a good fit. You have strong traits and weak traits, so find a situation where you’re spending most of the day using your best traits to do something meaningful.
Like dating, a lot of jobs are going to wine and woo you, but there’s only one to marry. By keeping your options open, by deferring gratification, by being honest and open, keeping your standards, you gradually move from ill fit to good fit, and blessed wilt thou be.
Don’t Sell Yourself For Money. It’s the measurement that rarely measures what matters. If you work in a spider web because the pay is good, you’ll get stuck in the goo.
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The Stuff That Used To Be Common
A Millennial complained to me that “everybody has a degree now”. The whole time I’m just grinning, thinking it would be stealing-candy-from-a-baby easy to compete among this generation. You want to stand out to the boss? Oh, yeah, how about these little nothings.
Leave your damn phone in the car. When you come to work, you’re selling your time and labor for money. If you’re doing personal things on work time, you’re stealing. It’s as simple as that. If you leave your phone in the car, and only check it on breaks, you’ll look absolutely righteous in the eyes of your boss.
Leave home at home. Coworkers and supervisors all have their own drama to wear. Don’t add to the load.
Do right even when nobody is watching.
Do the dirty work. You know what people who own their own business do? They sweep cigarette butts off the parking lot. They make sure there’s toilet paper in the restroom. They see something that needs doing and they do it. The more you’re like them, the more you’re indispensable. Hard times come, you’re a keeper.
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Change Is Coming
Driverless cars are coming. Shopping malls are going.
Look at what Google did to the encyclopedia business. Look at what Apple did to flashlight makers and camera companies.
Change is coming faster and faster. If you’re young, that’s the script for your life. Technology is going to roll through this world, making something from nothing, making old standards obsolete.
There will be industries, jobs and careers that we cannot imagine. If that makes you uneasy, I wind back to my theme, that even in the latest iteration of modern, the old fashioned human values, that applied to your grandparents, and their grandparents, as far back as GP’s go, there’s always a job for a quality person with timeless values.
Go have yourself a nice life. There’s plenty of room for one more bird nest.
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, where we still put your purchases in brown paper bags. Other Bedtime Stories can be found on the Eighty-one Facebook page. He can be reached at 81creativity@gmail.com.
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