Fight for the Right to Work

In a bad job market, the most important thing you can do is to keep trying.  Never give up.  Life is a race and your career is also a race.  The problem with most people is that they are often willing to give up at the first sign of difficulty.  The harder you keep trying and the more effort you put in, the more things are likely to go your way. From the time I was about 12, I had paper routes that required me to home deliver hundreds of papers all over my neighborhood by 7:00 am each morning.  It gets very difficult to do paper routes in the winter in Michigan, and it was not a fun job.  The worst part about the paper route was that I had a corrupt manager.  I think he was paid based on how many papers were being delivered on his route, so he kept increasing the number of papers I had to pay for, despite the fact that my customer base was not increasing.  I tried to keep up with this for some time but eventually it got to be too much.  He was raising the numbers of papers he sold me each week faster than I could cancel the newspapers.  Eventually I gave up. This was a huge mistake.  There are people around you like my manager, who are trying to undermine what you are doing, often for their own personal gain.  You should always fight back against people seeking to undermine you–and hold them accountable.  Had I fought back, I am sure I would have made a lot more money back when I was delivering newspapers. Each day I would be left with a huge pile of undelivered papers, for which I would still have to pay.  For years these papers accumulated in my mother’s garage.  Rats came and created elaborate nests out of them.  I knew this because when I would throw the undelivered papers into the garage each morning I could hear the sound of the rats scattering.  I became alarmed to set foot in there.  Even my dog refused to go in the garage.  She would yelp and scream if anyone tried to take her in [Read more]