© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• The unexpected always happens. Titus Maccius Plautus (254–184 B.C.)

You can't always predict when disaster will strike you down, but you can hedge against it. Whether it's a part‑time job for extra cash or your life's work, the better your perspec­tive on politics, history, world and national events, the safer your income sources will be. You won't be caught running a hot dog stand outside the auto plant that closes without warning.

You want to avoid “fragile” sources of income. These are income sources that can be disrupted by events totally out of your control: corporate takeovers, plant closings, interest rate hikes, wars in far‑off places.

If you're an accountant, a restaurant manager, an electron­ics technician, a banker, you have the flexibility to move on if your income source dries up. You'll have to make fewer adjustments. If you're in a more sensitive, fragile field, you might have to go for complete retraining, and re‑start at half the income. It's called job extinction.

To avoid fragile income sources, train yourself to eradicate wishful thinking about your opportunities. “Things change” should be your motto. It's easy to be blinded to reality when you see people with good jobs and coveted lifestyles because they have attained a certain degree, gotten a certain job and seem oh-so-secure. But we know better, don't we? We know we have to look hard at what look like opportunities.

Pick up any newspaper or magazine. It's common to come across feature stories about people who thought they had it made until their economic world fell apart. When these people fall, they fall hard, because all their dreams are shattered. It's tempting to say they're not to blame, because they have been hurt by circumstances totally beyond their control. But they are to blame—for thinking that life was fair, for failing to do hard thinking about economic realities, for living on dreams and wishful thinking.

Even if you do take a major fall in life, all is not lost. Maybe you did sit and wait. You can still pick yourself up and grab opportunity out of bad luck. Many people who have been fired from their jobs, people who have lost their entire careers, have drifted into fields that treated them very well.