I’m not sure if I mentioned this in the last post but I created a YouTube channel that at first was going to be focused on early retirement. However, most of my post seem to revolve around the subject of risk management and resilience and since I am not actually retired, it is hard to produce ‘retired’ content.
You can find the channel here -> https://www.youtube.com/@kensearlyretirement
So I am likely to change the name of the channel to something along the lines of risk management or resilience.
One of the first posts I made was focused on younger people (teens- 20s) on what, in my opinion, they should do to get ahead in today’s job market. These are the three things
- Get a job or career with the earning potential that can provide the lifestyle expectations you want.
- Adopt minimalism or essentialism.
- Keep your freedom and independence.
Lets go thru these one at a time.
I admittedly spend a fair number of hours digging into YouTube and listening to peoples stories about being fired, laid off, and general miserable in a job that is sucking the life out of them. There are several common trends I see with a lot of these people. First, a lot of these people are working retail or food service jobs. Unless you are the manager or maybe assistant manager you are not going to be able to make enough money or have the benefits like healthcare or vacation days unless you are basically running these businesses. Nor are you going to get a full time job. Full time jobs like these were killed when the Affordable Care Act was passed requiring businesses to provide full time workers healthcare insurance. So now you have a large number of people that are having to get two or three jobs just to make ends meet.
Another common job type are the HR, payroll, or other administrative jobs. These are typically the first types of jobs to go when a company is facing financial difficulties. Or if the CEO has to shuffle things around to get their annual multi-million dollar bonuses.
I know that there have been layoffs for people like first responders, teachers, doctors, nurses, and tech workers but generally these are some of the last people to go because this starts cutting into the meat and bone of a company and cutting these people out will affect the bottom line.
But my advice is this. If you are young. Meaning in high school. Do your best to realistically figure out the lifestyle you want to live and reverse engineer your career from there. If you really do want to live the celebrity lifestyle you need to figure out what those people did to get there. You will, of course, need talent and passion. You will also need a lot of luck. But if the risk of not getting that lifestyle is greater then you risking other opportunities you need to thing about more realistic options.
The same goes for professional athletes and social media influencers.
Using the Hollywood example. Maybe there is a different type of job in that industry that can still pay the bills and have benefits but were you would also have a greater chance of getting that type of job.
So do something like that.
Another option is to be an entrepreneur and create your own company. There are a million ways to do this so I won’t get into the details there but working for yourself or creating your own company you will work the hardest. But the reward is greater. You won’t lay yourself off (hopefully). And you will be able to keep your independence. Which will bring us to the next thing you want to do to get ahead. I’ll talk about this one in the next post.