Keep doing what you’re doing

Another piece of bad advice for Scanners is - Keep doing what you’re doing.  If we keep doing what we’re doing, it shows that we cannot adapt, and it will get old pretty quickly.

The one thing that is inevitable about life is that - THINGS CHANGE.

We Scanners cannot just keep doing the same thing and expect everything to stay the same. Life and the 21st century employment market just doesn't work that way.

Thinking like this, Keep doing what you're doing, may work in the very short-term, but the world is changing so fast that if you’re still doing the same things in the same way, then by definition you’re falling behind.This is the part I have trouble with. The bar just keeps moving higher and I am tired of always trying to play catchup.

I have discovered something about myself. I am not the kind of person who works fast. I like casual and easy going. I actually dream about getting back to a simpler life when there was no instant communication and before life sped up. I'm thinking back to the 1970s when I was a child. 

Even today in 2015, I do NOT have a cellular phone. After watching the movie, The Devil Wears Prada, I told myself that I was never ever going to become a slave to any cellular phone like Andie was to hers. A landline phone is perfectly good enough for communication.

The younger generation have grown up with all this instant communication and may well be able to adapt and change to keep their careers, but the older generation, such as myself, find it very hard to make that adjustment.

I have found that I detest being part of the corporate world, and having to dress up in "power" suits and wear high heels.  They say I have to be myself. Well dressing up in power suits and high heels, is NOT my idea of being myself!!

While I may like variety, I prefer to be dealing with the same kind of variety on a daily basis and not being hit with totally new demands every day.

Some people like routine, but if you want to reach your full potential, you have to “shake it up” and keep learning and growing.

Routine is the death of a career. Dealing with totally new jobs every day may be considered as changing, but it is happening way too fast for me.


So how to get ahead in the job market and deal with all the change?

Scanners may have to become self-employed. They can find and start their own businesses where they are in control of their careers, and can control how many clients they have and whom they do business with.

I have read of some people who find something that they can make, and they produce and sell these items as they make them. One of my favourite teenage actors of the 1980s, Michael Schoeffling, left Hollywood and now lives in Pennsylvania. He has been making and selling hand crafted furniture for the last 25 years. It seems that he chose to leave Hollywood after being typecast as a teenage heartthrob. I think he found it difficult to get more mature film roles based on that perception.

The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill had similar problems. While his cast mate Harrison Ford has been able to develop a very good movie career, including 2 record breaking movie franchises, Mark Hamill was pretty much typecast back in 1977 as Luke Skywalker and had a lot of difficulty getting mature film roles as he grew older. However he was able to adapt and change by becoming a VOICE actor. Mark now makes his living lending his voice to cartoon and animation  TV series, as well as to video games.