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?

Earlier this week I had a brief break from ‘boring mundane task #1’ and ‘boring mundane task #2.’ During this time I had to accomplish absolutely as much as possible in this amount of time as I could.

One quick note, when I say boring mundane task, I am referring to something that is obligated to be done, but won’t increase your wealth.

As BMT1 wrapped up, I immediately went to work attempting to get one step closer to my dreams. In this case, it was two important phone calls and tweaking some code. Both of the phone issues still need a follow-up, but the other item on the list is good forever.

Of course every time that I get a break it doesn’t end up as productive as this one, and hopefully I can have more such as this one in the future. Life takes planning, and there is an element of strategy involved as well. So when your 15 minutes comes around be ready for it. Have your time planned out and go accomplish things!

For those of you who read my article last week regarding my fall-out with my friend in Virginia, I am back to report that I spent my time off visiting a close friend in North Carolina. My friend Carrie lives in the “sticks,” about an hour’s drive from the Outer Banks, and her family confirmed my belief that people who are least able to afford life’s luxuries are also the most insistent on making their guests comfortable and meeting their every need. The principle of creating a hospitality savings account (see my earlier article) seems to apply to the majority of true Southerners, especially those who work hard for what they have and take pride in being able to share their modest, but well earned comforts with guests. Carrie’s mother told me that from the time she was a child, she was taught to make every guest feel like a “queen” even though her family was barely able to scrape by. For these people, hospitality is one of their greatest virtues.

Carrie’s family lives in the poorest county in North Carolina with the state’s (and for that matter, the nation’s) lowest ranked public school system. In order to offer their three children a chance at a better life, Carrie’s parents denied themselves luxuries many of us take for granted so that they could send Carrie, her brother and sister to parochial high schools and then to college. I was amazed at this family’s commitment to education, a commitment that on one level is even stronger than in the greater Boston community in which I grew up where 95% of the kids in our public high school matriculate at four year colleges. I was not considered successful for going to college- it was simply expected and to do otherwise was unthinkable. I would have only been a topic of cocktail gossip if I had gone to Harvard, and even Harvard is considered “normal” around here. Yet, for families like Carrie’s, getting into any college is a major achievement and their dedication to education is so pervasive because they can’t afford to feel otherwise. They have seen the alternative first hand, while the people I grew up around were hardly aware that most Americans were living a different reality.

It seems to me that the working poor and working classes are more conscious of the value of money than any other socioeconomic group. They put in long hours to earn their small paycheck. Consequently, they value every dollar much more than a single mother on welfare whose monthly government check reflects tax payer’s dollars and not her own labor. Carrie’s father works at a paper mill and while I was down there this week, he was working the night shift every day so I barely got to talk to him. However, he asked me to let him know if there was anything he could do to make my visit pleasant. The working poor may not know the ins and outs of CDs, 401Ks, and IRAs, but they do know how to use a savings account and they put money away for things that have lasting value like education and a comfortable, welcoming home as opposed to saving up for an Ann Taylor suit as I did once in high school. If I had grown up like Carrie, there wouldn’t have been any Ann Taylors within a 100 mile radius and I probably would have been using my earnings at McDonalds to help pay for my private school tuition if that opportunity was within my reach.

So the next time you lament about not being able to afford a new car or a bigger house, think about families like Carrie’s who are struggling to afford their mortgage and the rising cost of gas. When I offered to pay them back for the cost of the gas to and from the airport, her mother said “don’t be silly. You are our guest.”

This week I had an emotional fallout with a friend I had planned to visit over something as simple as the following:
she wanted me to pay for my own groceries and half of her gas while I was at her house and I thought that was too much to expect of a guest. In fact, I thought it was downright rude. She in turn, thought I expected too much of her as a host. The end result is that we are no longer on speaking terms, but the cause of this altercation was so basic and avoidable had I been in an Aridni mindset when I talked with her: it all boiled down to money.

I was raised in a family where knowing how to be a host was essential to the success of my father’s business. When I was growing up, we regularly had visitors from other countries stay at our house and we wined/dined them, took them to see tourist sites in Boston and did everything possible to make their stay comfortable. Had I not been hospitable towards these guests, it would have hurt our family’s solvency and my father’s reputation. More importantly, as my mother always emphasized, it is important to treat your guests the same way you would want to be treated if you were in their home. It all boiled down to respect. Now, if I am visiting a casual friend, I don’t necessarily expect them to buy me caviar, but I do expect that since I am the one paying for the plane ticket, they will cover some of the other expenses of my visit.

Now, my ex-friend in Virginia has different financial expectations. As she put it, “friends don’t pay for friends… No one owes you anything and if kindness is given, it should be appreciated but not expected.”

I don’t see paying for groceries to be a financial trade- I see it as hospitality, a kindness that is reasonable to expect if you are visiting someone. If I want something special that she doesn’t have, then yes it makes sense for me to buy it myself, but should I have to pay her back for half the spaghetti and meatballs we consumed? What if I get seconds and she doesn’t?

Now, after my friend had explained that she is very poor and sometimes can’t even afford her own food, I completely changed my expectations to accomodate the new information. Our similar, yet contrasting backgrounds could provide a clue as to the discrepancies in our financial expectations of eachother as host and guest. We were both brought up in well-to-do families, but her parents never spent any of their wealth on her–my ex-friend always had to fend for herself. My parents on the other hand, made sure I was never wanting for anything and at the same time, impressed upon me the importance of giving to others who were less fortunate.

The result? My friend thinks that everyone should fend for themselves and I believe in the phrase “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” She says she is too proud to accept “handouts” from people (i.e. a host paying for her groceries) while as a host I would be embarrased to charge my guests for their food. Who’s right?

If the tables were reversed and I was the host, I would most likely not extend an invitation for someone to stay at my house for a week if I did not have the means to be a hospitable host. However, if my budget was really tight and I was close to the person, I might say something like “I really would like for you to visit, but I just want you to know ahead of time that I can’t afford food for two.” That is very different than what my ex-friend said which was “you have to pay for your own food. Every last bit of it.” In fact, as I told her, if she visited me and I was living on my own on a budget, I would pay for her food even if it meant that I had to save up for it because those are the expectations I have of MYSELF as a host. But was it right for me to impose my expectations of myself on her?

The bottom line here is whether it was reasonable for me to place my own financial expectations on my ex-friend and vice versa. Were my expectations of her too high? She certainly thought so; I beg to differ.

What’s really sad is that we were very close friends, but because our financial expectations of eachother were so different, we both percieved eachother as being rude and unreasonable.

My advice: If you are living on a budget, next time you go to the bank, make sure you open a “hospitality” savings account so you can be prepared the next time you have a house guest. Either that or don’t ask for company.

It is quite possible that somebody has their eye on you now. Who exactly are they? And what exactly are they watching for? They are waiting for you to mess up.

Before you run off to pick up a tinfoil hat or label me as a conspiracy theorist, hear me out.

For the purpose of this post, ‘they’ are not necessarily people who would benefit from your business or your reputation going through rough times. This is all about managing your image really and the need to actively work to improve it.

Take for example Rockefeller. He was not a bad person; however by not controlling his image, he was not well liked. Anyone who makes massive amounts of money is easily targeted by those not as fortunate and Rockefeller was certainly no exception.

It took him years of philanthropic work to recoup the ground he had lost from the public’s eye. When he died in 1937, he had spent almost 40 years of his life trying to regain his image.

(Continue reading this article…)

Surrounded by my family for the past week, I have witnessed their immediate acceptance to my husband because of one thing… he made people feel important. People love to share their accomplishments, praise their passions, and most importantly, have someone take note of them.

Success in any avenue of life can come this way. Network with these people. My uncle Bill is obsessed with sailing; my husband asked him about sailing. My aunt Jan is paranoid about property issues around her land; we own land next to her—my husband talked about that. On and on until my husband had conversations with gobs of my family on topics he probably didn’t even care about. Sure they didn’t learn much about him at all. Yet the way into a person’s heart isn’t to boast about yourself. If you want to get with the big guys, talk about what the big guys love to talk about. The big guys in my family seem to love my husband!

Bottom line: make people feel important.

There is a story in my family about 20-25 years ago when my dad was in Toastmasters and was going to give a speech at the next meeting. He had two weeks to prepare but struggled very bad and couldn’t come up with anything at all.

He had collected data and done some research, but he was still having problems constructing the actual speech. With one week left he went to visit his parents for some advice on the speech. They gave him some pointers and helped to put his mind to ease, but ultimately he was still hitting a roadblock.

When the day came for the speech after a restless night (it probably didn’t help that baby Katie was crying the whole night through!), my dad woke up and thought well the speeches are voluntarily done so I’ll just skip this meeting and give the speech in two more weeks.

With the pressure off of my dad he quickly fell asleep. It didn’t last long though, because the phone began ringing. When answered, this is all that was said.

“Hi Tom. Are you coming to give your speech? Your parents are here to listen to it.”

With that my dad jumped out of bed and was off to give his speech that he had worked so hard on, but had nothing prepared for.

My dad planned out his entire speech in the 10 minute car ride to the meeting. When he got there the first speech was just finishing and he was next up.

He went up to the podium and began; there was no turning back now! So my dad went into overdrive, pouring more than 100% into his presentation.

Then it was finished. And the audience loved it. His parents loved it. His fellow members loved it. And even the Toastmaster heads loved it.

So I ask you now, If you had 10 minutes to piece together your speech, could you do it?