Hate looking for a job? Chances are that you’re looking for work the hard way, which means you’re going to have to keep looking a whole lot longer.

The worst ways to look for a job are:

1. going to employment agencies
2. answering local newspaper ads
3. mailing resumes to random employers
4. applying by internet

Notice that these options also happen to be the easiest. You just have to hit print and address envelopes—no interaction with real people. You can stay home in your pajamas! The problem is that a lot of people are out there in their pajamas, but a few people aren’t. The people without pajamas are probably finding more jobs.

Many employees seem to hunt for jobs in the total opposite way than employers. Future employers aren’t interested in pajamas. It takes a lot of guts to get out there. But a successful job is worth it.

Four ways you can better your odds of finding a job are:
1. ask your family, friends, and community for leads—the school where you graduated can be a big booster
2. start knocking on doors of interesting companies, regardless of whether they’re advertising for jobs
3. pick up the phonebook and start calling businesses you’d consider working at and ask if they’re hiring for the type of thing you do well.
4. Establish a mentor and learn how to network

A while back, I wrote a related article called 4 Things College Grads Need to Know.

Now I’m a shy person, but as I prepared to search for a new job in a few months, I’m realizing that I can’t be reserved if I want to get a good job, so I needed to write and to share this information with you.

Anyone can serve as an employment contact—from barbers to dental receptionists. My friend made business cards that she’d hand out to everyone she met. She didn’t let shyness factor in; she got out there. Now she’s got a huge network and a great job.

I just ran into this article about finding the balance between self promotion and integrity. Where do you draw the line, and how should you promote yourself towards you boss and others? Without isolating yourself of course.

The ideas in the article come from a book called Selling Yourself without Selling Out: A Leader’s Guide to Ethical Self-Promotion. I haven’t read it yet; however I hope to get a chance to pick it up sometime this fall.

The five ideas in this article are:

1. Educate up.
2. Expand your network.
3. Tap other people’s expertise.
4. Acknowledge your team.
5. Celebrate success.

Check out the whole article over at Marketwatch. Of course they have a description and example on each of those five ideas.

When I quit my job last month, I felt pretty uncertain of where life would go, especially because my husband quit his job the month before. I never expected to find such satisfaction in setting and accomplishing my goals instead of my employer’s.

Living without a constant paycheck is tough. When working for someone else, you start to depend on this little burst of wealth every two weeks when a boss gives you a check. When you don’t get that check, I think that you fight a little harder. You don’t clean your house as much, but you keep working when you get home after a long day.

My husband and I can only keep up this schedule until December when he starts graduate school, so I’m trying to make the most of each day. Freedom spoils you, though. I feel like I’ll be like the new college graduates with skewed perceptions of how work and life should be.

But then again, I think college grads believe in something that we long ago forgot:

1. Work and pleasure can be the same thing.
I don’t mean that you have to love every moment of everything that you’re doing *that’s impossible. But shouldn’t you be just as eager to start your work day as you are to finish?

2. Little favors can lead to big favors. Sometimes you can accomplish a lot more when you team up with others who have different skills and ideas. We’ve really tried to build good connections. While we were in Germany recently, our real estate projects kept developing. Our real estate agent was willing to serve as our emergency contact. My sister was depositing monies at the bank. And several great contractors and handymen tackled a few of our dreaded projects while my dad stopped in during his lunch breaks to follow up. With the exception of family, everyone else helped us along because we’ve helped them in the past, and they know we’ll have work for them in the future, too. Bosses can’t be feared, and as a boss, you can’t always appear so fearful.

3. Life is about living.
My last boss was a workaholic, and it made him furious that I wanted to leave at the end of the day. My memories of college often involved doing the least amount necessary to generate the most pleasing results. You figured out exactly what score you had to get on final exams to maintain your grade. And how many people actually read every text that they were supposed to? School was about more than what you learned in class. Work shouldn’t consume you when life holds far more.

4. Money isn’t everything.
I’m not thinking of reverting back to Ramen Noodles. But whatever happened to the thrill of a free meal or cheap living? How about riding that bicycle even when you can afford the gas now? We work to make money, and suddenly we don’t know what to do without the huge sums of money. You become entrenched by growing “necessities”.

5. You don’t have to be an expert to give it a shot.
In the workplace, it’s easy to see the people that are better than you and become passive. Sometimes it’s even easier for the boss to literally remind you of how unknowing you are because you lack the experience, the knowledge he has, or just plain common sense (HIS point-of-view). In college, we were fearless – what’s the worse that could happen? The sense of adventure vanishes at work, I’ve noticed. Don’t just stick with what you’re good at. Take a leap at the things you’ve never tried or don’t do as well.

NPR is doing a nationwide project called StoryCorps where people are invited to share their lives. For forty minutes, a person can interview a relative or friend, have the information stored in the National Archives, and most importantly, walk home with a personal copy of the recording.

Ever since my dad and I decided that I would interview my grandma the day after her 90th birthday celebration, my dad has been urging me to record my memories before they become as fuzzy as memories are to my grandma.

Share your lessons on money

My grandma didn’t know much about her own money; my grandfather cared for the books. He died years ago, and I can no longer ask him about his experiences and lessons. Today, such disparities are few. You know about your money, and you know the strengths that are bringing you more money. Start keeping a record of your lessons.

The sad truth is that most of us don’t have living grandparents or family members experienced with wealth over time that we can talk to. It’s pretty hard for them to look back even if we have such people around.

You don’t have to have wealth now to record your experiences. In fact, that’s not the perspective future generations can truly learn from. The mission at Aridni is to walk our readers through our lessons. Have you ever seen a book or self-help program that truly starts at the beginning? Seems like they’re always skipping a step—like you already have the million dollar idea or something! These books sell a philosophy; they don’t offer frankness during each step of wealth building. A personal connection who wants YOU to succeed (not another book sold) offers far more useful nuggets.

I learned a lot from my grandma and family traditions that day. I only wonder how much more I could have learned if she’d written them down when she was younger.

How to write your financial journal

1. Address the journal entry to someone close to you so that you’re more likely to write personal thoughts. I start with: dear friend.
2. Talk about where you stand with your finances today
3. How did you get where you are today?
4. Where do you hope to financially stand in the future? Why?
5. What are some ideas and plans you have for obtaining that goal?
6. What are some smart decisions that you have made?
7. Any mistakes?

I am always amazed by the amount of politics involved in business. Think of the businesses that your business can’t survive without. Now think for a moment of the businesses that can’t survive without yours.

Take the company or product that you rely the most on. Now imagine that they are completely gone. They vanished overnight and there is absolutely no trace of them whatsoever. Their service is no longer available and your running out of time before your shareholders, and more importantly your customers begin to notice.

I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m about to ask already, but here it is regardless… “WHAT DO YOU DO NOW????”

Anyone with an entrepreneur’s mindset can tell you what must be done. Whatever it takes. It is up to you to make things work. Find alternatives, but don’t just look at the former company’s competition, there are all kinds of solutions you could be looking at.

Is this something that you can afford to do yourself? While that’s not always a financially feasible option, imagine for a second the market control that you could potentially obtain. Being as we said this is a rather important aspect of your business, something that you really rely on, let’s assume the likely scenario that you are not quite able to afford this. So what’s the plan now?

How about your network? I’m talking about both your personal contacts and your business’s professional contacts. The event of a company with a valuable disappearing off of the map (although rare!!) would not only be devastating to you, but also to your competitors and your partners. It’s fair to assume that YOUR competition isn’t going to sit around. It’s all about results and numbers.

So before you let yourself drown while wallowing in your own self pity, come up with some sort of plan. Can you be the one who unites everyone? I talked about having your company take over the service, but that could be expensive to your business. That however doesn’t mean that your network as a whole can’t arrange something where everyone benefits. And if the new service is owned by people who rely on it, you no are no longer subject to the whims of some unreliable company.

Now I’m not saying that you should wait around until some company that’s making money suddenly decides to disband before you can take action. It’s all about networking and politics. Who can help you get ahead and at the same time you can help get ahead?

One quick example is my friend Shay over at Sparkplugged.net, he is able to help me out with my weak area, web design. And meanwhile I am able to help him out with technical aspects of his site. By trading knowledge we can both get ahead. And more importantly, trust is developed between the two of us.

Both of the web-pages for Aridni and Sparkplugged are hosted by the same company and even on the same server. If for some reason there was a problem with the hosting (it’s been great so far, knock on wood!) by having two of us, we wield more power if something should occur. Granted it’s not a whole lot more, but what if our network a good portion of the people from the host! That would be a fair amount of influence. (note: I’m really happy with my host but it’s a relevant example here where a network could help build a great alliance )

Now it would be just awful to be caught off guard and need the network that you don’t have built up yet. If somebody doesn’t know you, they certainly won’t be inclined to help you out. If you haven’t even gained trust from someone, they have little incentive to offer you favors. So get out there and start recruiting your allies! What kind of trades can you offer? Remember both sides must benefit!

What if you only had one month to impress everyone, make friends, and influence people, do you think you could do it?

As you might know, I have traveled to Buffalo New York for the summer, and now that it’s drawing to an end, it is time for me to go home. This time I am taking a different route that the way over. I’m going to drive through Ontario to Michigan and then drive across the country on the I-90. (but that’s a little off topic!)

Our main business idea didn’t quite work out so I picked up a summer job here. As a seasonal worker I only had a finite amount of time to leave an impression.

The game was on, first order of business… training. I wanted to become competent with the operations and lexicon there.

My next priority was to improve/master the working skills. After training was complete I worked to become as efficient as possible with the customers.

The third task on my agenda was to offer help to other employees. While this was more of a courtesy most of the time, being useful and productive is a great habit. When you help people out, they are more likely to help you out down the road.

The last portion of my strategy was basically just talking to people. I tried to be friendly to customers, employees, delivery people, and management. Once again if people like you, they are more likely to help you later on.

I’m not going to be arrogant and say that this plan of attack impressed everyone, made friends, and influenced people. But what I am going to say is that I believe it certainly paid off.

After the first two weeks I was on friendly terms with the managers and supervisors. As I’m sure you know, this holds all kinds of perks and benefits. If you are on their bad side work can be a terrible time. It really is the difference between night and day. Of course you never want to compromise your own character to appease someone else.

Finally on the day of my last shift, the district manager came by and thanked me. He mentioned that everything he heard about me was good, and mentioned that if I ever come back to Buffalo that I would have a job.

My strategy of hard work and communication worked out well in this situation. You never know who is going to talk to who, so it’s a good idea to display the same great work ethic around everyone you encounter.

That’s how I tried to get ahead in the game. So now I ask, if you only had one month to define your image and mold how people think of you, how would you go about it?