How to Find a New Job

• "Take inventory of your talents and what you're looking for.
  
  
• Join a job club that identifies prospects in your field or area.
  
  
• Working alone, identify prosepcts and go visit them to see if they're hiring.
  
  
• Knock on doors of any office, factory or employer that interests you to see if they have openings.
  
  
• Ask people in your network for any job leads."
  
  

This from an article and sidebar in today's Washington Post on Richard Bolles.

Richard Bolles' book What Color is Your Parachute? is the best thing I've ever read in this area and Richard updates it annually. He also recently released another book in light of the current crisis called The Job Hunter's Survival Guide.

Finally, Richard's website - JobHuntersBible.com - is just amazing.

My $.02: With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and email, Richard's advice to utilize your network is that much more potentially powerful. However, the more personal the contact, the more fruitful the result. I do not suggest job hunters post broadcast Facebook or Twitter announcements asking for folks to contact them with potential leads. This will provide diminishing returns.

If I lost my job on Monday, I would 1) be really sad (because I love my job!) and, then, 2) I would review

• my Outlook contacts,
  
  
• my Facebook contacts,
  
  
• my Twitter contacts, and
  
  
• and my LinkedIn contacts.

Then I would divide them into three groups:

• Those close friends or associates I visit personally to find out about any positions of which they may be aware,
  
  
• Those in this same category that I call instead of visit because of time limitations or geography,
  
  
• And those that I email individually with the same question.
  

The other thing that I would do is to check the company's of my LinkedIn contacts and their contacts to see if there are any organizations in which I have any interest. Then I would work those specific contacts for any particular positions with which they might have some influential connection.

The frustrating thing about finding a new job is that it's a bit like sales and requires a lot of psychological hardiness and emotional resiliance: 95% of every thing you do will end up being worthless. 5% of your effort will yield fruit. The problem is that you don't know what 5% of effort will bear positive results so you have to do all 100%!

One thing that Richard says with which I absolutely agree: There are always people hiring.

The most important things to do while looking for a job are to stay persistent, remain active, and maintain hope!

Author Len Sweet asks

"Publishers making this an age of encyclopedias: more than 15,000 new ones in the past 10 years. In a Google world, why?"

My thoughts:

Two reasons - one technological and one qualitative. Despite the rapid decline of information's cost, the written page is still easier on our senses. When digital paper is cheap (something post-Kindle), this will change. Then, one unfortunate side effect of the declining cost of information is the concomitant declining quality of disseminated ... Read Moreinformation. We still appreciate information that's processed and sifted as we find in books, newspapers, etc. When information cost more, more information was processed. Now that dissemination is so cheap, perspective and analysis and, sadly, truth are sometimes lacking. The declining cost of information is a marvelous characteristic of our age, but it's not an unmitigated positive in terms of unintended consequences.

Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative

This morning I finished the second volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. Reading Foote's magnum opus is a bit arduous; it's 2,960 pages all told. But I am thoroughly enjoying Foote's magisterial treatment of our nation's four year conflict. Foote, who died in 2005 at the age of 88, was a novelist and he's a great storyteller. His presentation of the personalities of the Civil War is entirely engaging.

He completed the first volume in 1958, the second five years later, and wrapped up his final book in the trilogy in 1974. But it wasn't until Foote appeared in Ken Burns' wildly successful1990 PBS documentary The Civil War that the novelist turned historian became very widely known. Though at that time Volume 3 - Red River to Appomattox had been published 16 years previously, at one point in September of 1990, each volume of Foote's history was selling 1000 copies a day.

War is repugnant, but my primary motivation behind my reading of histories and biographies around the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and World Wars I and II is what they have to teach us about leadership. When I am done with the three books, I'll post some thoughts about leadership prompted by Foote's treatment.

Training the Emotional Mind

Just read this great quote based on the thinking of Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, in Asplund and Fleming's book Human Sigma:

Train your emotional mind. Most of our cognition is automatic and intuitive, and it connects directly to our brain's motivations and reward centers. Haidt refers to those more automatic and intuitive processes as the mind's 'elephant,' and our more conscious, controlled will is the rider on that elephant. We can guide the elephant, but when it really wants to do something, it is difficult to control. Training our elephant involves changing our daily habits through behavioral conditioning, meditation, or some other purposeful redirection of our most basic impulses. It also takes time (about 12 weeks) for our brains to learn new habits.