How to manage your career for maximum $$$

There are two kinds of people:

1. Those who look for a job
2. Those who look for a talent

If you look for a job, then your entire career will be controlled by someone else: the employer. This is because no matter what job you take, the job will ALWAYS belong to the employer. He can take it away from you any time, without giving you any explanation as to why. He can just walk into you cubicle Friday at 5 PM, and tell you: "Don't bother coming in Monday."

The manly attitude is to face the truth: no matter what you own (a house, a car, a dog, whatever), the truth is that every day, from 9 to 5, your ass belongs to the employer. An employee is someone who gives up his freedom 5 days out of 7, from 9 AM to 5 PM, in exchange for security.

Many people will deny this fact (that they are slaves), and because they engage in self-denial, they will probably remain employees till they are 65 years of age. If you wake up one day, when you're 65, and you realize that you've been working like a slave all your life, then it's a little bit too late to do something about it (unless you're a descendent of Colonel Sanders and you want to start a chicken franchise).

However, the people who are intellectually honest to themselves and work hard to save money in order to launch a business of their own -- those people are already on their way to financial independence.

The trick is to begin to use other people, while offering them something in return. In international trade, they call it the comparative advantage concept: if you're good at producing service A, then exchange that service with someone who's good at producing service B. That way, you both win.

LinkedIn allows you to find people whose skills and assets complement yours. Think about it: if corporations, with all their enormous resources, need partners, we little folks need partners even more!

Bottom line: to manage your career for maximum $$$, you must think of your career as a business.

More on this later on.