As an educator, speaker and business owner, I have spent my entire career helping thousands around the U.S. and Canada to change their thinking and to become entrepreneurs. And I strongly believe that there is in fact a better way to succeed in making a living and making a life.
The career landscape has changed dramatically, and many are still working in a model that is completely out of date. What worked for previous generations just isn’t working very well for anyone in the workforce whether they are close to retirement or just entering the job market.
Today we will explore three important questions:
- What’s really going on in the workplace today?
- In this new economy, is it better to become an entrepreneur, or is it really safer to work for someone else?
- If a person decides to become an entrepreneur, and start their own business, how can they do it without taking on massive risk?
To answer these questions we have consulted some of the most knowledgeable experts and thought leaders in the field of entrepreneurship such as:
Les Brown (Entrepreneur, motivational speaker, author)
Paul Zane Pilzer (Economic advisor for both Reagan and Clinton)
Robert Kiyosaki (Author, Entrepreneur)
Susan Sly (Entrepreneur and Author)
Harry S. Dent (Economist, Author)
Dr. O.C. Ferrell (Prof. Economics University of New Mexico)
Chris Brogan (Journalist, Author, Marketing Consultant)
Ali Brown (Entrepreneur)
Brian Tracy (Entrepreneur and Author)
John Assaraf (Entrepreneur, Life Coach)
Richard Brooke (Entrepreneur, Author)
Sandra Yancey (CEO/Founder, EWomenNetwork)
Bob Proctor (Entrepreneur, Motivational speaker Author)
Kim Kiyosaki (Entrepreneur, Author)
Mark Victor Hansen (Entrepreneur and author)
Cody Bates (Entrepreneur)
Jack Canfield (Entrepreneur and author)
My intention is to give you new information to allow you to make better choices that are not limited by an outdated model, as we all navigate this thing called the New Economy.
So let’s start with question number one: What’s really going on in our working world today?
Let’s look at unemployment. 30-40% of Americans are not working. But if you’ve been unemployed for more than six months, the government removes you from the unemployed list and pretends that you’ve dropped out of the labor force, according to Paul Zane Pilzer in a 2014 interview.
Pilzer has served as economic adviser to two US presidents and is a well-regarded economist and author. Pilzer stated, “I’ve often said that unemployment particularly structural unemployment, that’s unemployment due to technological changes, is the first sign of economical growth.
‘Think of it this way…there are ten people living on an island. They go out every day and fish. One day new technology shows up, a missionary brings them a net. Now using the net, one pilots the boat one throws the net—two fishermen can do all of the work that ten used to. That’s a 500% increase in productivity in one day—two doing the work of ten.
‘Now the island has a big problem. 80% unemployment, but the island still has all the wealth of the fish because the two people produce as much fish as 10 did. Of course looking back through history, these changes use to take hundreds or thousands of years and during that time we went into farming, and transportation some of us became doctors and some teachers or lawyers and we developed all of these new professions and new manufacturing jobs.
Today these changes are occurring literally in one day, when a new technological advance occurs, and we don’t have the social structures to deal with it or the ability to retrain all the unemployed people.”
On a global basis, everything is being turned upside down because of the rapidly advancing technologies. These new technologies while improving some things, are leading to the elimination of many jobs and consequently large numbers of unemployed who are not prepared for the new advanced technology jobs that now exist. And any training of new jobs will not happen in a university or college—their just too slow.
Robert KIyosaki, Author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, stated, “The idea of job security in the information age has been obsolete for ten years, but it is still taught in our school system and that is where the problem starts. There is not real-time financial education in our schools and people are still trained to be employees and work for that paycheck.
‘Middle class income has been in steady decline since the 1980’s, and all the while, parents are still telling their kids to go to school and get a job—it literally makes no sense.
‘As middle class incomes continue to decline, what happens to those people who are dropping out of the middle class? They are now re-labeled the “working poor.”
‘We are told that poverty in on the decline. Be that as it may, at the same time the number of the working poor is rising, people who are working fulltime but still on food stamps, those numbers are going up.”
If you’re going to control your future, you won’t be using an old method such as the 40/40 plan. The idea of graduating from college, finding a career with one or two companies and working 40 hours a week over 40 years—that day is over.
Some people say that if they can’t find a job, they should just go back to school to get even more qualifications, another outmoded approach. These perpetual students simply end up going several more years unemployed with not work experience and expanding their already choking student debt. By the way, national student loan debt has now exceeds $1 trillion.
As I mentioned earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau data shows that in actual purchasing power, wages of college graduates have been decreasing for the past ten years.
The average person, who has been working a lifetime in America today, is ending their working career with an average of $41,000 in assets. We’ve literally created a system where people earn just enough to survive while they are working. So, what happens when they’re done working? What happens during retirement?