How to Create Your Own High Paying Job

37 Tips for Reaching Your Career Goals

Dr. Gary S. Goodman

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781722520816
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Are you unemployed? Or, are you overworked, underpaid, and stuck in a lifeless job, reporting to someone who doesn't seem to be doing much better than you are? You're not alone. Corporations once needed large inflows of middle managers and the formally educated. Many of these posts have disappeared or have been displaced by outsourcing, offshoring, international competition, and by technology. There is a widespread and growing under-employment problem facing almost every society. Many are working at jobs that do not require the experience and schooling they possess. In the United States up to 44% are under-employed; in Canada this number is 40%.Though there has been some job growth over the past few years, these jobs are mostly lower-paid without a solid ladder to success. In this original and groundbreaking book, you'll learn how to develop your own highly compensated career opportunities.

Tip 1: Create a Parallel Career Track

I worked my way through college and grad schools. It wasn’t easy, learning full time and working full time. But it yielded some extraordinary benefits that I continue to cash-in today. Let’s skip to today and I’ll show you what I mean.

In the last week I have: (1) Practiced law; (2) Practiced real estate; (3) Sold a loan; (4) Contracted to write a book and record an audio version; (4) Pitched a corporate training program; (5) Coordinated my teaching assignments at two major universities; and more.

This means I am a lawyer, real estate broker, financial salesperson, negotiator, professional writer, recording artist, corporate consultant, and college professor. Each of these capacities brings income to me. Some of them are well paid. Worked together, they are even more rewarding.

When I was a freshman in college, my Sociology professor, Dr. Quinn, predicted each of us attending class that day would have a minimum of four careers during our lives. That sounded daunting and exhausting. Yet, I’ve engaged in seven or eight careers, depending on how we count, during the last week, alone! Surely, these jobs require various amounts of study and preparation, lasting years. But they are not sequential, as we think careers must be. They are simultaneous. This is a form of multitasking that you should consider doing, as well. The first step is to be open to taking on different career identities. You cannot become so inflexible that you tell yourself, borrowing from my trades, that because you are a professor, selling is beneath you. Start instead with the premise that all honest work is worthwhile and meritorious.

If you enjoy doing a job and it helps you to earn a living, that’s good enough. You do not want to get ego-invested in believing you must be a specialist in any one area to respect yourself or be respected. Specialization has been keenly pursued in developed societies ever since the industrial revolution. Learning to do one small thing and to do that well has been seen as a ticket to success. And it worked that way, until recently. Let’s look at just one of my specializations, practicing law.

As I communicate this to you, some say there are far too many practicing attorneys in the State of California, at 225,000, way more than the market can handle. Of that number, about 170,000 are engaged in legal work while the rest are in different occupations. An oversupply of lawyers means wages become depressed, jobs in the law are harder to find, and if you want to create a high-paying occupation for yourself, choosing to do it through a legal practice may not be the best way.

That is, if all you do is practice law. It so happens in California you can sit for the real estate broker’s exam if you have earned a law degree from an accredited school. Naturally, you need to take a broker preparation course. But if you have the brains to be a lawyer, believe me, you also have the smarts to be a realtor. I’ve had both sales and broker licenses. The latter enables me to do more things and to earn higher commissions.

Most people practice real estate part time, as salespeople. They buy and sell for their own portfolios, saving on commissions, or they do some transactions for their friends and families or both. Generally this is an accepted practice, though uni-career types that believe you should do only one thing at a time might gripe about it. The fact is if you simply do one real estate deal each year you will spike your overall income significantly. For this reason, I would urge you to get a real estate sales license, which is easy and inexpensive to do. You do not have to be a lawyer for that, and you can save yourself money even if all you do is buy a property for yourself every so many years. Once more, my point is that having lots of arrows in your professional quiver and actually shooting them off together can make a lot of sense. To mix the metaphor, it is akin to having your fingers in lots of pies.

Now let’s turn to some of the skills that are shared in common by the career paths that I am pursuing simultaneously. I honed my selling abilities when I worked for Time-Life. I became their top seller and then a sales manager while I was a full-time undergraduate student. This single skill has been worth a tremendous amount of money to me. As I mentioned a moment ago, in the last week I did some successful selling. In fact, I’m almost always selling. I do it to get universities to offer my classes. In some cases, those initial sales last for a decade or more. Once my courses succeed, typically I’m asked to do more teaching at those schools. Likewise, I need to sell my books and media programs to publishers. At times, I do this directly. And at others, I have an agent that places my projects. To get an agent, you have to sell the person on your earning power and creative capabilities. Then, you have to sell the person on the value of each new project as you conceptualize it.

Consulting for a living involves ceaseless selling and self-promotion. Typically, projects only last for a while and one needs to be quickly followed by another. To keep your calendar full, you need to keep hustling, and this means selling. To create a high-paying job you will need selling skills, as well. You might be thinking, “But I don’t want to be a salesperson!” Yup, I know the feeling, and I have to overcome it practically every day!

Selling gets more lucrative, more routine with time, but it always requires a certain amount of effort. Read my book, Selling Is So Easy, It’s Hard. It will help you to avoid the 77 predictable pitfalls we all fall into.

For now, let me urge you to appreciate that we’re all salespeople, butcher, baker or candlestick maker. And the first sale if you want to earn high-income is between your own ears. You need to sell yourself on your own value.

Tip 2: Take A Tip From Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was trying to build an electronic device when he was in his late teens. Only problem, he did not have the money to buy the parts required. Then he had this brainstorm. David Packard, then the hugely successful founder of nearby Hewlett-Packard, probably had those parts. Jobs looked up Packard’s home phone number. It was in the book! The teenager explained his project and asked if the honcho had some spare parts.

Packard did better that that. He was so impressed with the moxie Jobs showed in phoning him, that Packard gave Jobs a summer gig assembling the same devices that Jobs wanted to build on his own. You can read a million things into this story. For our purpose, though, I hope you will take inspiration from it.

To his credit, Jobs thought through who was likely to have the parts he wanted. But there is something even more significant here. Jobs started at the top. His first call was to the boss, someone who could make anything happen. If someone in a firm can donate spare parts to a kid, it would be the owner of that firm, correct? Plus, and I’ve seen this time and again, if a leader is impressed with you, they will make a spot for you. They will put you to work somewhere in their organization. This way, they can learn about you. What kind of worker are you? Punctual? Tardy? Creative? Dedicated?

They may not give you the keys to the kingdom, at least not right away. But they will let you prove yourself. And if the boss is mentoring you, even behind the scenes, believe me; you will be on a fast track, even if you start in the mail room or in front of a machine on the factory floor.

This brings me to a point. Most of us, when we’re opportunity hunting, waste our time trying to impress the wrong people. Let’s say you do what most job seekers do. You spiff up your resume, buffing it to a high gloss. Then you send it off to the Human Resources department at a company. And you wait for a reply. None comes, and you wonder why? For one thing, HR people don’t create jobs out of thin air. Their workday does not consist of sifting through resumes, finding interesting people, and then making customized jobs for them.

They receive requests from various parts of the firm. The sales manager says she needs two more account executives. Would HR please recruit them either by placing ads or retaining personnel agencies to identify suitable candidates? Or, that sales manager says she needs a sales assistant to help with various things. Then, HR might write a position description, or take an existing one pertaining to an Executive Assistant, change a few responsibilities and buzz words here and there, and then advertise that job opening.

Let’s hark back to David Packard. After Steve Jobs called him, the boss might have asked his HR people what tasks they had that related to the gizmo Jobs was trying to build. Voila! They found an assembly job doing exactly what Jobs wanted to do. But let’s say they didn’t. Packard could have easily said, “Well, I’d like to try this kid out, somewhere. He sounds like he has a decent technical mind and he can build things. What have we got?”

Remember, this is the founder and owner of the firm asking HR to find some spot, maybe any spot to put Jobs to work. You know that HR individual will come up with something, correct? What I’m saying here is that HR people are reactive, not proactive. They respond to needs that others have identified. They don’t roam the corridors breathlessly inventing things for people to do, and especially innovating tasks. That is above their pay grade.

Now that I’ve used that cliché, let’s examine it further. Typically, HR folks don’t control the purse. I see this all the time as a speaker and consultant. For example, a company came to me asking about one of my negotiation seminars. The head of HR made the initial inquiry. What would it cost to bring my training to that firm? Immediately, I inquired about the amount of funding they had budgeted. They didn’t have a budget. Well, this is par for the course, I thought. Someone, who is a line manager, perhaps the head of sales, wants the training. But he or she delegated the recruitment task to HR for the purpose of doing some initial “shopping” and tire kicking. Of course, after I quoted my fees, the HR fellow got sticker shock. It was so far above his pay grade that he had no context to evaluate the value associated with the price I quoted.

I have never sold my consulting services directly to an HR person or department. They are not the buyers, and if they think they are, believe me, what they permit you ask a fee or a wage will be depressed. At some stage you may have to deal with these generally nice folks, if only to complete paperwork associated with your job or gig. And they may have some influence over hiring decisions, again, at some stage.

But they are not the real buyers. The real buyers are folks that are higher on the food chain. Steve Jobs intuited this fact. That’s what gave him the motivation to make his first call to David Packard. You need to go to the top, as well. Look at it this way. If you shoot for the moon and you miss, you still might end up in the stars.

I’ve contacted company presidents and owners and they have referred me to their inferiors. However, the clout of having a top dog say to an underling, “Hey, see if this person has something to offer us,” is implicitly a hint that they believe you have something to offer! Why would the most important person at the firm bother to pass along my name if he or she wasn’t convinced I had at least some potential value? If you contact HR instead as your opening gambit, even if they like you it is highly dubious that they will send your name upstream to more important folks. Why is this so? It is risky for them to take a chance on doing anything outside of their standard routines and responsibilities.

Let’s say that hypothetical boss passes my name along and the underling thinks I’m a waste of time; that I have nothing meaningful to offer. Will the boss be at risk for having made the referral? Of course, not; bosses are secure in that way. They can say, try this or that, with impunity.

Let’s review what Steve Jobs did, which got David Packard to create a job for him. Jobs thought through who would have the components he needed, in other words, he identified the company that was probably building devices of the type he wanted to build. The principle he followed is this: Don’t visit a nearby palm tree if you’re seeking oranges. Palms may grow dates and possibly coconuts, but oranges just won’t fall from them.

Identify the type of company that is doing what you want to do. Next, develop a short pitch. Jobs said he was building something and he thought Packard might provide him with some parts. I’m inferring this was approximately the gist of the conversation. Your pitch doesn’t need to be fancy. We’ll invest more time in constructing your pitch later.

Jobs got Packard’s phone number. It was in the phone directory. Don’t assume every step of the process will be difficult. With a minimum amount of digging or a few phone calls, you can get to nearly anyone’s communication doorstep. Jobs made the call to Packard! For some folks, lifting the teeny phone to make such a call can feel as onerous as lifting a 2,000 ton weight. Later, we will talk a bit about phone fear, who gets it, and how to overcome it.

Finally, Jobs was open to any offer Packard made. And he seized the opportunity Packard handed him. Without that summer gig, there may have been no Apple, and no Steve-Jobs-the-Legend. But as you know, Jobs created that job at Hewlett-Packard. He didn’t see an ad for it. And he didn’t waste time with HR folks. He went to the top, and not too long after that, the top went to him—the top post, that is.

Tip 3: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try Something Else!

We are creatures of reinforcement, plain and simple. This means, if we do something that ends well, we are inclined to repeat the behaviors that preceded the happy outcome. For example, let’s say you found a good summer job by going door to door in the retail district of your small town where you happened upon a Help Wanted sign. The people inside were warm and courteous and supportive. You were hired on the spot and time flew. You earned a decent piece of change, for a kid.

Based on that one experience, you might expect your next opportunity to come the same way. Easily, without any muss or fuss, you believe good situations will practically fall into your lap. This is a more favorable outlook than expecting the job hunt to be hard and filled with obstacles. If you’re dreading it, you might procrastinate and fail to do even perfunctory employment seeking behaviors.

This is akin to what I have experienced at numerous sales jobs. As part of an extended interview process, I have been put on the phone with a minimum of training. A name or two along with phone numbers have been supplied to me. I have been expected to “reach out and sell someone” which happens to be the title of my best-selling book.

Here’s what happens. At those jobs that work out well, almost invariably I have been the beneficiary of beginner’s luck. Much more often than not, I have made a sale on my very first try! At one place, an office supply wholesaler, I phoned a baker, as in butcher, baker, candlestick maker. My goal was to sell him a gross of ballpoint pens—that’s twelve dozen writing instruments, 144 in all. I followed the presentation, word for word, doing my best to bring it to life. And at the end of it, the baker did his part; he bought! As I recall, I earned about $35.00 for that first conversation, which wasn’t bad money at all for a graduate student. The owner and sales manager were shocked, in a good way, of course. The sales manager exclaimed, “He’s a master, a master!” which was high praise, indeed.

And I went on to prove them right. I became the undisputed champion seller of ballpoint pens to customers in the food service industry. I focused mainly on selling to restaurants, which no one had really mastered, before. I joked that you could navigate your way across country by car, stopping along the way only at restaurants I had sold, and never go hungry! It turned out to be a great part-time job for me, enabling me to pay for a new sports car that was the envy of my fellow grad students, and probably most of my professors, as well.

I sold pens on top of teaching classes at two universities, so I did pretty well for myself. That pen job was a straight commission affair. If I sold I earned, and if not, well, you know. But I never experienced a dry spell. From that first sale onward, I did okay for myself.

The moral to the story is this: Very often, if a job is right for you, you will show a knack for doing it, immediately. The required skills will come easily to you. From a practical standpoint, this means you should be prepared to try many jobs before settling on any one job.

Let’s look at the other side of the coin. Let’s say what you have chosen to do, or the only job you could find at the time was an utter pain. Every shift is just terrible to do. Possibly, you hate your boss or your work mates or your assignments, or all of the above. That’s a bad sign!

I delivered fish and poultry during the hot summer in a truck that wasn’t air-conditioned. It was a smelly, greasy, and exhausting dash from one doorstep to another. One day I was called on to bring a case of wine down from the loft. I tripped, fell forward, and twelve bottles broke with a deafening sound. Fortuna...