"I think you just better start sniffing your own rank subjugation, Jack" (unknown source, quoted in "Knocking on Heaven's Door", as performed by Guns and Roses)

"I am Jack's rank subjugation" (nonexistent cut of Fight Club)

The rest of your life

There are a lot of clear facts about the "job marketplace" in modern cities, and in most cases it is safe to say that you are currently being pushed around by employers who want to keep you guessing and keep you clinging on to a situation of being underpaid and overworked and told that you will be "paid back" in kind, in time, when "things are better" - with promotions, higher salary - and the whole time you are saying "I'm clocking up cv points" - well, be unblind - you are totally screwed.

There's 100s of MILLIONS of people being treated like you, and 80% of them will stay like this for their whole life now - they will be deprived for the next 30 to 50 years, so you need to listen to me and follow my advice on using firm, assertive and importantly, powerful, tactics to force your way into a high salary - if you MUST work for the ratrace, if you MUST be someone else's worker, don't take any rubbish - it's about the money. Vanity and all the other things they try and use, and feed, should be dropped. Negotiate for fair pay or quit your job - do not be a walkover!

First, sales people

Despite being a mathematician, software developer and most of the time now server administrator/engineer, I have a very strong bond with all sales people since the only jobs, as someone from a non-mainstream race without an education in football, that I can get are sales jobs, and that's the kind of work I've done my whole life, so therefore on a personal note I want to start with sales people and offer advice for sales people to make it through this difficult time when their targets are the toughest, the generosity of their employers at its lowest ebb and insecurity and fear of job loss at their absolute all time highest.

Most of the people I ever got to know very closely in the last decade have been sales people, since I am one, and generally those I get on with most are people like me. Such people are often incredibly sensitive, very passionate and overwhelmingly the OPPOSITE of the 'stereotype' (with very little real connection to reality) since in fact these days most sales people working in offices or similar outfits are good at their job due to their creativity and general tendency to enjoy expression and communication.

So as the fan finds itself splattered with that which ought not be named, good saleswomen and salesmen have only a few options to save themselves from the impending financial wipeout. One method I would recommend is that you quit your job, face poverty and find a way to start a business, somehow, something you find you really enjoy. And in time you'll be VERY rich.

That of course suits only a part of those sales people I care most about - ie the very good ones. Some brilliant saleswomen/salesmen may not really have the right credentials to run a business, although it is unlikely since in fact the primary credential for running a business is being a brilliant saleswoman/salesman. So if you are forced to stay employed, as well as obviously asserting your right to a fair reward for being brilliant, try to play your employers the same way they invariably play YOU - i.e. ditch employers at regular intervals by finding higher paying jobs and bullishly getting them behind everyone's back.

Do NOT trust your employers. Sales people are completely expendable to all businesses - as well as being a vital method of trying to survive. They'll use you and throw you away without any hesitation. So just step on them. The better you are, the more you owe it to them to do this to them. They do NOT deserve the talent of good saleswomen and salesmen. In truth you should quit and start your own business and if you don't want to go it alone, quit in a team, with someone you have a good dynamic with, NOT someone who you have a good time-wasting relationship with!

People with inexplicable jobtitles

Okay. Those of you with jobs which all sound very "non-sales" and technical, who have masqueraded for years as what you are not (i.e. not sales), it's time to admit that most of what you do is just ground-level sales work of one kind or another, whether it is research, 'writing', collating or whatever. You are always just producing matter whose primary purpose is usually to sell the goods - i.e. you are NOT part of the minority workers in a company, often nonexistent (due to sourcing), who actually PRODUCE goods or services to be sold on.

Your jobs are in a very tough predicament because you are not workers who each bring in a fixed profit from your work - in fact you are secondary and the primary sales people and the budget they generate determine how many people like you can be afforded by the company. You should try not to be a worm (as is tempting) and should instead aim to preserve your security through sharing intelligence with the sales teams and simultaneously learning more about sales and gaining more respect for its role in paying your salary.

Many 'grey-area' and 'consultative' job titles will just have to go, so be prepared to sell yourself as a salesman if the going gets very tough. There are only two directions you can push yourself in - either toward the money or away from it. If you were to try and go it alone in business you would be at a severe loss because you have no real independence in the area of capturing markets and guaranteeing sales. The best thing you can do is empower yourself to have that kind of independence.

Vital workers

People whose jobs, for one reason or other, be they a school teacher, a nurse, an engineer, or anyone else who has to make, create, and lay down that which will then be sold, used, built, travelled on, lived in, etc - you have to be tougher than anyone else during this big recession. Your jobs are being stamped on from every direction and as companies collapse left right and centre, people take it out on YOU, the weakest in the money pyramid, first of all.

You more than anyone else should seek sales help and sales skills and go out on your own and work as your own boss as soon as you can. Do not wait to find out the hard way that you are going to be robbed and drained for anything and everything you have from time to intelligence to money by those of our society who have less of all those things, so do not let this happen to you. Act aggressively: create a business and make idiots like that work FOR you instead of taking all the money for your work and ultimately wasting it since it is YOU who matters most to the business landscape, for without you there is nothing in society worth having.

I am a software engineer although my whole life is consumed by salesmanship, as a business owner, but that's what I'm telling you to do. Ultimately my technology projects now all will gain from the dedication I've poured into salesmanship for nearly a decade, and finally the recession has opened up a lot of potential for someone like me to really consolidate the power I have already been building, in small ways, for many years.

Public information websites are a good example of a simple sort of thing you can create to feed money to a business of your making. In any business you must try to create multitudes of inbound channels of income which can vary in absurdly broad ways. Do not see Arthur Daley's bad side and forget about all that guile and cunning and versatility and strength. Selling is NOT a bad man's game - it is a good thing and in the hands of the good it can achieve wild results. Look at Google, or Amnesty International (would the latter achieve anything without THE POWER OF PERSUASION?)

I urge you not to be your usual self and waste time. Extract yourself fast - this means embrace the act of making money fast. If you can start earning out of the web inside a year, without leaving your job, then you may manage to leave employment and create your business without ending up poor in the interim - but it's unlikely. 3 to 5 years is a good time to set aside for a beginner to learn how to create and run a business. After that you don't need to learn again, you already know, and over 40 or 50 years you can make a HELL of a lot of money, if you have intelligence. You need nothing but intelligence and training - training comes not from working for someone else who pays you but working for yourself who doesn't pay you.

Don't be a "homeworker" spamming idiot

Okay, it is, today in Summer 2009, a growing concern of mine that spamming and spamvertising is experiencing not just a huge increase but lots of good press. Idiots from the non-technorati world are coming into our domain and are trying to drain lots of profits out of the DYING spam systems which we, the intelligent ones, have been bashing cleverly in the dark for years, weakening them and making them ready for total breakdown. The huge flood of spamming jobs that former office slaves are taking up round the clock in Europe and the USA is indeed enough to break down and destroy that spamming system. But let that not concern you. I just get upset because I take great pride in this universe of business I am part of creating, but focus on yourself and leave the idiots to the captains of our industry to deal with. As for you - remember that what YOU are about is starting a business, putting your soul into it, making something outside your job which you put much more into than your job - you give your whole self to. That is what I want, not for you to learn how to do 3 hours of spamming per day and build an "extra income" from helping ruin my universe. No, I'll screw you up and close you down if that's what you want, because people like me can sweep away spam in so many ways, including unscrupulous ones (who's going to protect the spammer when I hack his account, destroy his pathetic websites full of unadulterated hindrances, full of pure exploitative evil, and perhaps even have his bank account frozen and a few other authoritarian steps taken against him (or, less often, but nonetheless) her?).

If you are not producing something which you know is a good thing to produce, you are one of those spam bastards, and just remember, I am going to hunt you down, not personally, but with "robotic" online armies. So don't do it unless you are really really hardcore. And if you are that hardcore, why not use it for something much more profitable than bullshit spam? Maybe you're just in a rut. You'll never get out of that rut by abusing your talent - that can only lead to a bigger rut later on. Face the music, and learn to put your abilities in the right place - talent must go before mercenary tendencies. Any fuckhead can spam. Hardly anyone can make a good true profitable honest business. Do the latter. That's what being a brilliant businessman is about, not just turning fat cash over with no regard for how it is turned.

Visit UKusers4u.com to learn exactly how to set up any normal mainstream form of online business.

  [content last updated on 11/Jun 2009]

Shams Pirani's lexical guide:

PART 1: words to never use

NB if you use the words below, ever, we will never employ you, and we will spurn you:

Deal breaker
Prada
Web 2.0
Credit Crunch
Twitter (use the alternative Twatter)
Facebook (use the alternative Arsebook)
Myspace (use the alternative Myarse)
(more to come)...

Starting a business

The myths and lies dispelled: here's what you REALLY do (stop believing the crap your bosses tell you or the rubbish on tv shows like "the apprentice" and "dragon's den" - dragon's arse, more like)... So where to begin? Easy:

Begin with nothing. That's how all business starts. Firstly do NOT start a business on negativity - i.e. don't go borrowing money or using investment, even savings, because that's just bollocks and stupid and people who do that will not make lasting businesses which make a fortune and are fab. Sounds wrong? Well think about this - the entire crash of 2008 to 2012+ has been brought about by a gigantic liquidity bubble - people thinking you can create a business using money as a primary resource for building the business. That is why it is bollocks. Stay away from this stupid way of doing things and you won't be poor.

How many ratrace slaves have so far saved above 50k over 10 years of slavery? Do you know anyone who has? And if they are in a higher bracket of pay such that they can realistically have saved at least 50k, consider how much they've saved in 10 to 20 years anyway, 50, 100? Great. What an achievement. They must be proud. Millions of turnover for their boss from their work, or the equivalent in productivity terms for ANY organisation, and they saved 100k. Well bloody done.

Anyway, if you were the best stock market investor in the world you would trade with the golden rule: NEVER TRADE WITH MONEY YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE - thus if you saved 50k over 10 years of slavery, that is not something you want to put into a business, because a business is just the same as any other investment - what you can get for minimum, cheap and free can be very powerful and valuable, if it is accompanied by the right dedication from you and thus the company itself can indeed produce processes of the highest quality, then you will make money. If you want to buy success by using big investments to make "good" results, you are a spineless fool with no ability to make money - just the belief that money can make money. Well it cannot. It was a bubble and it's over. Money cannot make money. Work, effort, vision, talent, capability, things like this make money - a lot of different things, and there's a lot of ways to make money.

Business startup startup

Firstly, have a business that you want to do - a product or service, or range of products or services which you want to sell to a specific target market, which may be a wide open one or a very closed one.

That means look around and find out what businesses do well and what businesses do badly. In 2009, don't start a bank, estate agent or luxury gift shop! Of course there could be a cunning new kind of bank you could start which would seize the whole market (if I don't get there before you) or a property engine which cashes in on the fall of all estate agents, but I can't think of any loophole for gift shops.

Ordinary businesses are usually the most reliable, since all the staple things in our lives are pretty ordinary and dull and they are absolutely reliable, habitual, cyclical, quasi-permanent. You can sell those things to people knowing they'll always buy them - customers will always be there to buy up all your stock or time or whatever you give.

But you can be brave, and try to go beyond the ordinary, particularly if you have interests which you want to follow. Be realistic and know what the real status quo is surrounding your chosen market. If it is a shit market, know that and don't waste your precious time on it.