Take that Job and Shove it!

I don't care if you are 38 or 58 you are living in one of the most opportune times you will ever see. Sounds crazy huh? Well they are moving the cheese (I know this sounds trite but it is true). If you keep looking for the cheese where it was you'll never find it. In other words, you can't keep looking for the cheese in the wrong place.

If you are new to this blog, I am the old dude here, Bobby D. Now I would call Stasia the young dudette but she is rather thin skinned so lets just say she is the YOUNG one.

Down below Stasia posted an article, Content Sharing or Slave Labor? I made the following comment:

The thing about Citizen Journalism is you can do it part time and make a couple hundred bucks a month. If you are really good you can make some serious dojo.

On the other hand, if you are really good you can probably get a job at the Huffington Post. Take a share of the VIG.

Now if you are a Citizen Journalist down here in Florida you can also make 18 bucks an hour doing some caregiving work. Ten hour days, five days, that is a bit more than $45 G a year. Add in the meager citizen journalism pay and you are getting near $50 G. (By the way, driving older people to the grocery store and taking them to the doctor is not hard work. You also end up with lots of free meals and other fringe benefits.)

Down here in South Florida you can buy a nice 3 bedroom townhouse with a garage in the neighborhood of $125 G.

Anyway, here is my question. How many journalist in this day and age make $50 G and get all the tax benefits of a sole proprietor?

Not to mention, once you get good at caregiving you hire other caregivers and take a piece of their action. Next thing you know you are making $125 G.

We live in America. You can think about all the people losing their jobs and wait until you lose your own. Or, you can become an entrepreneur. Once you learn a business you get to say these magic words--take that job and shove it.

Well now I want to elaborate.


Back in 1973-74 the stock market dropped by almost 50 percent (see: A Brief History of Stock Market Drops--the Last 80 years). New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy. People were losing their homes and we were in the middle of a monster recession. The world was coming to an end, Right? Sound familiar? It didn't get better for quite a while. By 1980, inflation was up to a annual rate of 15 percent, unemployment was around ten percent, and short term interest rates were over 20 percent. The world ended didn't it?

Ok, now to my point. I don't care if you are 38 or 58 you are living in one of the most opportune times you will ever see. Sounds crazy huh? Well they are moving the cheese (I know this sounds trite but it is true). If you keep looking for the cheese where it was you'll never find it. In other words, you can't keep looking for the cheese in the wrong place.

Now I suppose you want me to tell you where to find the cheese, but I am not going to do that. However, I will give you a couple of pieces of the road map. First and foremost, start maxing out your 401 K. Don't believe the crap you are reading out there. If you can't max out your 401 K with your current job, get a part time job. In 1974 and again in 1982 you could have put $10 G in any of a long list of stocks and made well over a million. Yeah a million bucks from one ten thousand dollar investment in a single stock. The list of companies is very long. An investment in Microsoft or Intel (later in the decade) would have done the trick.

Now what you need to do is start figuring out where the money is going to be. Hmm, who is the Microsoft or Intel of alternative energy? Forget about buying the computer, buy the company that sells what is in the computer. Forget about the utilities, start figuring out who is going to put a part in every wind machine or solar panel.

Ok, now I just gave you an idea about where you can start finding some cheese. Its in alternative energy. Maybe you are lucky and you can identify an early stage company that is going to be the big winner in the alternative energy field. How about you go beg them for a job and promise to work like a dog. Working like a dog is not so bad. Don't believe me? Well go find someone that works at Google. Why not find the janitor. He should be worth a few mill by now. Go find someone that jumped into CISCO, Intel, or Microsoft when they were in an old building down the street. CISCO started in an apartment.

Ok, for all four of you that read this blog go get some people in here to comment.

I have better ideas about the trends of the future and how to make some serious DOJO but I am not sharing unless I get an audience yelling and screaming at me.

How about we start with the student body at Drexel and work our way up to the real army--Penn State.

My mother was 66 years old when Microsoft went public. About $2 G would have gotten her to a million. You know a million is way to low. You should be thinking $10-30 million right now.

Oh yeah, right now buying Google is for suckers. You might make some good dojo but you won't find the cheese looking over your shoulder.