Alternative Employment
New Career Strategies for Rural New Brunswick & Ideas to Create a New Prosperity
Wishing You a Happy & Prosperous New Year! Now there’s a season’s greetings that we hear often – but what does it mean in 2014?
PROSPERITY as we have been conditioned to think, is usually synonymous to financial security and monetary wealth. That’s how the dictionaries define it, and that’s how we usually mean it. I’m not going to deny that life is easier when we are not struggling day-to-day for lack of money. But is money the basis of how we define richness of life? Is money the key to a meaningful life?
Globally and locally, people are rejecting the idea that PROSPERITY = MONEY.
On December 11, I attended a workshop on Alternative Employment where the presenter, Catherine Chambers, spoke about the New Prosperity. And she wasn’t talking about the gold/copper mining project in BC which bears this name. Ironically, The New Prosperity which Catherine speaks about is something as opposite as you can get to a mega-mining project.
Unlike the status quo meaning of prosperity, New Prosperity is not so clearly defined. It’s an aching, a yearning – that people around the globe are experiencing – as a response to the realization that living just for accumulation money is impoverishing us. The drive to ‘be prosperous’ has left us morally, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually bankrupt. And with all this malaise, we are getting physically sick – new diseases and chronic ailments are popping up all the time. Could it be that we are just getting ‘sick’ of the way things are??
Catherine started her workshop by saying that we are in a “Creativity Crises”. She said that as we transcend our way out of the Industrial Age, “intellect” is the currency for economic reform. And she wasn’t talking about academic intellect. Creative intelligence is the driver to the New Prosperity and a new kind of entrepreneurship is emerging. One that that is based on collaboration, fairness and something called STEEP factors, which I will explain further in a future article. For now though, I will say that I shared the example of Joe Gee’s Tomlinson’s Lake Hike to Freedom and Catherine said this concept scores very high on the STEEP analysis.
Throughout the day, Catherine made references to: Socialnomics (Erik Qualum), Work 3.0 (Gary Swart), Groupon (fastest growing company in the history of business), DIY movement (Do-It-Yourself), The Tyranny of the “Ors” and the Genius of the “Ands” (Jim Collins), The New Domesticity (Emily Matchar), The Necessary Revolution (Peter Senge), Crowdfunding, Social and Micro Enterprises – to name just the ones that I noted. You can google any of these references and you will see that things are not ‘business as usual’. They haven’t been for quite some time – it takes a decade or two for paradigm shifts to gain traction.
People want a change from corporatism, government corruption and obscene consumerism. They want meaning in their lives and they aren’t waiting around for directions from the top.
The New Prosperity movement is based on taking off the shackles of our individual and collective creativity and rebooting our entrepreneurial spirit. The Alternative Employment that Catherine talks about involves the use of technology (we are in the Information Age, after all) and how technology supports the agenda for a New Economy.
And we are choosing it. The Shop Local campaign is getting stronger all the time. People are making conscious choices to curb their spending at BoxStores in favor of supporting local businesses, artisans, community events, etc. It’s not new, it just went dormant for the past 30- 40 years. Shopping locally is all the previous generations ever did up until about the 1970’s.
The New Prosperity requires that people have integrity. Even now, people are less inclined give accolades to the businessman/woman whose ‘success’ has been built on exploitation and abuse of people, the environment and resources (i.e tax dollars). I personally have collided with corporate fraternity mobs and their only explanation to their aggressive posturing to overpower me was, “It’s not personal, it’s just business”. Those kinds of bullying behaviours in the name of doing business will become as socially and morally unacceptable as throwing a bag of trash out of your car onto the highway. And these bullies will eventually lose their power as their revenue dries up because people just won’t support trashy business practices. It’s just too embarrassing and too conflicting to be supporting or associating with someone like that, regardless of their status in society or the monetary wealth they display.
The savvy business person in the not-so-distant future will be those who compete for integrity. And they better be genuine and good at practicing it. Social media is a powerful tool in exposing the ‘bad apples’.
The crumbling of Industrial Age systems and beliefs is going to be pure hell for some. We have gotten pretty used to having others do the thinking for us – even when we know it doesn’t make sense. At long last, the creative, “outside the box” thinkers will have their place in this changing world. According to Catherine, quick and creative thinkers are in BIG DEMAND on a global scale.
In the next issue of Blackfly, I will talk about 8 specific areas of Alternative Occupations which Catherine identified as being relevant for job seekers. The good news is that these occupations do not require post secondary education. As you will see, certain skill sets are very much in demand and lots of people are having success applying these skills in an entrepreneurial way. And that’s the point behind the New Prosperity: supporting yourself in a way that’s aligned with your interests, skills and values. It may mean less money but the payoff is having more meaning and contentment in your life.
The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension. ~ Peter Senge
“The old economy of greed and dominion is dying. A new economy of life and partnership is struggling to be born. The outcome is ours to choose”. ~ David Korten
Prosperity, like love, is not a ‘thing’ that can be measured; it is an experience that can only be personally declared. ~ James Collister
