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If You Recently Got Laid Off or Fired from Your Job, Your Good Luck Has Just Begun! 

Whenever friends or acquaintances tell me that they have either got fired or quit their conventional jobs, my response is, “Congratulations.” After I said this to a friend who quit his job during an economic recession not so long ago, his face lit up, before he started laughing and remarked, “You are the only one who has said this to me. Everyone else is asking me things like ‘How could you during a recession? Jobs are so hard to come by!’ or ‘How are you going to survive?’ ”

I congratulate people who have quit or lost their jobs because I know that for people who want real success in their lives, unemployment is an opportunity for them to go on to something better. In fact, if you have been in the workforce for over twenty years and have never gotten fired and experienced unemployment, you are likely not a risk taker or all that creative.

Indeed, some of the most creative and famous people in the world have got fired. In 1978 Lee Iacocca was fired from his job as president of Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II, who told Iacocca, “I just don’t like you.” Soon after, Iacocca became the chief of bankrupt Chrysler Corporation and made it profitable for years.

No doubt, getting fired and being faced with unemployment can be distressing, as it was for me when I got axed from my engineering position over two and a half decades ago. But it wouldn’t have been distressing at all if I had known at the time that I was destined for much greater things. Indeed, if I had known where I would be twenty-five years later — experiencing career success without a real job — I would have been profusely thanking my boss the second he fired me. What’s more, I would have had a celebration that day as expensive and as big as I had twenty-five years later in honor of my twenty-five years without a real job.

As an author and occasional professional speaker specializing in helping people be happy away from the traditional workplace, I have had an interest in good quotations about work and the workplace. It naturally follows that interesting anonymous comments about the workplace in the form of graffiti also get my attention. Thus, I put together a collection called Graffiti for the Employee’s Soul. (It’s free — just like all the other best things in life! You can download the e-book in PDF format at Creative Free E-books ) The following twelve items come from the e-book:

• Working here is a nightmare. You want to wake up and leave but you need the sleep.
• I owe. I owe. And off to work I go.
• The thought of suicide has helped me get through many days at work.
• Teamwork magically inspires our group to come up with solutions that are consistently and considerably dumber than any one of us.
• My job is a big secret. Even I don’t know what I am doing.
• As long as we continue to work here, happiness is just an idea.
• Can I trade this job for what’s behind door Number 2?
• I’m just working here till a good fast-food job opens up.
• Like to meet new people? Like a change? Like excitement? Like a new job? Then screw up
  just one more time!
• Around here, “progress” is everything getting worse at a slower rate than it used to.
• I just took a self-improvement course and discovered I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself — unless I want to keep my job.
• My work cubicle is just a padded cell without a door. I want my freedom and I want it now.

If you have just been fired from your job and are considering another job like it, the above comments may motivate you to consider something different that will lead to real career fulfillment. Whenever you catch yourself yearning for the benefits that your old job provided, it’s best to look at the other side of the coin. It’s like reminiscing about an old love affair. We tend to remember the good things much more so than the bad ones. So when you feel a little dejected because you miss the routine of your old job, consider all the things that you didn’t like about the job.

The reality is that many hugely successful people have been fired at one time or another — sometimes several times — and gone on to better things. Most of these people admit that getting the ax placed them on a fast track toward career fulfillment. Indeed, it was the best thing that ever happened to them. For some, losing a job was the incentive they needed to open their own shop so that they didn’t need to work at a job they hate ever again.

Years after working at an occupation that he hated, Leonard Lee, owner of Ottawa-based Lee Valley Tools and Algrove Publishing, told a reporter with The Globe and Mail, “No amount of money is worth doing a job you hate. It rots your soul. It destroys you.” So why do so many work at a job they hate if it destroys their souls? Who knows? Perhaps they don’t value their souls.

Many people do value their souls, however, and are not willing to sell out to the corporate world ever again once they get fired. Instead, they pass up even the most prestigious and high-paid positions, often for much less prestigious unreal jobs and lower pay, so that they can avoid working for a corporation.

Getting fired along with unemployment, as I found out, is the universe’s way of telling you that you were in the wrong job in the first place. It is also the universe’s way of testing you to see whether you can take advantage of the adversity that comes with unemployment and create some opportunity out of it, such as starting your own business. Put another way, unemployment is an opportunity to develop real character and true wealth.

If you are up to the universe’s challenge, miracles will come your way. Money isn’t as important as you may think it is. Many multimillion dollar businesses were started on kitchen tables. Passion, purpose, and dedication will take you places where money won’t.

The reality is that great corporate jobs are hard to come by in today’s world anyway. “The traditional admonition of one generation to the next, ‘get a job,’ has been replaced with a more complex mandate: ‘Go out and create a job for yourself,’ ” George Gendron, editor of Inc. magazine, recently told Publisher’s Weekly.

Being fired is an opportunity to create a job for yourself instead of finding another corporation that has a ready-made job for you, from which you can be just as easily fired some time in the future. A corporation can take away your job and your job title but it can’t take away your talent and creativity. By firing you, the corporation may be doing you a great favor inasmuch as you now have an opportunity to fully utilize your creativity and talent.

Getting fired is a great opportunity to rethink where you are, what your priorities are, what’s important to you, and whether or not you are in the right career. Getting another corporate job may only result in treating the symptoms — damage control, in other words. It has been my experience that the best way to fully utilize one’s creativity and talent is to shun a real job and create one’s own unreal job. If you can be successful at an unconventional job that involves self-employment, you won’t get fired ever again because you are the boss. Above all, getting fired is a great opportunity to pursue the unreal job that you have dreamed about pursuing for some time.

So again, don’t look at unemployment as all that bad of a thing. Your good luck may have just begun, particularly if you decide to make the great escape from the corporate world to pursue something totally unrelated to the field in which you were. You may feel that you have touched bottom, when, in fact, you are already headed upward. In the words of motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, “See you at the top.”

Note: This article is adapted from the book: Real Success Without a Real Job: The Career Book for People Too Smart to Work in Corporations by Ernie Zelinski

Purchase this book at: Real Success Without a Real Job on Amazon.com 

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Written by Ernie Zelinski. Other articles by Ernie Zelinski.
Ernie J. Zelinski is a leading authority on the subjects of retirement, solo-entrepreneurship, and attaining real success without a real job by pursuing one's dream career. Ernie is the author of the recently released "101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep Forgetting", the bestseller "How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free" (over 90,000 copies sold and published in 7 foreign languages), and the international bestseller "The Joy of Not Working" (over 225,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages). Ernie is presently rewriting his "Real Success Without a Real Job" which will now be called "Career Success Without a Real Job: The Career Book for People Too Smart to Work in Corporations." For the Free E-book version of Ernie's book "How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free" visit: http://www.real-success.ca/free_ebooks.html

Visit the Author's website:
http://www.retirement-quotes.com

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