How to find the hidden job market

Here are some industries where jobs are disappearing very quickly: Newspapers, car assembly lines and coal mining. It’s important to keep track of jobs that are disappearing, because it gives us a glimpse of where new jobs are emerging. In order to understand where the workforce is heading, you need to understand why parts of it are dying.

The value in seeing these new openings in the workforce is deciding which is maybe the right next step for you. And that is a more effective way to steer your career than obsessing about the jobs that you want to exist that are not there yet. You’ll need to practice this way of thinking. I know because I do it all the time for my own career, checking a wide range of fields. So start practicing—here are several jobs that I’ll bet you haven’t noticed are gone, and what’s being filling the vacancies.

1. Blogger.
There is not enough money in blog advertising for lone individuals to make a living from it. There used to be. But today, if you want to sell content, you need multiple people blogging on one site. And if there’s just one blogger, you need to use your blog to sell something else (like career tools, in Ramit’s case, or a company, in mine). My favorite example of this is Guy Kawasaki. He built his blog traffic up to a respectable mountain and then realized that the ad revenue from blogging stinks, especially in comparison to his bestselling books. So he used his blog to launch a new company, and get another book deal, and then he shut down his blog, Read more

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How to answer the question, What do you do?

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Right after college, I was playing a bazillion hours a week of volleyball to get on the pro tour, and reading a book a night to make up for the fact that I was tortured for eighteen years by having to read what other people told me to read. But when people asked, “What do you do?” I said, “I work at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in arbitrage.”

It's a good answer, right? I had choices: I could admit to reading like a crazy person. I could admit to trying to be in professional sports but not quite there, or I could give an answer that impressed everyone: I work in currency arbitrage. In reality, I was so incompetent at this job that when currencies went wild after the Berlin Wall fell, I lost a few million dollars for a few violent traders. The only possible reason to keep a dyslexic, literary, arbitrage clerk around was because she was good looking. But I wasn't good looking enough. I got fired.

Immediately I focused on getting on the pro volleyball tour. At that point, “What do you do?” questions did not get “I'm getting a job in a children's book store because I worked in the family book store for ten years and I can tell you the publisher of any author–quiz me.” Instead, I said, “I'm moving to Los Angeles to play professional beach volleyball.” To me, the book store was a step back to support volleyball, which was a step forward.

Describing my move to LA over and over again to prying relatives and concerned strangers actually made me believe it. How you answer the question “What do you do?” is important because it frames your story for you in a much more visceral way than it frames it for anyone else.

Recently, I had the problem again. I was sort of working at my startup, Brazen Careerist, but not really. The company got a new CEO and was moving to Washington, DC , and I was staying in Wisconsin and marrying the farmer.

“What do you do?” came up a lot because I was redecorating the farm house and traveling back and forth between DC and Madison and NY and Darlington. People in cities asked me what I was doing because clearly, I was not full-time at Brazen Careerist. And people in Darlington asked me because clearly I did not have a life in Darlington. Read more

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Match jobs to personality to avoid anxiety

I’m trying to teach my son to stop playing his DS every second. To be honest, I’m a crappy role model. I mean, if I were great at having enough self-discipline to follow through consistently on my idea of proper parenting, things would be different.

I would say: No DS today.

He would say: I hate you. Read more

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Career change looks like Halloween

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When the kids and I moved to the farm, last Spring, the first thing we did was plant seeds. The farmer took the kids out to an open patch next to a corn field, and he planted ten pumpkin seeds with them.

I took the kids next to a rhubarb patch that has been growing for about 75 years, and I dumped a package of 300 seeds in a three-foot square area and I told the kids you can’t expect all the seeds to grow.

And this is how we started out lives together: the farmer being completely optimistic about the future and me wanting to hedge so no one is disappointed.

Here’s what happened: all the seeds grew. My vegetables mostly died because I hadn’t planted them assuming they’d need space to grow. But we had a crop of little pumpkins:

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How to take intelligent risks

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Recently, I covered my hallway in wallpaper I bought online (via Wallpaper Weekly). Everyone I showed the wallpaper to said the it would be too busy a pattern. But I loved it. So I bought it anyway.

There are a lot of problems with my hallway now — most notably, I used Elmer’s glue instead of wallpaper paste and I’m going to have to pull down the wallpaper and start over. But every time I walk through my hall, I think about how important it is to take risks with my house — because that’s what makes it mine. Which, of course, is very similar to a life. You can live someone eles’s tried-and-true template for a life, or you can make your life your own. Read more

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How to be lost with panache

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So, I am lost. But I need to be useful more than I need to confess feeling lost. So, here I am, telling you what I’m doing to get through this, because I think you and I have an agreement that you’ll put up with me being lost and not posting very often, as long as I’m useful. Read more

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When you’re feeling lost, don’t hide

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Feeling lost is part of being great. If you are forging your own path then you are often lost. Because you have not seen this route before. I wrote my book because I did not have a road map and I am wanted other people to have a road map to do a career like I did.

I have been thinking about this because I am really lost right now. I’m going to show you something. Here is stuff that’s going well. The farmer is totally hot, and he tries so hard to get along with me, and his singing voice is the kind that allowed him to hook up with any girl after his band played a gig. And he matches my wall:

Another good thing is that he lets me do whatever I want with the house. See? In the background? We definitely needed a hutch in the dining room. It’s exactly what fit with the decor. But I thought if I bought a hutch I’d just start buying stuff to fill it with. So instead, I drew a hutch on the wall. I showed it to the farmer and he said, “I really like the undulating lines. They have confidence.” Read more

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Five tips for asking better questions

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Now that I am committed to living on a farm, which is sort of the anti-New York City, visiting New York City no longer brings up flashbacks to a really, really difficult lifestyle. Instead, New York fills my head with ideas.

The first one is a billboard I saw as soon as I got off the plane: A good question is the new answer.

That rings true to me. I have been writing about asking questions for a long time. It’s the best way to have a meaningful conversation and it’s the best way to rope in a mentor or look like a star performer. People spend more time thinking about answers than questions, but it’s the questions that make you look smart.

Read more

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Seth Godin talking with Penelope, live this Thursday

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Guess what? I’m going to Seth Godin’s house for my next webinar, which is super exciting to me because I’ve never met Seth, but I love his ideas. (It’s 1p est on April 29. Sign up here.) Seth and I will talk about his book, Linchpin. And I will thank him a thousand times for the encouraging emails he sent to me when I was moping on my blog that I was in my dip and I was worried that I couldn’t make it.

And you guys will ask questions that we will answer.

When I was talking with Seth about what we will talk about he wrote this back to me:

My take is that [generation Y] is the last one that will be as totally brainwashed by the system, by the schools and by companies and by society to believe that the industrial age (and compliance) is their ticket to the carnival. The smart ones will see that and play a different game, and the sooner they realize how bad the scam is, the faster they’ll recover.

I’m excited to hear him talk about this. And I’m excited to hear the questions you’ll have for him.

Sign up here.

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Live video chat: How to find career fulfillment

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I keep wanting to use the word webinar, but I can’t decide if it is too jargony. This lexical conundrum reminds me of when the word workout went mainstream. It sounded too jargony to me, and I used to say go-to-the-gym and a not-so-snappy stand-in.

Should I use the word webinar?

Should I tell you how many times Ryan Paugh told me that I have to announce the webinar if I want people to come to it? I kept not announcing anything because I didn’t know what to call it.

Whatever we are calling it, it will happen on this Friday, 1pm est. (Sign up here.) I know that people in Australia cannot listen at this time slot. You have told me before, and I’m listening. One day I will do a webinar at midnight. One day I will record webinars so it won’t matter so much what time slot they happen in. One day there will be world peace.

On Friday we will talk about finding fulfillment, which is actually like establishing world peace, just doing it one person at a time. In an act of full disclosure, I’m going to tell you that knowing what to do is not the hard part of finding fulfillment. Doing it is the hard part. It’s like breaking up with a terrible boyfriend when the sex is really good. Not that I have ever had this problem. I have found that part of what makes a terrible boyfriend is terrible sex. But whatever. I can imagine the problem. The problem is that you know what to do and you don’t do it.

Wait. Actually, that’s the problem with everything. Like, I knew I was going to have to write a post about the webinar where I don’t know if I should use the word webinar. I knew it wasn’t going to change if I waited so long to write the post that Ryan Paugh wants to kill me. But I waited anyway. Why do we not take the action that we know is the right action? I will not be covering this problem in the webinar.

But sign up anyway. Here.

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