A huge, positive step in life is switching from 'working for a living' to 'developing a career'.
There has been a fairly recent social trend of young people choosing just to take 'jobs', claiming to have little interest in the income or the nature of the work, and focusing entirely on their after-work pastimes and interests. This is like dropping out halfway. The truth is, it wears thin quickly.
An interesting truth about human psychology is that we derive a great deal of our personal satisfaction and self-esteem from our work. It turns out you can't just stick your job in a pigeon hole, go through the motions, and still feel good about yourself. Our work and our self-esteem are closely linked. If our work is unsatisfactory to us, we will be unhappy. People stuck in unsatisfactory jobs carry that unhappiness over into other areas of their lives and find that nothing else makes them happy either.
How to escape a dead-end job (before it's too late)
A trend of recent years in many mature economies, unfortunate in many ways, has been that a big chunk of the new jobs being created are low-end, low-wage service-oriented jobs, like fast food restaurants, delivery and shop assistants. This is not to say you cannot start out in such a job and work your way up to better and better positions. You can, and many companies in these types of industries go out of their way to 'promote from within'.
However, the odds are definitely heavily against you breaking free of low wage jobs if your education is severely limited. High school is, today, virtually a necessity. Beyond that, career training is the big breakthrough for tens of thousands of people each year.
'People are afraid of the future, the unknown. If a man faces up to it, and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control overhis destiny. That's an exciting idea to me. Better than waiting with everybody else to see what's going to happen.'
Actually, career thinking even precedes career training. Career thinking is the change, in your own mind, from 'jobs' and 'paydays' to a 'career' and a 'career path'. The word 'path' is important; it says you are involved in a career you can develop, move forward with and progress from one level to the next. It says there is opportunity for growth, now and in the foreseeable future. To stimulate your career thinking, a list of such careers appears at the end of this Chapter. Incidentally, as you look through this list and think about career choices and options, it's helpful to remember that your own intuition or 'gut instinct' about which career path to follow will probably be right.
Your subconscious mind is a vast, computerised warehouse of information and ideas - many of you have put away there and consciously forgotten about. When you begin to focus your conscious thought on one thing, like a career choice, your subconscious does a kind of 'computer sort' through all the related, stored information, quickly organises and summarises it, and communicates it to you, through that 'little voice' inside your head. One of the pioneers of the self-improvement field taught that 'no problem ever comes to you for which the answer is not already within you' and 'man is deaf until he hears the inner voice of his own being'.
You can and should place quite a bit of trust in what your own 'inner voice' has to say about your career.
Yes, you can get a better job...
For every industry that is temporarily stalled in the economy, there are two others growing by leaps and bounds. You may read in the newspaper or hear on the news about some huge company laying off workers or eliminating jobs - but what