ingredients into the mix—and her new recipe is saluted by everyone. But she was just being inventive.
Yes, we all have it in us, to one degree or another. And we need it, if we look for jobs and just can’t find one. And then try to create a job from the menu of typical options in our society, but come up empty. What is left? We have to become inventive.
THE INGREDIENTS OF INVENTIVENESS
Inventiveness depends upon two habits of mind, which we can adopt and develop: attention and curiosity.
Attention means paying attention. Go downtown, to a familiar street. Walk down that street and see what is there that you never noticed before. Make a list. Notice how often we are blind to things that are right in front of us. Could I possibly have walked by “that” all this time, and never noticed it? Yes, you could and you did. We all do. Especially in this age in which we live, we’ve been encouraged to develop continuous partial attention, as Linda Stone (formerly of Microsoft) puts it.
Curiosity means just that. Endlessly curious. Endlessly asking questions. Endlessly wanting to know how, and why? Anyone who watched Katherine Bigelow’s masterpiece, The Hurt Locker, saw this kind of relentless curiosity in the restless mind of the hero. Why does this wire lead here, and not there? What is the reason people are staring so intently from their windows at this point?
Walk into any town or city. You can’t find a job, and you can’t create a job from the options offered you. So, now, you’re going to have to figure out how to create a job for yourself, from scratch. What are the tools at your command? Powerful ones: Attention. And curiosity.
What does this place need, and is willing to pay money for? What is there that is not being done? Or what is there that is being done, but you could invent a way to do it better? Or quicker? Or more thoroughly? It may be as simple as they need apple pies.
It may also turn out that the need is not just in that place. It’s more universal, and you have the wit and the wherewithal to put something up on the Web, that could attract ads and make you money.
There is no limit to ways that you could put together work that meets somebody’s need, for which they will pay you money. In other words, a job. All you have to do is stop thinking of inventors as someone over there. And realize that you are an inventor, too. We all are. So, use and encourage that strain in yourself. Notice the ways in which you are inventive already, in your daily life. Read the daily obituaries in the New York Times, and notice what inventive thing each person did while yet they lived.
As our economy worldwide grows harsher, as jobs are harder to find, we all need to become job creators. We need at least to know how, even if it is a survival skill that we never have to use. We can at least teach it to others.
As you go about your daily business, buying stuff, or getting repairs, or whatever, just think to yourself: every job is somebody’s invention. Somebody invented this job, and made it work. You have the same ability.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)[34] Chapter 12. How to Choose a New Career
THE THREE WAYS OF CREATING YOUR OWN JOB
Once you’ve decided you need the advanced survival skill of being able to create a job, rather than just find one, you have three choices.
One is, you can invent a job. We just covered that in chapter 11.
The second is you can work with the things you already know, and start your own business. We covered that in chapter 10.
And the third is to start with things you don’t know. Instead of contemplating a lake, you can contemplate an ocean. You can survey the whole field of careers, and consider ones you may never have ever even thought of, up to now. That is the subject of this chapter.
So, how do we begin, in looking at careers we never thought of? Left to our own instincts, most of us will opt for taking a test of one kind or another.
