Thinking Out of the Box?

The beauty of invention is that the inventor is able to look past the world he or she is in and see a vision of the future. Nothing about invention is based in the reality of the now. When you look at Einstein, the reason he is credited as being one of the greatest scientists is because he was a great thinker. He looked away from conventional understanding and wisdom and theorized. Couldn't do the math too well, but boy, could he think. As a 50-plusser, or a Gen Plusser, you know the history of Einstein.

He came up with a concept of ever-renewable, ever changing formula of the relationship between mass and energy. He envisioned the unthinkable...the black hole. Negative nothingness. And this crazy madness of creativity swirled out of him, like a dervish, in the space of four short years in his mid-twenties.

Science fiction used to be imagination of the impossible. But now, we can look at past fiction and see it converting itself into future projection. Sentient computers, for example, are going to be a thing of the future.

So when we think of job search or staff search, the roads we look to, as an industry, are fairly cut and dry. Staffing is still sitting in the 1990's and has not evolved sufficiently to keep pace with the demographic shift coming over the next 4 - 7 years. Forget thinking out of the box. We need to look at a new paradigm...a new box. Companies are already experiencing job crunches at the mid to upper management levels.

The way to filling the supply and demand of the job market and to employing 50 plussers is by looking to a new employment path. I'm going to call it personal branding. And it stems from self-confidence...a hard virtue to capitalize upon when the ego is, frankly, somewhat shattered from looking at the hard realities of a future where 50 plussers will be tapping into their savings at an unprecedented rate and far earlier than any market analysts will have antipicated.

First, we'll talk about the concept of personal branding. And then we'll start to tackle self-confidence, the mother of reinvention. Your homework until the next post: take a look at brands you know. Coke, Nike, Target, Mercedes Benz, Volvo, WalMart. See what messages come to mind when you think of them. We'll then translate that to the establishment of your personal brand.