Joelle Steele's Blog - MISCELLANEOUS

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Relationships * Social Issues * Spirituality

05/10/2024: Career Choices at Any Age

There is, or should be, a lot more critical thinking and planning when it comes to career choices. It should start early on and be relied on throughout your working life. But, sadly, most people tend to drift into work that is unsuited to their personality or skill set, and that is often quite unfulfilling psychologically and financially.

Career plans need to start, at the latest, around the age of 13. Why so early? Because this is the age when the direction of a child's personality and interests are becoming pretty darn clear. They begin to talk about what they want to be when they grow up, and their interests reflect those career choices. They may even talk about wanting to go to college or to a trade school.

Most kids these days have access to the Internet, with a ton of career information at their fingertips. The best thing a parent can do at this time is to encourage their child to investigate all the options for the type of career they are considering. It would probably also help if, as a parent, you also did some research into your child's dream too.

Avoid telling your kids what they should do instead of what they want, such as "Just get a job at the factory like I did," or "You have to go to college to get a good job," or "You can't make any money in that kind of a job," etc. While you may be well-intentioned, it is your job to guide them in what they want to do, not to squelch their dream by trying to steer them in another direction. That will just result in a lot of confusion for them and will no doubt lead to parent-child conflict for years. Not to mention how miserable their lives might become with an inappropriate career choice.

This same advice applies to adults. Don't let your parents or friends crush your career plans. If  your current career is failing to meet your needs and you want a change, put on your critical thinking cap and start looking for something that will lead you in a better direction. And if you're looking at retiring and want to start a new full- or part-time career, do the same. Ongoing research into career and educational opportunities will help you make good decisions at any age.

When it comes time to look for a job in your chosen career field, research the companies that you want to work for and find out who is doing what and where they are going. This will help you determine whether you are good fit for them and vice versa. Planning to be self-employed or a freelancer? Take some business classes no matter which you choose, and be sure that you fully research the kind of work you'd like to do and the types of clients or customers available.

And when you're making career decisions, think about your personality. If you are not the most friendly and outgoing person, don't get yourself caught up in work that requires you to have a sparkling personality. Do you need to be top dog at work? Do you like a lot of attention? Do you prefer to work solo or as part of a team? Are you good at managing people? Would you rather be working all by yourself with no interruptions? Do you like the idea of a corporate environment? Are you willing to relocate to where the jobs you want are located?

On another note, remember that no two jobs with the same title have the same job description. Parents often freak out when their child says they want to be an artist or a writer. This is because they envision their beloved child starving in a garret trying to sell a novel or painting. But artists and writers come in numerous categories. For example, let's take artists. Everything that is manmade in the world was designed and created by an artist. Every. Single. Thing. No exceptions. Your car, your house, your clothes, shoes, hats, furniture, appliances, dishes, eyeglasses, lamps, musical instruments, etc., etc., etc. All designed and made by artists, some self-employed or freelance, some key employees in art departments, some working in research and development. And some industries, like entertainment, have a multitude of artists who specialize in animation, hair and make-up, costume design, set decoration, opening and closing credits, photography, cinematography, and many other artistic positions. The list of art-related jobs is enormous.

No matter how old you are, when it comes to careers (and almost everything else in life), NEVER GIVE UP. Everything takes however long it takes. Too many people give up just because they hit a few obstacles or stumbling blocks along the way. Be a critical thinker and always be looking for alternatives, slight variations in your thinking that can lead you in the right or better direction. Sometimes your career is the right one (attorney) but it's simply in the wrong field or industry for you (criminal law). Sometimes you're in the right field (law enforcement) but in the wrong career (detective).

Don't assume that you will jump into your new career with a six-figure salary. It so often appears that someone was an overnight success. But if you read up on their success story, you'll find that they usually started their careers long before they achieved success. In fact, many started as adolescents and teenagers.

Don't let age stop you from pursuing your dream. I know many people who successfully changed careers, sometimes after returning to college late in life, at 50 or 60 or older. Schools and colleges welcome people of all ages these days. My friend Diane finished three years of college before she got married and had three kids. When her youngest was 10, she was working full-time as a secretary at a shipping company. But she had always wanted to be a lawyer, so she started taking night classes. At 37 she graduated with a Bachelor's degree, entered law school, graduated at age 44, and went to work as a law clerk. One year later, she passed the bar. She is now 56, loves her work, and is in private practice.

Anyone can be successful, at any age, in the dream career of their choice.

04/17/2023: Get Organized and Get Things Done

If a task is once begun
Never leave it til it's done.
Be the labor great or small
Do it well or not at all.

That's what my mother used to say. She been gone for almost 40 years, and I still live by those words. I've been a freelancer since 1975, and I've been a home-based business since 1983. I don't know if it's because I grew up in a home-based business or if it's just that I like working where I live, but either way, I love working at home. I've worked many different temp and part-time jobs, many from home, but for me, I'm most productive and most satisfied with the home work environment.

The things that have helped me most in business – home business in particular – are my basic personality traits. I'm self-motivated, self-disciplined, reliable, goal-directed, adaptable, flexible, persistent, and open to change, growth, and progress. I have read many books and attended various presentations on how to set goals, evaluate goals, revise goals, and achieve goals. I have always been very good at making plans and carrying them out, and every year I take some time to look at my plans and revise them as needed. I have a "master" plan or set of goals, and then a bunch of smaller goals and plans to keep myself focused on achieving the bigger goals.

When it comes to applying all of this, my persistence generally pays off because I don't give up. If something isn't working the way I want it to, I just try doing it another way. And I keep on trying until I get it right. And I always try to keep up with what's going on in the world as it relates to my work. I love to work and I want to work in the best way that I can so that I get the most enjoyment out of what I do. If I fail at something, I just see it as a learning lesson and move on from there, looking at what went wrong, how to fix it and not repeat it, re-adjusting my goals, and tweaking my plans until I'm back on track.

Do I ever give up? Sure do. But not on a whim. If I give up on doing a particular thing, there's got to be a really good reason. For example, I have had a couple of book projects I abandoned because they just weren't developing quite the way I had envisioned, and after much careful and intense consideration and evaluation of each book, I determined that my original idea and plan were flawed or ill-conceived in some way and that nothing I could do would fix the problem, at least not to my satisfaction.

I also give up on some things if I'm no longer interested in them, or the world is not interested in them, or my better judgment says I simply should not do them. With the latter, I have done this with certain services I used to provide such as property management and landscape design. I love landscape design, but I have had a few accidents over the years that left me with some mobility issues that became major mobility issues whenever I was out tramping around on my clients' rocky hillside properties here in Washington state. So, that was it for landscape design.

I embrace change and progress, especially in technology. When I can find a new device or piece of software that helps me do things more efficiently, I get it and learn to use it. I depend heavily on my computer, so I make sure I have the best system to run my software, and then I keep my essential software upgraded. I stay away from gadgets that do clever things but don't help me in any way. I maintain my computer and my peripherals (scanner, printer, etc.), and I use the best virus control, keep my files very organized, back up some files daily and everything once a week, no exceptions. I also run a paperless office, scanning everything and then storing it in files on the computer. I also started paying my bills online in 1998, and that's a real time-saver.

I'm also very reliable. I always deliver. I meet my own deadlines and those of my clients. I do what I say I'm going to do. This has allowed me to get repeat business and keep clients for many years. As for my own projects, I may experience occasional delays, but I always finish them. For example, I'm a year behind with writing one of my books, but in my defense, I wrote three other books during that same year.

My friends and clients have described me as productive and industrious. My friend Patrick calls me "a one-woman factory," because I do and create so many things. People often ask me how I find time to do all those things, and the answer is that I'm very organized and I don't do anything that's a waste of my time. I keep my office and desk very clean and neat, no cluttery distractions.

When I was self-employed in Venice Beach, I had a great assistant, a partner for one business, and as many as 35 employees. That is one way to get lots of things done. But on my own, I'm still very productive. I manage to be so productive because I've learned the most efficient ways to work. To begin with, I prioritize my personal and business activities. I do a lot of things, so I keep a detailed "to do" list, and I pick and choose from that list what I want and need to do, and I then put things in a detailed daily calendar which also includes my appointments, activities with family and friends, and the regular tasks I need to do each day or each week, such as laundry and checking the post office box. I also put reminders in my calendar about what projects I should be working on, whether it's social media marketing or research for a book or writing a book or doing a cover design, etc. That way, I always know what to do.

I also don't waste time, not even a half-hour here and there. The way I see things, every person has a limited amount of time to spend on this earth, and I want to make the best of whatever time I have, so I don't want to spend it doing nothing, idling away my days or even my minutes. For example, if I have fifteen minutes to spare before I leave to have lunch with someone or to go to the dentist, I sit down at the computer and I work for those fifteen minutes or I clean the kitchen sink or the stove top or do some other things that only takes fifteen minutes. This is not to say that I don't do anything but work. I like to read, watch movies, garden, hike, etc. I have time to do those things because I don't waste time doing my work.

I also set realistic goals for what I can achieve during a specific period of time. I don't try to tackle every chore in one day or even in one weekend. At best, that leads to procrastination. If I need to do a lot of work in my yard, I don't save it all up for one day. I do one little thing every day or one little part of the yard every day. That's how I approach house cleaning too. I hate to clean house, but if I just do one little thing every day, it all gets done and I don't feel overwhelmed by it. I also do the same when I'm dealing with upgrades or fixes to my websites, or working on a book. Do a little every day.

Lastly, I don't waste time by running errands every day. Instead, I run them once a week, and on that day, I go to all the places I need to go and do all the things I need to do. I usually make any appointments first thing in the morning so that when the last appointment is done, I run all my other errands, the grocery store being the last one, and I always shop with a list since I don't like shopping for anything. And I don't procrastinate. Do it now is my motto. Don't put off until tomorrow that which you can do today. You will always regret it if you let things pile up. And think of all the things you've always wanted to do. Organize your life and you will be able to do whatever you want to do.

04/17/2023: Who Writes Today's Software Programs?

Yes, I really do want to know. Who writes the software programs that I use daily? Word, Outlook, QuarkXPress, WordPress, etc. These all appear to be written by people who never use these programs regularly.

Maybe they just don't care that their programs are such time-wasters due to poor design. These are expensive programs that companies "upgrade" regularly without improving them. In fact, some of them are upgraded and made even more difficult or inefficient to use. If these software designers used these programs, they would know this. But, apparently they don't, or they don't care.

I am a one-person business. I'm not a programmer. I'm a user. Every time that I am forced to upgrade because a software manufacturer is no longer going to support the version I have, several things happen, usually simultaneously:

1) Some of my other software stops working correctly, even though it ran seamlessly with the new software and both are current versions. A trip to my computer consultant found more than two dozen cases where the new program overwrote files in my other programs. Had to uninstall everything and start from scratch.

2) Things that I don't want, don't need, don't have room for, etc., get installed without giving me an option to not install them, and now, no matter how hard I try, I can't uninstall them. As a result, I have had to re-set all of my preferences in four programs.

3) My older work files and research files stop opening when I need them, or I get a message saying they can't be opened because there is an error or the file is corrupt. Really? It's not MY error since they opened just fine multiple times before, most only a few days before installing the upgrades.

4) I have to waste my time re-learning where everything is in the upgrade because they have moved everything around – for no apparent reason. This can be anything from putting items in different menus or taking them out of the navigation menu altogether and putting them somewhere else entirely on the page, or making them really tiny and cramped together so that accessing them is difficult and slow.

5) The display of files is changed in Word and Outlook so that it's bigger and two lines, taking up too much room, and I had to re-do the preferences to access the files through file explorer instead, and that doesn't really work fully anyway.

6) When I first started my own website in 1992, it took me two weeks to become fluent in HTML code. Easy to learn. Since then I've used many web design programs, the latest being Adobe Dreamweaver, and they are all very similar. Easy to switch from one to another effortlessly. But I used WordPress for almost three years, and it is the worst software ever. I had to hire someone to help me. I want my programs on my computer. I hate working online. WordPress lacks a fluent structure such as an easy-to-use drop-down menu system. No spell checker other than a line under a misspelled word. No search/find/replace function. Difficulty placing images where you really want them to be. Access to HTML code but no split screen to see design and code side-by-side. A design view that looks nothing at all like the published page. And there are sooooo many other issues with this program.

7) I don't want Windows updates and upgrades. I check the box saying to not update/upgrade me. But it doesn't work. I can't opt out no matter how hard I try. Every time there is an upgrade, all my other software slows down or stops working.

8) I don't want to be forced to "subscribe" to a program just so that the company can make more money. Just stop forcing me to buy this and subscribe to that and update this and upgrade that. I was perfectly content with how my software worked and I want it left alone.

I love my work, but having to work with poorly designed software is really spoiling it for me big time. After all, I do have a life outside of my work, and I'd like to be able to live it rather than having to waste my time spending 30 minutes doing something that shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. Add to that having to pay someone to waste that 25 minutes to help me.

And now, as if things aren't bad enough, software companies now want to sell you their software yearly and you have to use it online. Slow? I have super fast Internet, and I have two of these types of programs and they are so slow that I am now shopping for something better that is installed on my computer and nowhere else that they can update it without first asking me.

So again, I ask, who is writing today's software? It's time they started consulting with people like me who actually use their software before they pawn it off on new users who think things really should take that long to do.

07/07/2022: My Clothes Don't Fit!

I am 6' tall. I was already 5'8" when I was in the 7th grade. My niece and several of my cousins are also tall. We know what it's like to be a taller than average woman. I personally know what a miserable experience it is to shop for clothes that fit. I am also overweight, so when I say I have a hard time finding clothes that fit, everyone assumes I just need to shop at stores that cater to large women. But I'm actually not that large. In fact, large is never the problem. It's being tall that's the problem. It's length that's the problem. Body, legs, and sleeves.

I have never in my life had a blouse, shirt, jacket, sweater, dress, skirt, or pants that were long enough. Women's tall sizes are a joke. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at clothes in catalogs, online, and in stores and found nothing that's long enough. And it's not just pants. (And speaking of pants, the idea that "5'7" and over" is a tall size is truly laughable.) What about body length? What about sleeve length? Do women's clothing manufacturers think tall women are just short women with extra long legs? Even bras are a hard fit for me because the straps – even the elastic ones – are never long enough. Why is it that men's clothing manufacturers manage to make things in variable lengths, but womens clothing manufacturers don't even try to? If nothing else, couldn't they make clothes with bigger hems so that there would be something to let out?

The world is filled with women of all sizes and dimensions. Surely clothing manufacturers could do a better job of making clothes for the ever-increasing sizes in height and weight of women, and for our various dimensions. I don't like to sew, can't afford to have someone sew for me, and I'm tired of always having to buy men's cotton turtlenecks in boring white or black because that's the only way I can get sleeves that are long enough. Ditto men's sweaters and shirts.

I see all these cute clothes in catalogs that don't carry tall sizes and wish I could wear them. And I see cute clothes in catalogs in tall sizes, and wish I could wear them too. And on an added note, the quality of fabrics and workmanship could stand some improvement too.