Situation Monday

Let’s face it.  Most people will never put the time, energy, and dedication into making real money.  When I say real money I don’t mean $125k while working 99 hours a week.  I mean the type of money that people enjoy when they’ve created their own thriving business system ($300k plus).

The idea is glamorous but the work to get there is often less than desirable.

For arguments sake lets say that a close family friend has established his own successful line of companies.  He has carefully created a multi-million dollar enterprise from the ground up.  During a casual conversation he pulls you to the side and says something that changes your life.

“I’ve been watching you for a while and I need to tell you this.  You can continue to go into that office every day and never really live the life you deserve.  Sure, in 15-20 years you’ll likely rise to making >$100k doing something you hate and spending all your time doing it.  I’ve known you for a while and I think you have what it takes to succeed on your own.  If you walk away from the security of your job I’ll personally guide you on your quest to be a millionaire.”

What would you do?

I had my review a few months ago.  I sat down in a room with my manager and my manager’s manager.  I was somewhat excited.  I knew a promotion was sure to come.  I’d successfully managed 2 large scale company projects.  I’d developed 3 tools to simplify work for employees across the country.  I had gone far and beyond by aiding my fellow co-workers.

My manager began reading his notes he made in reference to me.  My Strengths…  He read one paragraph.  I thought it was somewhat skimmed in comparison to my actions but I was like hey, can’t say it all.  The he moved to the Weaknesses and Developmental areas.  “Emotion control, Phone, Email responses”.

I was quite perturbed.  I did everything but turn water to wine.  I took over projects my manager couldn’t manage.  I’m a constant resource for answers for the managerial level that is three levels above me, and the best he can tell me is work on my emotion and communication skills.  And this is coming from a man who responds to my emails 3 weeks later.  Was I upset?  Not really.  Was I disappointed?  Hell yeah!

But that put one thing in perspective for me.  I need to control my own career.  If I continue to work year over year and come in this room and listen to my manager give me a random list of soft skills and tell me to work on them, I’ll be stuck here for the next 20 years.  Oddly enough, no one mentioned any of these things to me in the last year.  No developmental meetings, no discussions of growth at all until review time.

So I’m sure you know what my vote is, but what is yours…

The stock market is a non-tangible network of trading of company stock at agreed upon prices.  Maybe you are familiar with the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) which is where the feet hit the pavement.  51 million investors trading 400 million shares a day, and bouncing around approximately 10 billion dollars.

Stock in its simplest meaning is merely a term for “supply”.  In the stock market, this “supply” is the amount of money the company has raised.  The money raised is from individuals like you and I that give their money in hopes that the company will grow the money and give us the difference, aka profit.

Buying stock means you’ve purchased a piece of a company.  Depending on the amount of your purchase, you have some percentage of ownership.  This entitles you to voting on company decisions and key information such as annual reports and organization changes.

Recent media outlets have shown us that the people on the front line of the stock market make insane amounts of money (millions), even in the recession and government bailout periods.  Even with this brief lesson and what you “think” you know about the stock market, do you feel you truly understand the stock market?  If it is as simple as buying and selling of stock, why are people making millions of dollars?  Share you insight with the surveymagnet audience…

Let’s face it.  Our economy is in quite the conundrum right now.  If it’s suppose to be up, it’s down.  If it’s suppose to be down, it’s up.  But on the good note, things are seemingly getting better.  I’m not sure if it’s because of the lifelines being thrown at it, or if it’s just because troubles don’t last always.

Most of the knowing public know that the US economy is very vulnerable right now due to the weak contributors.  With so many to choose from, which is the “weakest link”?

• US Dollar – The Dollar has been on the value decline since 2000 and has been forecasted to continue
• Housing Market – if you missed this, you’ve been in a coma
• Stock Market – With the market hitting Depression lows, even Cramer was screaming “cancel all, cancel all orders!”
• Oil – You and I have to have gas.  Regardless of $1.99 or $9.99.  This just means that you cannot spend money elsewhere.  If I know that, why doesn’t our government?
• Government – Let’s go fight some people in Iraq and Afghanistan (what else need be said…)

These are just a tip of the iceberg.  Maybe our downfall is due to all these parts simultaneously hitting rock bottom or maybe the results of one affected the others.  I’m unsure and dying for you to tell me.

We all have our difficulties at work when working for someone else.  Ideas are never “that” good when spoken from you.  Most offices aren’t exactly meccas for superior intelligence.

Let’s face it – 9 to 5’s (or 8 to 5 if you get lunch) are quite stressful on lives and have long term effects on your work ethic.  Right out of college you are gung-ho about jumping in the workforce and using all those college skills and knowledge to make a difference. The reality of the situation is far less rosy.  Rarely are those hard earned skills put to immediate use.

Question is, is it positive or negative?  Since we know the survey magnet audience is of upper intelligence, you tell us your thoughts on the matter.

This article is a guest post from our friend Paul Toth at Violent Contradiction.

“Destroy all rational thought,” William S. Burroughs wrote, while Arthur
Rimbaud sought “systematic derangement of the senses.” Those were the days
when things were merely complicated, as opposed to complicated to the point
of ungraspable incomprehension. This I call a tyranny of the senses. What
Burroughs had right at the time he wrote his words was that rationality then
served social control systems. Now, however, irrationality has been
absorbed into those systems, just as marketing firms absorbed surrealism. Thus,
when people question why everyone they know, including themselves, take one
or more pharmacotherapeutical drugs, the answer is simple: they’ve been
taught and trained to think irrationally. Instead of learning how to think
rationally, they modify their brain chemistry so that it can withstand this
tyranny of the senses.

For example, visiting Best Buy amounts to a “systematic derangement of the
senses,” the audio-visual bombardment obviously targeted at creating
disorientation. How do we normally orientate ourselves when dizzied? By
repositioning ourselves in relation to objects. Thus, Best Buy’s systematic sensory
derangement causes a shopper to buy something, anything, as a means of
grounding the self. Roll over Heidegger, tell Nietzsche the news.

We live in the Age of the Anxiety Attack. Say goodbye, simple anxiety, for
your day has passed. The anxiety attack is the natural reaction to sensory
derangement. In fact, it’s virtually a marker of sanity, the last refuge of
the recognition that something has gone wrong, that the world is slipping
away into some unknown dimension, where perhaps the sun itself is nothing
more than a prop and the moon soon to feature corporate logos.

Here’s an experiment. When stopped in traffic, take a look around and try
to count how many logos you see. Check car bumpers, signs, everywhere and
everything around you. Unless you live in Wyoming or Montana, chances are
strong that you’ll have to drive through the green light before you come close
to a final number. This onslaught of logos creates an identity crisis, for
logos have come to serve as identity identifiers. Consider how much money
people spend to advertise for corporations. Consider the extent to which
teenagers will go to wear the hippest logo, thus, the thinking goes, becoming
hip themselves.

Eventually, however, buying fails us in the same way one lover after the
next fails to satisfy Don Juan: dissatisfaction guaranteed. At that point,
we’ve become “maladjusted” to an intentional and constant state of
maladjustment. This process feels like “going crazy,” but actually it represents the
start of going sane. Unfortunately, you’ve yet to pass through the office
doors of the last salesperson.

Now, I am not going to claim that pharmacotherapeutical drugs serve no
purpose. They’ve done us many favors. However, at some point, one has to wonder
whether, to paraphrase Foucault, the patient isn’t the symptom of the
disease, the disease being the tyranny of the senses created by an unleashed
free market with all the ethics of a rabid pit bull. Thus, anxiety,
depression and other common emotional “disorders” most likely reflect a proper
reaction to a purposefully-disordered culture.

Pills may deactivate the reactions of anxiety and depression, but the
source remains. The pills are part of the source. While I’m not advocating that
anyone stop taking medications and suffer through anxiety and depression, I
am advocating the position that these feelings are the consequence of
irrational thinking that has been embedded in us virtually since our births.
It’s as if we were born into a cult. That our thinking becomes almost
automatically irrational is no surprise. The surprise is that it takes so long
before we begin reacting to the insanity of trained irrationality. The
psychiatrist’s office is simply the last place to learn the lesson: even our own
sense of sanity can be sold, but it’s only a sense of sanity. The
irrationality continues until a person learns to think rationally.

Have you ever been sitting in the bookstore, bus stop, or Panera minding your business, and someone approached you and said, “How would you like to triple your current salary?”.

If so, you are a victim of multi-level marketing, direct selling, referral marketing, pyramid selling, or network marketing.  The design is quite simple.  Salespeople are rewarded through commissioned sales, and also through the sales of salespeople that they introduce to the business.

Much scrutiny comes from this as the sales pitch is 98% focused on how much you can make and less on what you are actually selling.  This is the very reason why it annoys me so.  Business to me has always been about presenting to customers what they see as useful and emphasizing that usefulness as the selling point.  But since Networking Marketing exists, it’s obvious that all do not feel this way.  What about you…

According to Wikipedia,

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event

Ingenuity refers to the process of applying ideas to solve problems or meet challenges.

Which do you prefer or learn towards?  When it comes to job placement or teamwork, you obviously want good competent people around you.  Depending on the environment, you may want persons with more experience or at times you may wish for people with greater ingenuity for their problem solving abilities.

Which is more valuable?  If your work environment is something similar to an assembly line, I’m sure experience will carry much further than ingenuity.  Adversely, in a developmental area,  you will encounter obstacles daily and will need those great thinkers to get you past it.

So with that said:

A good friend of mine is a VP at a well known Fortune 500 company.  He drives top of the line cars, shops at nothing less than the upscale shops, eats out most of the week and is guaranteed to be somewhere other than his 3 homes on the weekend.  We’ve never discussed salaries but he makes a pretty penny – I’m sure.

I’ve asked him on several occasions why does he live so frivolously even with the decent salary and bonuses he makes.  He said to me that “The more you make, the less you spend.”  I was very perturbed.  He explained that because of his status/position/title and by him being somewhat well known, he receives free meals, discount clothing, priority everything and and even enjoys a few company leased vehicles.  The company was polite enough to place him in a house considerable of a VP, and also pays the tuition for his kids to attend the most expensive private school in the state.

I made the analogy that “Money = Power”.  He said not really.  I inclined to say sure.  I, myself, do not enjoy leased vehicles, free meals, complimentary tickets,  and my son attends public school.  But why is this?  Why would you give a star or someone free items and charge me when its obvious that he/she makes more than me?

CEOs are some of the most powerful people in the company.  They make decisions that control more lives than than some mayoral incumbents.  Depending on the company, the decisions could affect our economy.  I’m sure these people have a plethora of knowledge, especially considering that the average age of a CEO is  57.

• 29% of Fortune 500 have an advanced degree other than an MBA
• 60% of Fortune 500 CEOs have held their position for less than 6 years
• Top 5 Undergraduate Degrees for CEOS are: Engineering, Business Admin, Economics, Liberal Arts, and Accounting
• Most Common Schools are: Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin, Rutgers, Naval Academy, Texas, and the University of Alabama

So as you can see, the knowledge and backgrounds of CEOs are vast, yet similar.  If given the chance, what would you ask a CEO?  Would it pertain to Retirement, Investments, Rise to Success, Car of Choice, or something else?  You tell us…