Finding your niche

Earl Nightingale says, "Get into a line that you will find to be of deep personal interest, something you really enjoy spending twelve to fifteen hours a day working at, and the rest of the time thinking about."

Do dentists really spend their off-time thinking about dentistry? I doubt that garbagemen or grocery clerks spend their spare time thinking about work. Yet the world needs dentists, garbage men, and grocery clerks. Well, I don't know about grocery clerks. The automated checkout seems to be the wave of the future, banishing yet another low-paying job to the slag heap of history. A French thinker, whose name I can't recall, believed that tedious jobs should be outlawed, and that people should just learn to do without the products of these jobs. That vision is coming close to being realized, at least in the United States. But instead of learning to do without these products, we are instead having them produced overseas.

My friend MK, a Hollywood makeup artist whom I have never actually met, tells me that even in Hollywood, "all the work has gone to England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Prague, and just about anywhere but Hollywood. Unless you do game shows or soap operas."

So where does that leave us? Well, there are two ways to take that. On the one hand, you can blame the unions, which I am sure are the reason for such developments, and lament the changes that are an inevitable part of life. Or, you can look on the bright side and say, "Hey, if you want to be in the movies, living in Los Angeles is no longer a requirement!"

I think what Earl Nightingale is talking about is entrepreneurship, rather than getting a job. America was built around self-employment. The job is a recent invention of the industrial age.

The problem with America, as I see it, is that ambitious immigrants move here, start businesses, and then have unambitious children who get jobs. Those jobs are eventually exported overseas to the people who stayed behind in the old country.