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Best Canadian Blog
2004 - 2007
Why this blog?
Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked.
This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio -
"You don't speak for me."
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The Pence Principle
Poor Richard's Retirement
Pilgrim's Progress
Trump The Establishment
Mike Rowes’s site here,
http://www.mikeroweworks.com/tool-shed/
Plenty of stuff for those struggling with the post secondary life and not wanting to take on 10’s of thousands of debt to pursue a dream someone else is trying to sell them, and it’s not the Huffington Post.
Mike Rowe has 3 videos at the TED site, all of which are not like watching the CBC or CNN.
This is one TED Talk I use with teens. It makes for some feeling uncomfortable, some feeling inspired, and always for a great conversation.
old but still relevant and will be forever!
Smart, practical guy! I can say unequivocally that I’ve learned the most from hands on jobs and from raising my son. I still wish that I had ‘followed my passion’ from Day One, instead of working in an office. It’s all fodder for life lessons, though.
Skills Trump Passion
This is a worthwhile read.
There is a good reason why people have both “avocation” and “vocation”.
Of course all this presumes that there is a basic work ethic driving the individual in the first place.
I agree with Mike Rowe.
I would add that if you take into account the cash transactions, you can make the same money as a house painter that you can as a physical therapist.
I’ve done both. Painting is harder physically, but easier on the nerves by an order of magnitude.
“In recent months, I’ve been chastised by the Right for appearing on Bill Maher, and rebuked by the Left for talking with Glenn Beck.”
Mike, welcome to the dirty, dirty job of the partisan footsoldier.
One of the greatest TED talks ever. First saw it years ago — it should be required watching for every teen…
Mike Rowe is dead on. The truth is the marketplace rewards skill and ability, not necessarily education and degrees. Hard work and a good attitude can earn anyone a great mentorship and real education that money can’t buy.
Pick the lifestyle you want, then select a job based on your skillset that will help you get there. I wanted something stable with a rural lifestyle, so picked mining engineering to get there. My wife is a city girl, so thank God the skills are transferable.
“Hundreds of men and women enjoying a balanced life as a direct result of their uncommon willingness to master a useful skill, do an unpleasant thing, and work really, really hard.”
YES X 157!!! SO many kids I’ve met have wanted to “follow their passion” ,and ended up washing dishes or serving fast food,and a lot of that can be blamed on counsellors and teachers who either don’t know the realities of the real workplace,or just don’t give a damn.
I found a way to earn a living for many years hanging 30 stories above the ground on a swing stage or bo’sun’s chair,made good money saw some spectacular views! 😉
A young friend busted his ass for four years following his passion, degree in archaeology. He works for a landscaper, $12/hr.
“Follow Your Passion!” Yeah, right.
Too many young people are stuck in neutral because of this advice. A lot of 17 year olds love video games but don’t know how to get their act in gear. I say get a job, any job Work at it for a while. If it is dead end and or you hate it find something else. Move along a few times until you find something your enjoy and pays the bills or you start to understand something more about life. Then you can start to make real decisions.
If you want to attend college or university, don;t even think about going or choosing a major until you have done the above exercise. Bad jobs build character and insight. We all need bad experiences. You won;t truly have a passion without them.
Trust me. Blowing snow from public buildings in -30 will cure you of any longing for labour.
besides stressing the body. the amount of paper work required, plus regulations with megalomaniac bosses. Is a mind killer as well
Good points. I have no idea when the “follow your passion” meme got started but far too many young people are under the delusion that if they get a worthless university degree, people will come to them unnanouced offering them a job.
I know doctors whose first passion is music, but they use medicine to pay the bills and this also allows them to buy expensive instruments and enjoy their passion in their free time. Only a very few people are lucky enough to have a job that they really enjoy doing. I would prefer to be doing neurologic basic research, but that would mean an academic position as well as trying to get grants (an aspect of that field I detested). Now, I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of medicine and just do neurologic research on people’s intact brains rather than neurons in culture. When I get a lot of complex patients in hospital I sometimes marvel that I’m paid well to play (for me solving problems is play).
Everyone should have a fallback skill they can utilize if their primary job disappears. Thus, someone who’s an electrical engineer would be strongly advised to also be a licensed electrician. Employment for electrical engineers is spotty now, but electricians are always in demand. Similarly, I’ve known artists who worked as welders and they used the welding skills to construct steel sculptures. They knew there was absolutely no way they could survive on their art alone and welding pays the bills.
I see lots of kids whose goal in life is to be a musician and they concentrate all their efforts into music without learning what they percieve to be useless areas such as math and science. The idea, when one is young, is to work at all sorts of jobs and pick up an eclectic collection of skills so that one is able to apply some of them in the future.
The lack of tradesmen that was mentioned in the article is scary. To me it would be a no brainer to pick up some form of trade, preferably 2 or 3 so that one had even more flexibility in a dynamic job market. Despite the increasing mechanization of society, toilets don’t unplug themselves, water leaks happen, fences fall down, large trees die and have to be removed and, in general, things break. Until we have a society in which there are large numbers of intelligent humanoid robots, there will always be employment for people who can fix things. What I’ve discovered over the years is that, in a pinch, I can do all sorts of repairs, but a professional painter does a far faster and neater job than I do, I’d much rather have an electrician apprentice dig a trench in my yard for running underground wiring and, when I would have rather been helping out the irrigation guys putting in the irrigation system, I was forced by my wife to stay inside and do medical legal reports. During the time that they put in the irrigation system, I made enough money to cover the full cost of it and then some.
I’m not sure if it’s the type of young patients I see but they seem clueless about the need to find a marketable skill as their first goal on leaving school. Female students, especially, seem to be attracted to absolutely useless courses and firmly believe that getting a music degree is a good thing to do. Male students are more practical and a lot of them don’t even bother with university when they can get work at great wages in the oil sands. Presumably, at some point the female student with the useless degree will marry the male student with a trade. Another common occupation mentioned by the teenaged clueless is “teacher” – as if teaching exists in isolation and they can just get by on taking drama and film courses and will learn about “teaching” in university.
Innumeracy will prevent a lot of these students from getting into a trade. For example, saw an anorectic patient in hospital today and wouldn’t tell her her weight, but did mention that her BMI was 15.9 and that all the information on how to compute her weight was in that number and her height. BMI= wt(in kg)/height(in m)^2 — I would have expected that a senior high school student should have no difficulty in rearranging the equation and, knowing her height, calculate her weight. The only way she could think of solving this problem was to use her cell phone to google BMI in the hope that the weight of someone with her height was on the web page she found. Of course, she couldn’t figure out how to convert inches to meters or kg to pounds either and she’ll be graduating next year.
The one annoying thing about trades is the formal certification system that’s in place. I can handle most electrical work and find it very annoying that, because I’m not a licensed, electrician, my wiring is considered to be substandard. Have had lots of arguments with electricians when they run wires in walls by drilling holes in 2×4’s whereas I would staple the wire to the far end of the 2×4 to avoid weakening the beam. The basic premises of home electrical wiring is that one ensures that whatever one does lasts for 50 years or more and that appropriate wire protection (steel jacketed cable outside) and strain relief is provided as well as minimum resistance connections. That said, I’ve seen some horrendous self-done wiring jobs by people who haven’t seen the destructive effects of very high current flows in poorly located conductors.