Joyland

"Always know where your wallet is, and show up."  Carny Rule

I recently read a Stephen King book "Joyland" about a college kid who works a summer job at a theme park set in the early '70's.  During his induction one of the old hands gives him this advice and my thought was, "Crap, now I'm going to have to update my Ten Simple Rules.

Pretty good advice no matter your profession and frankly when I think about the bulk of things that have caused me problems eliminating these two would take care of a bunch of them.

When taken in the literal sense I think people in general do a pretty good job on knowing where their wallet is .  But if you extrapolate it to mean knowing where your "wallet"  (Wealth, Assets, Loot, Love, Emotions, Talent)  is at all times I think most of us fail to some greater or lesser degree.  We have become a society who depend on others to watch out for us.  We trust investors, bankers, talk shows, reality shows, infomercials and un-invested outsiders more than we trust ourselves.  So we end up not knowing where our "wallet" is and trusting it to other people.

I've certainly made this mistake on both the financial and professional side and have my share of flaws on the personal side as well.

However, I'm convinced that the showing up part, in the literal sense, gets lost along the way too often.

Old Geezer Alert!!

I'm also convinced that young people today are especially bad when it comes to showing up.  I don't know if it's because of our mobile society where you don't have to actually ever see and talk to people face-to-face, or if it's inherent in all young people and I just don't remember me being that way or, maybe it's not as bad as I think and I just need to go out on the porch and yell at the neighbor kids to get off my lawn.

But I don't think so.

My observations tell me that a whole lot of people wait for things to come to them rather than going and looking for them.

Additionally I keep reading a growing number of blogs and articles on places like LinkedIn that encourage us to not try to make the Millennia's fit into our outdated and archaic methods of recruiting and management.  We need to let them express their artistic freedom and not restrict them.  We need to "Understand" them.

BAH!!

How about THEY understand that being able to verbally communicate, properly write and spell, take doing their assigned job seriously and show up on time is not outdated, but essential.

Now, back to watching the front lawn.