Millionaire & Truck Driver: A Marriage of Skills Not Status

I have a friend I met in the 80's---and for those of you losing count, that was almost thirty years ago---and he was a construction contractor for much of his life. He also owned a nightclub at one time and would tell stories of booking Flip Wilson, Tina Turner and drinking with Dean Martin. He just lost his fortune in the recession (real estate crash) and at sixty years old needed to do something else. He has been a millionaire at least twice in his life, and he recently decided to get a job as a truck driver. "I never thought I'd be in this kind of job, I used to think it was beneath me, but I needed something I could do now, on my own, and with little initial investment," he said to me. "I figure I can do this for ten years and retire if I do it the way I want to do it."

This is the new face of employment: the marriage of diverse skills as opposed to employment status seeking.

For most of us growing up, we went to school to get a higher paying job, hopefully with a fancy job title. This job title was our status in the world. "What do you do," is the American follow up to "Hello." What we did was who we were, how we judged our success and ultimately how proud we were of ourselves. Fair or not, true or not, it did not matter, that was the way we were raised.

Things in the 21st century have changed though, and fast. Corporate executives are working at Starbucks and Corporate Coaches are janitors. The new question of the century is not what CAN I do, it is what WILL I do. What am I willing to do? Underlying the willingness issue is a point of pride/esteem. What work is beneath me? This is the question that is nagging everyone these days especially those over thirty because they are still part of the old school of thought that says some jobs are "beneath me." This is a troubling, though pervasive, belief that some jobs are "too low" for me. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of this belief system because the economy has forced a huge contingent of extremely educated and trained people to take any work wherever they can.

What is problematic with the whole "that job is beneath me" kind of thinking is the extra hardship it is causing some people. The old expression is, "Pride goeth before a fall," meaning better to let go of pride before you hit the ground. Unfortunately I am watching many people hitting the (economic) ground. I am hearing stories every month of people selling their possessions on E-Bay before they will work for $12 an hour. One person, with two previous car repossessions, took her last $2,000 and bought (more like rented) a "no money down" car with monthly payments she knew she could not afford so she could look rich for a while (until it was inevitably repossessed also). The only point I am making here is that I believe for the next decade, people are going to be moving more toward matching skill levels rather than ego levels. Like the millionaire, contractor, club owner becoming a truck driver because he figured the system out, highly skilled workers, executives and degree holders will begin to see and value any employment as progress in the new hard economy. They will begin to adjust their pride levels to a new practicality---"money is money" and "I am not my job title." A culture where work ethic is more respected than job title would be a welcome change and one that is already in progress.

Before I go further, I must point out to the readers of this blog who have not yet read my book (a thought I try not to imagine) that I too have had my post graduate degree, humbling job phase so I know first hand all of the psychological issues that come with such a "fall." Believe me. But I want to end this piece with a silver lining in all of this job adjustment the nation is doing. The silver lining is profound and it goes like this: what if a majority of people "fell" from their status jobs and learned that after the loss of status, the only thing that is truly important is the people they work with and their relationship with them? What if "status" had less to do with what you did and more to do with who you are to work with? What if your focus became less about job titles and more about job relationships and how important it is to relate and support your fellow employees? I honestly believe that we as a nation are being asked by this crisis to move one more step beyond greed and power and move to the most important thing in life: Relationship. If this crisis does even a little toward moving people into work relationships with people whom they would not have previously related and allow them to find their common humanity, then from my perspective, the whole crisis would bring a "net plus" to the nation. Then, if these newly forged work relationships brought down the old walls of class/ego/status separation between people of all shapes and sizes even a little bit, then, as the song goes, "what a wonderful world it would be."