The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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The best route for smart, capable people who find themselves in this kind of unfortunate predicament seems to be to find a job - any job, even if it’s as a receptionist or phone support or retail worker or caterer or whatever - at a medium to large sized company and then just aggressively promote yourself internally. It’s likely your years of bartending and other customer-facing work have made you relatively personable, and that’s the main ingredient. Talk to others in the business, get drinks, promote yourself as a highly ambitious and capable person, apply for any internal promotion pathways, then see if you can make a jump into a position they wouldn’t hire you in directly but might promote you into. I’ve known at least a few people who have come crazy far with this method.
I believe that you're absolutely right, and I do credit the bar gig for leveling up my social skills in relatively short order (such that my boss there remarked that it made him feel good to watch me "emerge from my shell"; I did discover that I'm actually an extrovert or at least an ambivert and genuinely enjoy talking to people instead of being afraid of them) to the point that I would heartily recommend that any young man with lousy social skills take a bar gig for six months to a year. If I had gone that route at 21 instead of 31 I suspect that I would be vastly better off, but I didn't know any better at the time. As things are, I did light prep for the interview (The first job interview where I didn't already have the job before I walked in that I've done in 10 years.) and the feedback I got was that it had been "the most impressive he'd ever heard" (So much for the "can't interview well" excuse that I told myself for years).
One of the reasons I don't see much of a future at my present company is that it's more of an overgrown small business with bad financials than a large company with limited opportunities for advancement (My current supervisor did my job for six years before she got promoted, and she really did go above and beyond. I really hope she gets the promotion she just applied for/seems to have been groomed for because she's done far more than just put in her dues. As for me, I don't have six years to waste.). I'm currently looking at manufacturing because my father did the same sort of thing in that field, I have a knack for vocational/technical stuff, and he swears up and down that industry is begging for people like me.
I'm not terribly pessimistic for my long term, but this last few months have been rough and if it makes sense I find the act of typing out my irritation to be therapeutic. Getting feedback from smart and usually successful people (You've always been one of my favorites from the old days, BTW.) is a pleasant and appreciated bonus.
If your social skills are sharp, you should just go into sales. Any kind of sales, almost certainly you have some car dealerships around you and they basically take any warm body because there are an unbelievable amount of terrible sales people. Combined with your car skills you will likely become a top performer and then have a resume to go to more successful dealerships.
If you’re motivated, a good salesman, and have the knowledge, you can certainly carve out a comfortable life and maybe even quite a lucrative one if you are aggressive and make it an end goal to get to a good dealership. Some of those Finance guys and sales directors at dealerships comfortably pull in 100-200k and oftentimes more.
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