Today Pamela Slim over at Escape from Cubicle Nation wrote a very important piece saying “There must have been a few surprised Intel employees amidst the cuts”. She is of course right, but I’d like to go one step further and bet that there were many more employees sitting around fretting about the upcoming layoffs too paralyzed to do a damn thing about it except complain.

To anyone sitting in a cubicle and bemoaning the inevitable, sweating about your incredible debt or the family you need to support, and desperately complaining about your situation to anyone that will listen, stop now. Breathe. I’ve met people in your situation many times before and it’s getting rather predictable. What happens to a deer stuck in headlights? It gets hit by a truck because they don’t move out of the way. You’re doing the same thing, except that you’re going to get hit by depression and creditors who have suddenly lost faith in you. Let’s change that!

I have some wonderful news for you, if you are willing to believe and accept it. It is possible to avoid the truck and even end up in a better position in life as a result of this kind of major upheavel. Since the dawn of time every way of life that humanity has ever experienced, be it prehistoric cavemen society, or the capitalism that Intel’s employees are living in, has had a set of rules that must be accepted. These are simple rules that decide “how things work”. They explain why your friend with 2 years of college is halfway towards being a millionaire while your four years at a highly respected university haven’t helped you avoid being tens of thousands of dollars of debt and no retirement savings to speak of (hint: your college friend read a book or two on personal finance). Unfortunately these rules aren’t sitting on an altar in a temple somewhere, and they sure aren’t neatly summarized in a book at the public library. You must discover the rules one by one through critical analysis of the world around you and then determine how to use them to your advantage.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you high and dry here with a vague explanation of some magic rules that you need. I am going to spell out a few particularly relevant ones for you right here, from the set of rules that determine financial success:

1) At best an employee is a contractor whose taxes are deducted for him or her, and for whom the contract termination date is not explicitely set. It is not disloyal for either side to choose to terminate the employment at a time when it is no longer the best option.

2) Those who rely on a single source of income are the financial version of Evel Knievel. It’s simply inevitable that something will go wrong and not all daredevils are nearly as lucky as Knievel (if you can count forty broken bones as lucky). Having money saved and creating multiple income streams will isolate you from the damage caused by losing an income stream (ie your job).

3) Those that get ahead do so through networking. Building and leveraging a diverse network of people allows incredible opportunity and shortcuts to success. Those Intel employees who have a network to leverage are going to find new jobs quickly with higher pay and a fresh set of challenges.

4) Change is an accelerating mechanism. It brings about tremendous opportunity if you welcome it and terrible hardships if you try to avoid it. As time moves forward it will only occur faster and faster, and it’s a no-brainer as to which side you wish to be on when it happens.

5) The most profitable paths are not well-traveled and the best opportunities require effort to uncover.

The trick is now taking these rules and making them work for you. If you choose to live in denial and refuse ideas such as employment not being permanent you will ironically be the first one out on the street. Accept that what you are doing now won’t necessarily be what you are doing several years from now. Welcome changes and you will find that they are often opportunities that allow you to leap-frog into higher positions much sooner and with far greater ease than by working away in your current post. Companies hire many people into senior level positions from outside the company for the wealth of outside experience that this brings in.

If layoffs are looming over your head now then it’s more imperitive than ever that you get yourself in a position that will allow you to move on and succeed further. Now is not the time to freeze in the headlights and hope for the best. Start looking for another job and leverage your network when doing so. Start putting away money immediately and reduce or eliminate unnecessary expenses. Seek out credit before you can no longer state in good faith that you are employed. Ask yourself honestly what you wish your next move to be if you are laid off. Most importantly internalize within yourself that this is an opportunity not a disaster. Your mind has a way of synchronizing your reality with your vision and I’m perfectly serious when I state that if you envision success and put yourself on a path of being 100% irrefutable certainity that you will succeed then you will do so. The reverse is true too so you will no longer complain about your situation and how the axe is sure to doom you.

If rumours of layoffs are not around that is no excuse for getting comfortable and expecting your job to last forever. Get your personal finances and your goals together. Save money every month and don’t take on what I call “living outside your means” debt. You will lose most of your money this way and be hanging on a precarious ledge when life takes a downturn. You’ll sit there blaming the economy, but it’s actually your own preparation that will have made or broken you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under Achievement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.