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Take your job and shove it!

When I first immigrated to Canada, I did not have an education or the necessary skills to get a good job. The first job I ever had was washing dishes in a Chinese buffet. This was a huge restaurant. It sat something like 600 people, and on a Saturday night there was 600 people in the restaurant, as well as a line up outside.

My job consisted of picking up dirty dishes from the service stations, bringing them to the kitchen, washing them and bringing them out to the buffet. If you ever had a crappy job, you can relate to my experience there. I stayed at that restaurant for over two years. Here are some tips about how to survive working in a “crappy” job, or at least how I used my creativity to do so:

1. The time passes really slowly when you do not like your job. To make it more bearable, I tried to concentrate on what I was doing, rather then thinking about how much I did not like doing what I was doing. By concentrating on the task at hand, we stop the seemingly never-ending thought process in our mind. It allows us to relax and elevates some stress. Many meditation practices teach exactly that principal.

2. I started thinking about washing dishes as a game. I tried to improve how fast I was putting the dishes through the machine. How efficient I was at picking up dirty dish containers - any aspect of my job that I could improve. I didn’t do it because I wanted to be the best dishwasher, or because I really liked what I was doing, but because it gave me a way to challenge my self. It was that challenge that kept my interest up and made it more bearable for me to go to work everyday. It sounds stupid, but it works. In personal development circles this is called “Goal Setting”.

Sometime having a boring job isn’t our choice. Success doesn’t come instantly, sometimes we have to have a “crappy job” to be able to survive. I hope that these couple of tips I just shared with you, will elevate some of the pain. Our creativity can be a great resource at times when “we have to do what we have to do”. I always think of Mcguyver (a reference to a TV show from another era) when I think of creativity. What would he do to get out of this one?

Corey Rudl story

I was recently reminded of a story I heard long ago of an infamous internet marketer Corey Rudl, who passed away not too long ago. This is another one of those great stories that when you hear it for the first time just makes you say “wow”.

Corey was an “everyday Joe” he had a job and hobbies that he pursued when he was not working. One of his greatest passions was racing. He hung out at various internet forums devoted to the sport quite regularly. One day he saw one discussion about luxury cars that was extremely lively. He tuned in and found out that they were discussing a problem that luxury car owners are plagued with. It was the fact that inner-city gangs were stealing the hood emblems for those cars, and that it was extremely expensive to replace them. This practice of stealing the emblems was so popular, that the owners didn’t know what to do. Reporting the theft to the insurance companies would only increase their already high premiums, and paying the replacement out of pocket every month was too expensive.

You can look at this situation from two points of view. One, you offer your sympathy to those victims, and do nothing else. Two, do what Corey did. Look at it from a creative entrepreneurial point of view, and see an opportunity in that problem. Corey went out and found a wholesaler that would sell those emblems to him at a discount. This brought the total price to about one eighth of what the dealership was charging those car owners.

After that he made a simple site that sold those emblems. He went back to the forum, and told everyone there, that he found a place where they could purchase the emblems at a fraction of the price. The very first year without doing any further marketing he made something like 70000 dollars. That was many years ago, and till this day this site makes about 40000/year without any advertising or marketing.

This story isn’t about being lucky, or “getting rich quick”, it is about being open to everything around us. Without a doubt Corey was a genius where it came to marketing. But was he not open to notice this opportunity, he wouldn’t have acted and the story would have ended with that. Creativity works very much like that. One needs to be open at all times in order to let the creative inspiration blossom. The more we are open, the more we are able to be in the creative flow (a concept that we teach in our “Kick-Start Your Creativity” course). We also going to get to the point where we feel inspired all of the time - and that is truly a great way to live.

Here is another great story

Cindy is a single mom. Being a single mom is difficult under best circumstances, but a specially if you don’t have a lot of money. One day Cindy had a brilliant idea. It was an idea for a book. A book on relationships called “What men know about women”. A small coffee table book, it was going to be quite unique - it was going to be completely blank inside. What? A book that’s completely blank?  Absolutely.  I love how smart this idea is.

After this book was produced she encountered numerous rejections by big book store chains, who did not understand this concept. At that point she decided to try and sell it her self. That road wasn’t easy for her either, but her creative thinking and perseverance eventually brought her success. She ended up selling this concept through small hair salons and boutiques. First one at a time and then thousands. She made a lot of money at the end, but pretty much all of her success I say could be attributed to her inventive and creative ability.

The last thing I heard about her was that she wanted to get married again, accept she wanted a wedding in outer space.

What an amazing ability to think without limits. This is the kind of thinking everybody should aspire to. Just imagine how the world would be if everyone would be coming up with crazy ideas like that.