Sunday, October 20, 2002

 Future Shoes 
"Finding Work After 50"

by Michael Finley

Hello. My name is Mike Finley, and this is a different kind of career guide. For openers, I’m 53 years old. I’m not a millionaire. I don’t fly around on a private jet. I’m just a self-employed mensch making an OK living on the outskirts of the communications industry.

Be all that as it may, I’m here to give you some valuable insights into the way you earn your living. Because it’s kept me alive the past thirty years, doing things that, for the most part, I like doing. As I get older, I find myself appreciating this freedom and flexibility even more. And since it costs me nothing to share it with you, I’m happy if I can help you think through your employment situation.

What hue is your bumbershoot?

There are lots of guides out there for people looking to get their careers on track in hard times, and many of them are quite good. The classic has to be What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles.

Bolles is an Episcopal priest who had the revolutionary insight, almost three decades ago, that we go about the business of finding work in a completely ass-backward way -- from the supply side ("What's in the paper today?") versus a demand side ("What do I really want to do?").

If you have the ambition to change your life in a big, assertive way, I urge you to rush out right now and buy a copy of Bolles' book. Just put this book down, I’ll wait till you get back.

Good. Now that those other people have left the room, I want to tell those who stayed what this is all about.

I'm here to provide a middle path between the conventional route (in which you send out a mess of resumes and see what happens) and Bolles' approach (which requires greater "vision" than many of us are capable of in hard times).

Three warnings

Now, I must warn you at the outset of three things:

1. My approach works better for people that have some kind of experience, however vague or scanty, than for people who are brand, spanking new to the job market.

2. While I don't require that you have a clear, prophetic vision of your future, as Bolles does, I do require that you have an open mind about your abilities, and an entrepreneurial spirit.

3. Using Bolles' approach, you may wind up ecstatically fulfilled, and that would be fantastic. Under my approach, the idea is simply to get groceries on your table on a reliable basis. Bliss takes a back seat to basics. It's a more modest, and less visionary approach. But hey, who doesn't like groceries.

I devised this method nearly twenty years ago, during the wonderful Carter/Reagan recession, to get me, Mike Finley, some steady money. We could call it the Mike Finley Way of Getting Work. It doesn’t actually matter what we call it; what matters is that it works.

When that recession took hold, I was a newspaper editor, a good one, festooned with regional design awards and such. But those credentials were nearly useless because the industry I was in, newspaper publishing, was in the crapper, and would never regain its former size.

I had to come up with a new approach. It took me two years, but I did it.

NOTE TO READERS: 

For the rest of this essay, and with my specific methodology for putting yourself back to work, go to this link. then you can download the booklet and give it to someone you know who's trying really hard to catch on again.

  Good luck to you! - Mike

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Copyright (c) 2002 by Michael Finley

   

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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