Tell that to the billions of people who have died, period.
That’s more about paying cash vs. financing than used vs. new. If you finance a used car, you’ll still have to carry full insurance and if you pay cash for a new car you don’t.
There’s no question driving an older jalopy is the most cost-effective car ownership strategy, but assuming for whatever reason you want to be driving something newer the conventional wisdom in many circles is that buying a 2-3 year old used car instead of a new one is always the smart move.
(And actually, at least at my bank you can carry higher deductibles for new car loans than you can for used car loans, so the insurance would actually be cheaper on a new car than a slightly-used one.)
I would never finance a car purchase anyway so that’s not a consideration.
But if I had put down $25K on a car I would be taking a much bigger risk in driving around without comprehensive insurance than if I put down $6K for a used one. I’m a lot more comfortable taking the lower level of risk than the higher one.
Dress for the job you want, not for the job you have…
That’s just stupid.
I’d love to have a job where I wear bowling shirts and loose khakis some days and steampunk on others, but if that’s against the dress code, I should probably lean a little side on the employer’s.
Well, okay, but then the bit of conventional wisdom you’re upholding there is that it’s cheaper to drive an older car than a newer car. No arguments there. But the used vs. new thing is less clear cut when you are looking at newer used cars, which is the point I was making.
Well, I think that advice always meant “More formal, not less.”
I’m not sure even that is true. I just purchased a new car in December after spending a little over a month* looking at used vehicles. My new car was a scant 3k more than the 3 year old used model. Throw in essentialy no maintenance costs and I’m way ahead, with similar cost to insure. Others MMV.
- I don’t have to drive much.
As for the “do what you love” statement. I find that people who are cynical towards this philosophy seem to be locked into jobs they hate.
When people say that, they don’t mean try and find a job doing nothing. They mean try and find a job that leverages things you like doing (or at least avoids things you don’t like doing). If you like chatting with strangers, sales might be a good calling. Crunching numbers, accounting or engineering might be for you. I have an artistic friend who owns his own design firm.
I take if you’ve never seen a hockey game?
I think they mean you should dress like your boss does. It’s still silly advice since at most places of employment, people either tend to have the same dress code regardless of role, or they wear role specific attire where it would not be appropriate for you to deviate from.
I personally hate this expression. I mean what kind of bullshit job does someone do where they can “fake it”? How about actually train, study and prepare to do your job correctly?
My problem is that “love” is such an embellished term. There are a ton of things that people like to do, and only a few that they truly love to do. I’m concerned that a kid who only hears about the importance of love will come to believe that it’s a requirement for a sustainable career and a happy life.
(Not to mention…a person can love something and be very bad at it.)
A friend of the family once got incredibly angry at me when I told him I wasn’t passionate about my line of work. It’s like he couldn’t understand that not being passionate does NOT mean apathetic. I enjoy my work just fine. I like most of what I do. But I’m not in love with it. “Love” is what I do voluntarily in my spare time, not what I get paid for. If someone offered me enough money to retire today, I would do so in a hot minute.
I’m cynical about that philosophy and I have a job that is really great! I enjoy and like the work I do, but I must say that I don’t love it. I consider something I love to be something I’d do even if I didn’t get paid for it, and my job as an engineer definitely doesn’t fall in that category. But I’d never throw it over for music or jewelry-making (both hobbies I love that I don’t get paid to do, or at least only break even on).
The Golden Rule.
It only works at the most basic of levels. Personal experience shows that for most practical purposes, other people do not want to be treated the same way that I do.
Regarding career, work, etc. I tell my kids they should always do what they love… on the weekends.
One of my friends is a great example. He plays guitar in a small smoky bar on weekends and is having a blast in his little band. After he finishes a gig, he starts his Porsche and drives home to his big house in the burbs to relax in the pool. M-F he works for the man as a dept manager. Weekends he’s on stage performing. AFAICT, he plays guitar as well as any of the local musicians trying to “make it”, but doesn’t have to worry about rent or health care.
I love the joke that I read that said something like “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, they said. Now I’m sitting in HR for my exit interview dressed like Batman”
Plus, assuming the job you want is management and there’s a distinct dress difference, you tend to look like a massive tool to your co-workers if you dress like the managers and not like them. You’re making a point to show that you’re not one of the team. Management may like that, but generally speaking, it can be a douchebag move.
Do well in school, go to college, and work hard, and there will be no limit to your earning potential and the amount of impact you can have on the lives around you.
No such luck.
I think this adage has a lot of truth to it. Though it’s probably more true of a business setting rather than a job setting.
Suppose you’re setting out to start some new business or hoping to pull off some big business deal. You will have much more success at convincing potential partners, lenders, investors and so on to go along with you if you can project an image of success and competance, even if to this point you’ve not been very successful or accomplished much at all. And if you can pull off that image, then you have a much better chance of actually making it, in that your deal or business will be more likely to actually be a success.
And the same also holds true, if to a lesser extent, in a job progression situation. Training, studying and preparing are all great, but if in addition you can manage to project an image of being even better trained, more knowledgeable, and better prepared than you actually are, you will have a much better chance of being promoted to the next level than the guy who is completely relying on knowledge and training alone.
Dating advice “Just be yourself”. Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Man, that’s a good one. Wish I’d known they were pulling my leg then…
My mother used to tell me “be nice to everyone and they will be equally nice to you.” Except NOT. I spent the first few years of my working life trying to be ultra nice to everyone and got manipulated, abused (in the overworked sense), mistreated, and disrespected and people made the assumption that I was happy as a clam with my little entry level job and wouldn’t welcome any advancement opportunities. My mom had done her insidious work so well that I had to quit that job and start over elsewhere after getting a little tough love from a career counselor.
But the thing is, if you only do what you love half-assed, you’re never going to get amazing at it, or anything like as amazing as you could have been. Practice matters. Talent and craft have to be honed, and that takes time.
I love to teach. I am an excellent teacher. It gives me satisfaction and purpose and actualization. I just can’t imagine I could get that same sort of bone-deep satisfaction that I like who I am were I just teaching ESL classes on the weekend.
Now, I’m fortunate that what I love is something that can at least keep me in the middle-middle class. But I’m intelligent enough, hard-working enough that I feel pretty confident that I could have been successful in fields where people are part of the upper-middle class. But for me, this was a reasonable trade-off.
I do understand that not everyone cn be a rock star. But I work with a bitter old teacher who actively discourages every kid who approaches him from even considering teaching as a career, including some kids who really seem to have a passion. He tells them not to worry about what they love, find a job they can stand that will pay really well. And I gotta tell you, that conventional wisdom doesn’t sit well with me, either.
There’s three ways I see this as being true:
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People often want to hire someone who has experience doing a job, which can make it hard to break into that particular field. Waiting tables might be an example of this. If you’re reasonably intelligent, though, you can pick up the particulars of the system quickly. You might exaggerate your abilities (okay, lie about your experience) up front, trusting that you’ll be able to figure things out on the way.
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In other fields, such as teaching, the training you get doesn’t generally prepare you for the reality of everyday work. In this case, you’re going to be in front of a classroom not knowing what to do in a lot of situations. You improvise–but it may be very unwise to let students know you’re improvising, since that can, with some students, make classroom management difficult. You fake confidence and savvy until you can develop them.
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I tell students to fake it till they make it sometimes. They come in in the morning grumpy and tired and not wanting to work. “Look at me,” I say, with a bright cheery smile. “Do I look tired? No? Well, I am. But I’m smiling and working hard anyway, because I know that the best way to get myself into the swing of things is to pretend that I’m not grumpy and tired. Try it: even though you’re feeling grumpy and tired, pretend you’re not, and you’ll end up feeling better and getting more done.”