J.O.B.S. – J.ust O.ne B.asic S.kill

By Orlando Rodriguez. Photo Source: Wikipedia Commons. U.S. Public Domain.

When I was young. My grandmother always used to always greet me with her muffled accent and this dreaded phrase: “Are you working?!”

Most of the time, it usually came after “Hello”, but before “how are you?” This unless my mother was sick, if someone died or if there was an horrible earthquake.

To her and my aunts, a job was more important than having functioning genitals. You could pee on yourself, but if you had a job, at least you could buy new clothes.

Because of this emphasis on employment, the word “Work”, and any variation of it, “working” or “worker”, became a root word in my crosshairs. I vowed to never become a worker, even if Karl Marx came back to life and said he had a sack of unmarked bills. I would never toil for pay of any kind by fulfilling a piece of another person’s vision.

Of course, this isn’t practical. Helping an organization, for compensation, is inevitable in a service based economy. However, the odds are greater that you will always find yourself working at ‘jobs’, if you have just one basic skill.

To avoid this, you must master what you love to do. Malcolm Gladwell, calls this in his last book, ‘Outliers’ the ‘Ten-Thousand Hour Rule.’ Transferable skill mastery equals more financial independence than performing a Fordian conveyor belt task, that you have no passion for.

That means playing toward your strengths. If you like to gossip, get followers for your Twitter posts on everyone else’s business. If you addicted to Facebook, use your network of friends to gauge trends through viral marketing. If you can’t keep your opinions to yourself, write ’em on a Word Press blog or a Paper Li publication.

If some of the best graphic artists, started out writing graffiti, why wouldn’t the next great directors and advertisers, come from YouTube?

Don’t let your skills get overlooked.

Workers on a Henry Ford designed assembly line, 1913