The Ever Changing Rules of Personal Growth 0
I am currently visiting my parents for Christmas in my home town in The Netherlands, where I occasionally meet up with old friends while I am here. Yesterday, I met up with a very good friend of mine, and we started discussing our intentions for 2010, as New Year’s Eve is approaching. Besides the well-known health issues, and our intentions to do more sports, we had a long discussion about money. My friend had recently read a number of books and articles on career making and growing wealth in general, and his idea was that we had simply learnt many wrong things from our parents and relatives.
We are both from non-entrepreneurial families, and our belief of earning money is that of taking on a paid job, and earning one’s money through employment; in the end, this is what we had learnt from our parents our entire lives. In a sense, I can still hear my parents tell me to get a good education, work for a large and multinational company, work hard, and the rest will follow automatically, I can be assured of that.
Although this might have worked in the 1950′s (and I know it did, since this is what has made my parents pretty wealthy), they do not apply in the modern world. Young, well-educated men and women graduate from university, apply for jobs with titles bearing the word ‘manager’ in 80% of them, only to find out that the title “International Customer Relationship Manager” is virtually the same as “call-center clerk”. Additionally, a request for a salary raise during the annual review meeting is responded to by
You know the economic situation is a difficult one, and I will never be able to obtain approval from my superiors. You have done an extraordinary job, but 1.5% is the most I can give you.
1.5%? I am sure last year’s inflation was at least 2.5-3%.
The world’s globalization has simply brought countries closer together, more and more people have the opportunity to go to college or university, and corporations are simply faced with an increasing offer of well-educated employees on the one side, and on the other side the competition from companies from low-wage countries is increasing.
As we were talking yesterday, my friend made an extremely interesting point:
Who we are today is the result of our learnings and experiences in the past; What we do today will define who we are tomorrow. But how the hell does a person break out of the downward spiral of being a regular employee, if this is all he knows?
And let’s be honest: college and university will teach you everything about doing business and entrepreneurship, except for how to be one yourself. So, how does someone, who has been taught to deliver hard work through employment only, break this habit?
I believe it is not an easy task, with which many men and women are faced nowadays. The most feasible method for most people is to create an additional income, at the side of any regular income. A popular strategy is investing in stocks, stock options, futures, real estate, or any other form of investments. The anticipated income is firstly the growth of the investment value itself, second the yield it generates year after year. Additionally, many people attempt to earn a regular second income. Many people choose the internet as their preferred method, since the investments are extremely low. The boom in blogging sites is a great example of this phenomenon. Moneywise24 Personal Finance is also a blogging site following this example, but still it does not (yet) generate revenues. This is in itself the great challenge of starting up something online: you think you have a great idea and insight, thinking you are taking charge of your own life and ready to make a difference, only to find out that everyone else is already doing the same.
I believe the next ten or twenty years or so will be very exciting; we see that trends are coming and going fast, we are experiencing a growing competition on the international marketplace, we recognize that the old and proven methods for making a career do not work on-demand, and we are in search of new methods for achieving personal growth and development.
How it will end? I honestly do not know…
Possibly Related Posts:
- The Top Reaon Why You Should Pay Yourself First
- Sometimes You Just Have To Keep Your Salary a Secret
- The Top Reasons Why You Want To Spread Bonuses Throughout The Year
- One reason why you should not pay your bills immediately
- The Top Reason Why You Should Stop Looking for a Better Job
