By Richard Posner

“The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless.”
~ Emlyn Williams~

For most of my youth (and maybe yours) when you went into a job interview you would give the interviewer the answers you believed he or she was looking for. 

Quite often those answers were lies, distortions, or lined with self-doubt.  After all, you wanted to get to work and begin holding your proper place in society. 

If it took a few distortions or naive assertions such as “I want to help your organization develop the next Game Boy,” or  “I want to lead the effort to develop cars that run on meglevs”….so be it. 

It was a means to an end, right?

Fast forward to the winter of ’09.  Many of those people who clawed their way into the system with self-deceit and lies and were then able to endure its chains during good times, are as easy to spot as a stripper heroin addict in a room of Born Again Christians.  They are unemployed or hanging onto their job by a nose hair because they never followed their dreams and their fraud was finally sussed out (slang for discovered).

Call it karma , if you must.

Japan is deeply effected by the recent dark clouds circling the economic planet.  “As GM goes, so goes America,” and as Toyota goes, so goes Japan.”   Many people have bought into this mindset, and have caused a run on the mind bank.   People and governments are gasping for air and a fresh approach.

Rewind to those first job interviews.  Isn’t what you really wanted and what you finally settled for vastly different?  You settled for a salary, and promised your employer in return that you would be a good boy or girl, follow orders, and sell your soul to the boss-devil as long as they could pay your bills plus a little alpha. 

You wanted independence, but chose the wrong vehicle – others to lead you.

This morning I watched a microcosmic view of “bread line” mentality in a New York Times video.  All the people in the video were hungry to work and many seem to have good skills and abilities.  But they are standing in line with many thousands of others at a job fair hoping against hope that they will win the job lottery for less than 40 positions offered by the boss-wo(man) inside.

You and I don’t need to stand in line.  You need to evaluate who you are:  your passions, your abilities, and your dreams…and then take action. 

You and I have infinitely more worth than the salary a boss wo(man) can offer you.  Let’s stop chasing crumbs when we can have the pie.  It’s all a matter of attitude and follow through.    Believing is seeing.