The career guide in the photo above is the best quick read on how to create an independent income for yourself.
In my view it’s the best book in this category. I plan on buying a copy to read over and over.
In tandem with this practical business book I recommend one other book wherever I go and in whatever I write:
Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions.
Ben Arment the author of Dream Year reinforced what I’ve always realized: Those of us who choose a different path in life or a unique career can become riddled with self-doubt.
Strive to conquer the self-doubt which is a natural feeling to have when you’re an Artist/Creative or other maker or person in business for yourself.
Use the self-doubt as the catalyst for examining how to overcome this fear. In Dream Year you will be given the confidence to “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams / live the life you imagined” as the famous quote implores.
I’m getting ready to publish Working Assets the book in print and e-book format. My goal is to have the book go on sale in the early spring.
I checked Dream Year out of the library which you can try to do if you don’t want to buy it.
Dream Year is a sharp, succinct, and cohesive collection of action steps to take.
Crowdfunding is another way to drum up cash to start a business or fund a project.
The 3 main crowdfunding sources are GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and IndieGoGo.
Kickstarter is for creative projects. GoFundMe can be for human interest projects like supporting a family whose house has burned down in a fire. IndieGoGo is where you can find the latest in cutting-edge tech projects.
Individuals with disabilities often do well starting their own business, according to the authors of The Next Millionaire Next Door.
For residents of Brooklyn in New York City the Brooklyn Public Library hosts a yearly PowerUp business plan competition.
Locals can create a business plan and pitch it to a panel of judges. The best business idea wins seed money so that the person can start up the business.
See if your local library system has a Business and Career Center like the Brooklyn library does.
Often there you can get information about starting a business. The Business and Career Center will also host virtual workshops today and in-person workshops once the pandemic ends.
In the coming blog entry I will talk about crowdfunding to generate money for your business or other plan that requires capital.
From January 2007 to September 2015–close to 9 years–I had a second job as the Health Guide at a mental health website. I wrote news articles about hot topics in recovery and answered questions in the Q&A forum. At that time I was in the vanguard writing about things no one else thought to write about. Just like I’m doing today.
I recommend getting a second job or having a side income stream. Rather than selling your soul to earn the big bucks at a job you hate or that doesn’t fit your personality.
Below this blog entry I’ll offer links to websites that can help you create a side hustle.
You can read the Kimberly Palmer book The Economy of You where she talks about going into business for yourself part-time in addition to a day job or full-time if you’re able.
See also the Chris Guillebeau book: Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.
Buy the Patrick G. Riley guide: The One-Page Business Proposal. I own this book and have used it myself. One page is all you need to pitch your service.
In coming blog entries I’ll talk about other ways to earn extra money.
Here I’ll end with one caveat for creative folk:
You often won’t get paid to write an article for a website. HealthCentral paid me when I was the Health Guide. I call the use of free mental labor an “intellectual sweatshop.”
Here’s a list of websites that can help you:
Writers Editors and other Creatives can search for work at MediaBistro.
Getting a yearly performance review at your job can seem if not capricious at least stacked against you.
At one corporate insurance job in the 1990s I wasn’t given a pay raise. At all. Zero. Zip. Nada in compensation.
At the job in the law firm library I wasn’t given a promotion. That’s when I obtained my union job. Here the pay raises are set via negotiation for all employees in the union.
Going over my performance review printouts was a case study in how to earn what you’re worth.
It’s been my experience that if you have a union job it’s hard for you to be fired. Unless you have a city job and low seniority and the city is experiencing a financial hardship. Like the coronavirus pandemic that shut down New York City. Then there might be “LIFO” layoffs of the Last in First Out.
Reviewing the performance reviews of two different supervisors can be illuminating.
How is it that one person can give you only a “Satisfactory” overall rating and another person gave you a “+” rating which is better with a few “Superiors” checked off?
You need to have a stronger constitution to deflect not getting a positive performance review.
If you don’t work in a union your job might be on the chopping block in the future if you keep getting sub-par performance reviews.
See: Kennedy Rolland, Florence. The Persuasive Negotiator: Tools and Techniques for Effective Negotiating. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2020. and Dawson, Roger. Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating: Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator 3rd edition. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2010.
Ideally, you will negotiate a higher salary when the company makes you the job offer. They wanted you and only you. So getting into the habit of negotiating up front is key.
Role-playing this kind of negotiating with a friend or therapist or practicing if possible with a professional could help you become comfortable asking for the money you’re worth.
In the coming blog entries I’m going to talk about creating a side hustle for yourself. I recommend having a second job or income stream to bolster the pay you get from a “day job.”
This is because any time you work for another person your career–and its trajectory and eventual success–is often in their hands.
It’s a myth that you can do what love and always be paid what you’re worth.
The solution is to have what’s commonly called a “side hustle”–a second job or income stream. In addition to your “day job.”
The fact is that when you work for a business or for anyone else you have no control over the trajectory of your work history.
How to gain control?
To be proactive in choosing a career that is the right fit with your personality.
In this blog I wrote about a year ago about taking a detour.
In my own life I spent 9 years in corporate and legal jobs. The first 7 years in insurance offices. The second 2 years in a law firm library.
Figuring out quick that though the new job was in the library field I wouldn’t get ahead playing by a supervisor’s rules. I was passed over for a promotion there. This turned out to be a good thing.
Today I’m a professional librarian in a public library. For close to 9 years I had a second job as the Health Guide at a mental health website.
The point is I didn’t recover until I found this job that was the right fit with my personality.
Wherever you work whenever you are subject to having a supervisor give you a performance review your career path is in someone else’s hand.
Thus my enduring urge to tell readers and audience members to have a second job or income stream in addition to our day jobs.
The yearly evaluation your supervisor gives you can seem capricious.
Though I favor acting true to yourself I remain skeptical about always disclosing your mental health issue to your boss and coworkers in the workplace.
This is because it can influence how your supervisor rates you and how much money you get in a raise.
Is this universally true? No it is not. Yet it is a distinct possibility.
Coming up in the next blog entry how to navigate what happens when you receive a performance review.
The better you like your job and what you do for 7 hours 5 days a week the easier it will be to take your yearly rating in stride.
My experience has been that different supervisors have different personalities. Their worldview and their own quirks in how they perceive other people factor into how they rate your performance.
I will use a “case study” approach from my own files to demonstrate why working at a job you love and having a side hustle could be the way to go.
Today I value as I did when I was a disc jockey in the 1980s having the radiant defiance to be unusual.
I’ve read the book The Next Millionaire Next Door shown above. Those of us who are financially well-off have what’s called “social indifference.”
I’ve coined the term “radiant defiance.”
Individuals who have social indifference to the trappings of acting rich become millionaires.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is the route to a miserable life of mounting debt.
The millionaires next door become well-off through hard work, discipline, conscientiousness, and integrity.
They don’t live in luxury homes in upscale neighborhoods. They don’t drive a Mercedes Benz.
These millionaires are frugal as a rule.
Why am I writing about this? It’s to get readers to value doing your own thing, not what others are doing.
Millionaires don’t follow the crowd. They don’t (and I don’t either) spend time on social media or watching TV. They don’t spend hours getting worked up over political issues.
In short, the millionaires next door act differently from how most people live.
The point is that I urge readers to reject having what constitutes success in America–the mindset of earning more and more money to be able to buy material goods that make you appear rich.
Real millionaires don’t succumb to “affluenza” the disease of consumerism.
Nor does where you start out in life determine how far you can go. It’s the habits you adopt along the way that determine whether you succeed or fail.
In the book shown above the authors corroborated that individuals who have disabilities often go into business for themselves and do quite well at this.
To wit: your SAT score and college GPA don’t correlate with whether you’ll be successful later in life. See under my Book Reviews category my review of Late Bloomers, which also denounced the early “conveyor belt” of SAT scores and elite colleges as being predictors of future achievement.
It’s commonly called social indifference. I call having the guts to act true to yourself radiant defiance.
Being normal isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. What makes you different gives you an advantage.
I’ll end here with one thing the millionaires next door share:
They chose a career that is the right fit with their personality. They saw a need in the market and capitalized on filling that need.
Coming up in the next blog entry I’ll talk about my own work history to give readers insight into how acting with radiant defiance can help you succeed in any goal..
I wanted to write about this topic because all of us will experience this fate on one of our jobs.
It’s not ever a good idea to be lazy as a coworker.
Doing the bare minimum. Or not doing anything at all.
I’ve worked with individuals who don’t do their fair share of the work. Not only that they don’t do any work. They even try to pass off their work for you to do.
Wait a minute. You shouldn’t be doing your coworker’s job.
It’s a double bind: if you’re perceived as being a hard worker more and more work will be dumped on you.
In Betting on You Laurie Ruettimann talks about this dilemma in detail. I reviewed her book here. You can click on the Book Reviews category to read this review.
Ruettimann tells readers how to be a “slacker” in a good way on the job. So that the pressure you’re experiencing doesn’t steal your energy and sanity.
In an ordinary work day all of us should have the free time to take 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the afternoon as a break and breather.
Sadly, a lot of coworkers treat the full seven hours of the day as a “break” to do nothing.
This can be demoralizing. You can be tempted to join them in serenading the water cooler every 10 minutes. Or scrolling your Facebook account instead of doing any numbers crunching.
I say: as hard as it is to work with lazy coworkers refrain from ratting them out to your boss about their behavior. You’re not the schoolyard monitor for a fourth-grade class. You and your coworkers are adults.
For women especially [and particularly at law firms for female attorneys] we can work twice as hard thinking we have to prove ourselves. We’ll get twice as far even though we’re better than the men.
What is the solution when dealing with the not-acceptable kind of slacker behavior in the workplace?
I say: do your job and be great at what you do. Be different. Refrain from being tempted to do the work your coworkers fail to do.
The fact is that not everyone who gets a promotion will be the best qualified. As multiple women who experienced sexism as female attorneys in law firms have attested.
The remedy is to do your due diligence. Research the company you’re interviewing at. Go on GlassDoor to scope out employers. Arm yourself with the typical salary, working conditions, and other criteria.
Former New York governor David A. Paterson published his memoir Black, Blind, and in Charge: A Story of Visionary Leadership and Overcoming Adversity. His first-person account has no trace of pity, bitterness, or regret.
On page twenty-eight Paterson asserted that the root of his adversity was not the disability itself only his reaction to it. He offered a fiery condemnation of not owning every facet of your identity. That your disability makes you who you are has been a war cry I haven’t wanted to utter.
Why do I fear telling others that I have a disability? Ironically in my first book I limned this “secret sauce” that compelled me to become an Advocate. Left of the Dial was a graphic pager-turner that detailed my early recovery.
Only Governor Paterson said it better than I could’ve when he wrote:
“This may sound strange, but whoever you are, whatever you are, you should be proud of it. If you’re proud to be black, if you’re proud to be a woman, if you’re proud to be American, if you’re proud to be a New Yorker, you should be proud to be blind.
Even though it causes you problems, it’s who you are. It’s what you are. The question is, ‘What will you be?’ And you’ll never be anything until you resolve the fact that God created you the way you are and even if there are imperfections, this is who you are.”
Always I have thought that I succeeded because of having an illness not despite living with a disorder. Shunted into the mental health system I fought to get a job and live in my own apartment. Two things people with normal lives take for granted that they can have.
By dressing in my “Greenwich Village” garb I sent a clear message to anyone who saw me: I’m not giving up until I get what I want. My clothes were as radical as I was–free-form like my thinking. A Visionary, I thought recovery was possible even in 1987 when I was told it wasn’t.
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go” was T.S. Eliot’s famous quote. Often, I credit my sartorial risk-taking as being the genesis of my take-no-prisoners approach to achieving my goals.
According to Black, Blind, and in Charge, there’s a sixty-eight percent unemployment rate for blind people in this country. That David A. Paterson obtained a J.D. and rose to become a governor says it all–the fight is worth taking on.
Though this 55th governor of New York didn’t have a mental illness I recommend everyone read his book. In July I cohosted with Max Guttman L.C.S.W the Zoom workshop Editorializing Lived Experiences: Creating an Authentic Voice and Impactful Message in Professional Writing. At this event I told the attendees: “Don’t give up the fight.”
The reality is that fighting for our rights as individuals with disabilities has always been necessary. Stereotypes abound when you have schizophrenia or another mental illness. All too often mental health staff themselves persist in thinking that recovery isn’t possible.
Who are you going to believe–a person who tells you there’s no hope or someone like me that understands that recovery comes to each of us in different guises? Everyone’s recovery is as individual as our thumbprint. Bake a cake. Sing in a choir. Ride a skateboard. It’s all great whatever you choose to do.
If you ask me the bar has been set too high by outsiders as to what constitutes the definition of “recovery.” The average Joe or Josephine on the street doesn’t get half as much scrutiny as mental health peers do in terms of what we’re able to do.
For over five years in my blogs I’ve sung the praises of Rite Aid cashiers.. A lot of them have been ringing up customers’ orders for five six or seven years. Doing it with a smile every day. No one gives them grief for holding a minimum wage job.
Yet when a person with schizophrenia works behind a Rite Aid counter, suddenly they’re viewed with pity if not outright contempt. While a person like me endures an obstructive chorus telling me that I’m “the exception to the rule” because I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and have a Masters’ degree and work as a professional librarian.
You got a problem with a person with a disability who demands equity in society in whatever form their participation takes? That’s what I want to ask outsiders who don’t have lived experience with an illness who dare claim to predict our destiny in life.
David A. Paterson beat the odds that were against him. His book should be required reading. Whatever kind of disability you have, I recommend you think for yourself about what’s possible for you to achieve.
In an earlier blog entry I talked about finding the work environment where you can be yourself and thrive.
My aim here is to give readers a shot in the arm of confidence so that you can Be Who You Are Not Who the World Wants You to Be like a magnet I bought attests.
The term Born This Way is a manifesto that everyone should be proud of.
I’ve been told over and over that I’m “the exception to the rule.” I feel crummy when I hear this. As if there is a stereotype of how people with schizophrenia live and act and dress.
Mumbling on the street. In tattered clothes. And what if one of us appears that way? We shouldn’t be viewed any worse than others.
This is what I don’t like as an author and a human being: I detest stereotyping people. That is: viewing everyone of the same race or gender or ethnicity or disability as having the same characteristics. Simply because of your interaction with one person of that race or gender or ethnicity or disability.
In this “disability box” outsiders use our symptoms as the proxy for who we are.
Outsiders can’t see beyond illness to accept us as “individuals who” have schizophrenia. Often it feels like our personality traits and our humanity are discounted as factors that enabled us to persist in the face of emotional challenges.
Our road might be harder yet that’s no excuse top give up. At the end of this blog entry I’ll give a link to an online Zoom event I cohosted at the 15th Annual Peer Conference in July.
The workshop was titled “Editorializing Lived Experiences: Creating an Authentic Voice and Impactful Message in Professional Writing.”
The key word in that title? Authentic.
To claim and assert our individuality is the only way you and can succeed in life and in recovery.
Maybe I knew this all along when I showed up to that day program in 1989 wearing vintage pajama pants in the summer?
The YouTube video of the Peer Conference Workshop is 1 hour 5 minutes.
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