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A Job?

Career Prospects for people who are Different in some way or other

After watching yet another fascinating documentary about people with some interesting medical condition, and noticing the same old thing said again that the people didn't have much chance of any employment because of their disability, I realised that it was time to write this page. The thing is, I am a bit different myself, and I would be regarded as "unemployable" in conventional send-in-a-CV type ways. However, I have found a solution which may help a lot of people who are looking for gainful employment but are up against the usual problems.

Now of course I don't know what your particular condition is, and what disability you might have that makes you think you might find getting a job difficult, but the chances are you are in some way different to normal.

Well I am definitely not normal at all. In fact, I am a paranoid schizophrenic, and there are other unusual things about me. Yet, I have actually done quite well for myself, and I am wealthier than most people I know. My success didn't happen overnight, but it did happen. What I did is not for everyone, but there are key elements to what I did that may strike a chord with other people's situations. It may be that your own situation, of being different to normal, and finding career prospects difficult, may fit with what I'm about to say.

Being NORMAL is well overrated, and it's really not that clever. So it seems a bit strange than it is regarded by some companies as a pre-condition of employment. This may be one of the reasons why the world gets into a mess sometimes.

So anyway, don't try to be normal! Instead, look at what's different about yourself and then try to fit the plausible solutions around that. Even if what you have is something regarded as "a disability" the chances are there are positive and negative aspects to it. The key to success is to to choose solutions which emphasise the good things about your differences and play down the bad things. For example, if you're very tall, choose a line of business such as basketball where that's an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Even if the thing that makes you different is something that you feel is always a downside, you can at least make career choices where the disadvantages are reduced considerably, possibly to zero.

In my own case, I set up an online business. Online, you keep your own schedule rather than having to fit to rigid hours, and if you are incapacitated for a while, the online stuff continues regardless. More about this at How to Set Up and Run Your Own Business and How to Get Your Own Website. Another thing about the online world is that anything different is interesting, so you may find that whatever makes you different gives you an advantage versus the normal. Far too many websites are the same as each-other, and there's no need for that. It is the originality which gives a website the edge.

Another thing is that if you have an unusual condition, you are probably an expert in it, and your expertise may help other people who have that same condition and may intrigue the normal people who don't have it. So, if you set up a website, it will be keenly looked-at by people generally.