Last night on an unanticipated trip for some carry-out to my local eatery El Azteco in downtown East Lansing, I had the radio tuned to Michigan Radio, WUOM, and Marketplace was on. I really do enjoy Marketplace, and Kai Ryssdal, but last night I happened upon an excellent commentary by Charles Handy, a dude that I’ve never heard of, but now I’ll be paying a lot more attention to.

My favorite quote of his from the story was this: “if you are your own boss, it’s up to you how hard you work, or where, or when, or why.” And he doesn’t talk about this just in the context of being a strike out on your own entrepreneur, but also as an corporate entrepreneur working for someone else.

You can read about the story here, and download an Mp3 of his commentary here, but I will tell you what Charles Handy was talking about was absolutely the essence of what The Working Stiff blog is all about, particularly my post about the best investment you can make is in yourself. I highly recommend that you listen to this post. I found it to be fan-freakin-tastic!

No job, no problem: here’s a list of 10 things to do while unemployed.

1. Learn a skill.
2. Read a book.
3. Go to the library.
4. Exercise; get in shape.
5. Learn a Language.
6. Plant a garden.
7. Learn a musical instrument.
8. Do volunteer work.
9. Go for a walk.
10. Start a journal.

1. Learn a skill. What does it take to learn a skill? Usually time and patience. When you’re unemployed time is in great supply. Use that time to do something productive; learn woodworking, plumbing, electrical or something else where you can build or repair something. These aren’t just great things to know, they’re practical and can help a great deal in every day life.

2. Read a book. When you’re unemployed there’s nothing but time to read that book you’ve had sitting on your night stand forever. Secondarily, reading is great way to escape from the doldrums of unemployment.

3. Go to the library. Get curious. Go to the library and learn about something. Someone, though, I can’t remember who at this point, once told me that a library card is one of the most important things you’ll ever have. That’s a philosophy I believe, and lived by. Check out the local library.

4. Exercise; get in shape. You have lots of time; move, exercise, do some yoga… you’re not rushed, so go ahead and walk to your daily errands. Exercise also serves to get out those energies that collect in your being when you’re out of work. Get movin’!

5. Learn a language. It takes time to learn a language. Use your unemployment freedom to acquire a foreign tongue. During one unemployment stint I started a translation of the Tao Te Ching, which I’m still working on today, and may be for quite a while longer…

6. Plant a garden. A garden, a flower box, or a flower bed can be a great way to not feel so disconnected from the world. Periods of unemployment, when your friends, spouse, etc. are working can be lonely. Cultivating soil and planting is a timeless and ancient endeavor that can connect you with the earth. I’ve found it especially peaceful to embrace this natural world during when struggling with employment woes.

7. Learn a musical instrument. Everyone has a piano, guitar, recorder or some other kind of musical instrument they’re not using. Get your hands on a musical instrument and try to pick it up. Nothing is so relaxing as a plunking out a few chords on a piano or a strumming a guitar. The cost of admittance is low, and it can be really rewarding and relaxing.

8. Do volunteer work. People need help and can’t afford to pay — offer your time. You won’t be paid in cash, but you will be paid in kindness and good will, things are often, but not always, in short supply during periods of unemployment. Too often, when I’ve been faced with unemployment, I’ve resorted to feeling better by eating a Big Mac, or an entire supreme pizza, there are better and more healthful ways to get recharged… try volunteer work.

9. Go for a walk. In the rush of daily living that usually encompasses the gainfully employed how often did you get the opportunity to walk around your neighborhood. This is kind of a dove-tail into #4, but I wanted it to be separate, and not about exercise, but rather about exploring your locale. Be a tourist in your own town. Go out walking, look around, meet people, and connect with the world around you. It’s so simple, and so rewarding, yet it’s also very challenging to do when you’re working… make the best out of the unemployment time, because even though it’s dreadful at times, it won’t last forever.

10. Keep a journal. Unemployment can be a real bummer vitality suck. Write about your experiences and get the the thoughts and energies out there. Writing can be a cathartic and healing process that can allow you to get in touch with yourself. Keep a journal or put together a blog. Writing down the trials and triumphs can settle the madness of unemployment down.

Unemployment doesn’t last, but it is lasting longer and longer for folks out there. For me, personally, I’ve tried or done all of these things in periods of lay-off or unemployment before. Being unemployed sucks, but if you can keep your body and mind alive and feeling good through work and exercise, you’ll make it through happier and more satisfied. You will get through it, but like any prisoner of circumstance knows, doing good time is the goal.

I walked out to where me and other guy would be working and sat atop a mound of soil that I had created the week before. I was fuming and just sat there in the early morning August sun, silent. The guy was working and he sensed my agitation, introduced himself, and asked what was wrong. We talked for a few minutes, but I didn’t really have much to say. I had no plan, and no prospects, and I was not only being cheated, but also taken advantage of. I had nothing. Knowing this I carried on for a few more days, and earned back the time to pay for the sessions, and earn enough time for another session, but the elderly southern gentleman, while old, was no dummy and quite an astute conniver. He knew I had no prospects and he kept sticking me up and holding the training hostage. It was starting to feel like indentured servitude, and pretty soon I would owe him more than he owed me according to his relative method of accounting.

After another couple weeks of this routine and horrific training, I had enough. I walked out of the training and into the office of the elderly southern gentleman. I didn’t know what I would say, or do, because I was young, and Detroit was a small town. Word in the A/V business could travel fast. I collected myself the best I could, and told him that I would be discontinuing the training. He gave me a lot of trouble, told me that he had set aside a place for me, and all this and that. I told him, that I would have to respectfully decline. I also told him that by my estimate he owed $50 and that I wanted to square up. He told me that he didn’t have any money and that I should be paying him for the privilege. I asked if he needed to go to the office or an ATM and get cash. He told me I would take a check for a lesser amount, I told him that I wouldn’t. He told me that I was ungrateful. I insisted that I be paid for my time. He told me I did a bad job and deserved nothing.

He tried every attempt at breaking me down. The elderly southern gentleman with his white suits and black cain, looking like some kind of senior knock-off, Leon Redbone kept up his act, until finally he told me that I was making a big mistake by leaving his employ and that word of my not completing things would catch up with me. He pulled two twenties and two fives from his wallet and threw them on the floor in front of me. I was broke. Not missing a beat, I picked them up and shot out his door in a single motion.

At the time, with no prospects and no opportunities, and also being young, I had no idea what I was doing. He may have been right for all I knew, but it didn’t matter. I had to make the choice. I had to do what was right for me. In the end, I never did break into A/V in Detroit, and not long after that I took a job as an administrative assistant. Work wasn’t great, but I did get to work with computers, pay was good, and I wasn’t sweating in the hot sun. While I don’t know how things would have turned out if I had stayed, things certainly have been better for leaving, even if it did take a long time to reconcile that.

Do you have any stories like this? I’d like start a featuring stories like this, contact me with your ideas.

All throughout our lives we’re faced with situations. Most of these situations don’t require much, perhaps some research, advice from parents or colleagues who’ve had to make similar choices before. We evaluate what’s before us and we make a decision to move forward. These are the easiest situations to deal with. However, sometimes, thankfully not all that often, situations arise where there’s nobody to offer advice, and your only guide is your personal ethical and moral compass. These are situations where you really have to sit yourself down and evaluate what you’re faced with and how it may or may not affect your life down the road. These kinds of circumstances almost always test your integrity, because there’s usually something fundamental and core to your being that’s at question.

The tenuous relationship between you and your integrity is the feeling when you’re at the crossroads of something in your life that’s big or has the possibility of becoming something very large if you don’t act swiftly and decisively. In situations like this there’s almost always a component sacrifice or loss that comes with doing what you know is right, but is neither comfortable or very appealing. It’s the conflicted feeling that is the tenuous relationship between you and integrity.

I remember one time, early in my career, as I was working trying to break into the corporate video business in Detroit. The economy was in the toilet, and there was a lot of desperation. The desperation became most apparent whenever I showed up to interviews. I was fresh out of broadcasting school, I had a pretty good reel, and I was still there like all the other new upstarts groveling at the feet of studio and post house owners trying to get any kind of job, even a coffee boy, that might allow the opportunity to get a foot in the door. After nearly a year and a half of interviews and few prospects I met an elderly southern gentleman (I say gentleman sarcastically, because he was no gentleman at all, but we’ll get to that) who was willing to give me a chance, but there was a catch… Isn’t there always?

He would give me a chance to work in his studio and actually work on the gear, but he’d only do it in exchange for me landscaping his house. The closest I had ever gotten to landscaping had been planting a tree when I was in the Cub Scouts. I explained this to him with the hope that he would have mercy and cut me some slack, and just let me in. Ha! No such luck, the elderly southern gentleman was willing to teach me. So the next day, on a hot August morning, I showed up with a thermos of water and two bologna sandwiches. The deal was for every eight hours I worked I could earn $40 that would be put towards a special studio program that he had worked out with his son, who actually ran the studio. And the $40 for studio time actually came out to only two hours of studio learning with the “chance” — I have to put chance in big fat air quotes — that I could get an opportunity to participate in a shoot or work in the audio studio, for free of course, but the chance to practice my craft. So let’s review, eight hours of labor for $40 that could be put towards two hours of studio time that *might* lead to a chance to actually do A/V work for free as an intern. It was a horrible deal, but I was desperate and hopeful. Sometimes, hope is all you have especially when you’re desperate. I sweated it out for several weeks, working roughly four days a week that culminated in a six hour studio learning time session each Friday. The lessons were not good. The yahoo son of the elderly southern gentleman was a washed up rock and roller who landed on the wrong side of the coke spoon too many times, and his feathered hair, straight from a Journey cover group, being tossed about as he covered the most basic aspects of audio, was doing little for me.

Still hopeful and still desperate, the first week-earned session had ended. Time to start back up again on Monday accruing more learning time. When I got to the site on Monday I noticed two things. First off, there was a guy already there, working, and a lot of the work that I had done the week before had been undone. I went to the office and asked the bleery-eyed elderly southern gentleman what happend to the work I did all last week. As he wiped the sleep from his eyes he told me that I hadn’t’ done a good job and he had gone and redone it himself… There wasn’t much to the job, it was mostly spending the day bent over pulling weeds and rocks out of a small field of which I had accrued nearly 15 wheel barrows full by week’s end. This guy was probably 90 years old, seriously, no joke, so I just stood there agog imagining this old man doing that back-breaking work. He told me that he apprised the new upstart of the project and that moving forward I would have company. He then went on to tell me that he would dock me for all of the previous week’s time, and so effectively, I was working to pay back the session of the previous Friday. I became smoking hot, and started to argue with him. He held all the cards. I walked out.

To be continued on Wednesday, 09/30/09…

The best investment you can make is your in self. That’s what I’ve taken to telling myself and the countless family and friends who have been laid off, and after months of being on unemployment aren’t seeing any real opportunities coming their way. “It’s one thing if there are interviews,” one friend told me, “but when you don’t even have the hope of that after hours and hours of job hunting, it gets kind of depressing.” Yes, yes it does, I agree with that.

I’ve been laid off probably seven times, usually from small businesses, who were on their way out of business. I recall one job as a graphic designer where the electricity was turned off, and I lost all of an intense (and ill-advised) Photoshop layout, over one hundred and fifty layers. When the bill was finally paid and the electricity was turned back on I went at it again, and you know what it was a better design and came together more quickly, but that’s hardly the moral of the story, because in fact I was laid off a month later… didn’t see that one coming — HA!.

Being laid off sucks! It diminishes your self-worth, poisons your outlook on life, makes you resentful, and generally is just a sad time; unfortunately these feelings only intensify proportionate to the time you’re without a job or the hope of any kind of gainful employment. The suck train just keeps a rollin’… until you reach a point where you either crack, roll over and give up, or you decide that you’re not going to be a victim of bad times and you need to take control of the only thing you can, yourself. It’s no surprise that more millionaires were made during the Great Depression than any other time. The fight or flight instincts take over, and you decide I’m going to do fix this, I can do this for myself, and you do. You do, because the best investment you can make is in yourself!