Free Fire Your Boss by Stephen M. Pollan, Mark Levine Page A

I believe almost everyone should take. That’s what I mean by killing your career and getting a job instead. Rather than viewing your work as a career — something you do for power, for respect, for security, to travel, to serve, to meet people, or to express yourself — you should view your work as a job: something you do for the money. This doesn’t mean quitting your current position tomorrow. It’s an attitude adjustment that may or may not lead to a change in employment. That remains to be seen after we go through the remaining steps in this book. For now it means changing your orientation toward work from the aesthetic to the mercantile.
    Far from asking you to reject your higher calling, I’m doing my best to help you achieve it. You haven’t achieved it yet, have you? Despite your stated goal of, say, working for others’ respect, you don’t feel like you’ve got it yet, do you? I didn’t think so. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. You picked this book up for the same reason people come to see me in my office: you’re unhappy with your work life. Well, by working for the money you’ll become much happier. Let me explain.
    There are different ways other than work to achieve every one of the other goals we’ve discussed. It’s easier to satisfy your need for service by spending time feeding the hungry at a soup kitchen, for example, than by trying to find a job that somehow helps the hungry. The mercantile aspect of the job will, by its very nature, impinge on the spiritual element of feeding the hungry. Let’s say you’re working at a social service agency. You’ll need to deal with the politics inherent in any organization. Depending on your position you’ll need to negotiate pay raises for yourself from superiors, deal with the petty squabbles among coworkers, train and discipline subordinates, fight to get resources for your department, go out and solicit funds, and perhaps even deal with insurance companies or local governments. If, on the other hand, you volunteer at the soup kitchen run by the agency, all you need to do is feed the hungry. You’ll be able to experience firsthand the satisfaction of feeding the hungry, see the joy your work is bringing to poor children, and return home at the end of your time there feeling justifiably good about yourself and your contribution to society.
    The same is true for every other reason you may have given for working. There is probably a more efficient way of achieving your goal, one that, in fact, guarantees you’ll achieve it. In some cases there might be many other ways of achieving your goal. You can express yourself by acting in community theater, for instance, rather than trying to make it as a professional actor. You can meet people by going to church, or joining organizations, rather than just at the office or plant.
    Work, on the other hand, is the single best way to earn money. That is its designated purpose. Ask work to do more and you court disappointment. Sure, there are ways other than work to earn money: you can inherit it, or you can have so much money saved and invested that you can live off unearned income. But relying on inheritance isn’t a very good idea. Despite some predictions in the early 1990s, it’s unlikely we’ll see a huge transfer of wealth between generations. (See the box above: The Inheritance Myth.) And if you’re reading this book you’re almost certainly not independently wealthy.
    THE INHERITANCE MYTH
Forget those fantasies about inheriting big bucks from your folks. In the early 1990s an academic study suggested that the baby-boom generation would receive the largest inheritance in history — almost $10 trillion — and that this money would impact a very broad segment of American society. The news spread like wildfire. I had clients come to me for help with inheritance planning…even though their parents were alive and well. However, the idea of widespread patrimony is a myth. The numbers were