Wealthy Affiliate - More than an Income Source
I woke up this morning at 2:00 with a thought in my head about Wealthy Affiliate. It was an epiphany really, and as much as I wanted to stay in bed and drift back to sleep, I couldn't. I was compelled to get up and write my thoughts down.
The Nature of Work
This is actually something that I've been thinking about quite a bit in the last few years. In my professional life, I've been working for the past 16 years as a Human Resources and Payroll Manager. This perspective has given me a lot to think about as far as the nature of work in society. You see, a person's work is largely a driving force as to how a person views themselves. It is often where we find our identity. People want to feel productive, and they want to feel that their contributions to society matter. That our existence makes a difference in the world. Don't get me wrong, those fulfilling contributions can often be found in our contributions to our families, friends, churches, etc. But for the vast majority of people, myself included, the number one source of personal fulfillment comes from their contributions made at work.
The Robots are Coming!
Believe it or not, this relationship we've had with work for millennia, is being threatened. It is not being threatened by anything evil, but actually by our own advancements in technology. In our day to day lives, we may not realize it, but technology is advancing incredibly fast. It has only been 11 years since the first smart phone was introduced. How much has that changed the world?! I don't have TV service anymore because we just stream everything online. When I was in high school (class of '94), I didn't even know what the internet was!
Well, that change is still happening, and now it's happening with increased automation in the workplace and artificial intelligence. When I first started in payroll in 2002, I had to manually enter hours from time cards into our payroll system. These days, my payroll system is automatically updated from the time clocks that the employees punch in on. What used to take me an entire day to do, now takes me 10 minutes!
Payroll is not alone in this phenomenon. In all aspects of work, jobs are being lost because of this increased automation. Our work is becoming more and more efficient, and as we continue to progress, it's just going to get worse for the job market. I expect that in the next 10 years, our society will be just as unrecognizable to us today, as today would be to someone pre-internet.
So What Then?
So, what do we do about it? Are we hopeless? Absolutely not! As unprecedented as this challenge will be, we have faced great challenges as humans in the past, and we have overcome. We will do it again. What is needed is a change in thinking. What we need is a change in how we see work. We will always need to work. Humans are just wired that way. But the idea of the 9 to 5 job where you drive to an office and then come home... That idea needs to go away. Our economic security and purposeful productivity needs to increasingly not be found in a job with a company. That dynamic is going to become more scarce as time goes on.
This is what excites me about Wealthy Affiliate and what intrigued me about it from a Human Resources perspective. This shift in thinking is exactly what Wealthy Affiliate is doing. This is the shift that I'm talking about. It has about looking to ourselves for our own work and for our own economic security. It has about building something sustainable that isn't reliant on a job where upper management can one day decide that a robot can do your job better and cheaper than you can.
It has also about embracing the robots! We don't need to be scared of the robots as if it's like Terminator here to wipe us out. The robots are actually already here. The Amazon affiliate program is actually a robot. SEO is a robot. Google indexing is a robot. Wealthy Affiliate is actually helping us as a society embrace the coming changes. It is giving us the ability to be ready for those changes.
Promoting with Pride
I'm going through the Affiliate Bootcamp training right now, and just getting my first site up. But here's what excites me, and excites me enough to wake me up at 2:00 in the morning. We can promote Wealthy Affiliate with pride! This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, and it's not just a pipe dream for people who just want to stay in their pajamas all day and not go to work.
Wealthy Affiliate is a real solution to a real problem, and it is greater than ourselves. We can promote Wealthy Affiliate as something more than just a means to an income. We can promote Wealthy Affiliate as an answer to one of the greatest societal challenges we've ever faced!
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