Some excellent advice (IM not so HO) from people who are not me

I thought this was really helpful. You can safely ignore the fact that she (Pamela Slim) addresses it to college students, because it's applicable to anybody:

Open Letter to Recent College Graduates. Actually, her whole entire blog seems like its really cool.

Below is one of the links that she mentioned in the letter that I thought was really great too, particularly for the unemployed/underemployed/trying-to-figure-out-how-I-want-to-be-employed. I was already using my Thursdays to do the 2nd (well particularly PHP and Linux right now) and 7th (French) ones, but I'd been giving some serious thought to the 8th one (maybe not three, altho i do have three ones in particular i'm thinking about), and the 6th one would help me streamline my Renewable Energy thinking, reading and learning, which is something that is also supposed to be one of my Thursday focuses. I'm probably going to have to expand to Saturdays and mayhaps some parts of Sundays as well. And I'll likely have to do my shortened version of the list in stages (or trim it) so as to avoid that whole Jack of All Trades Master of None / Chicken-with-its-head-cut-off foolishness (that was really just a guise for laziness and fear) that I'd hitherto made my hallmark. I wish I could do the first one (Hope Worldwide most likely. As I've mentioned before, they are my peeps). Next time I'm in between jobs that's going to be a definite. My list is shortened b/c I currently work full-time (almost). But if you're currently job-free then hey - go for it.:

Graduate school for unemployed college students

Fewer college grads have jobs than at any other time in recent memory—a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers annual student survey said that 20 percent of 2009 college graduates who applied for a job actually have one. So, what should the unfortunate 80% do?

How about a post-graduate year doing some combination of the following (not just one, how about all):

• Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit.
• Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery. [Clarification: I know you can't become a master programmer of all these in a year. I used the word mastery to distinguish it from 'familiarity' which is what you get from one of those Dummies type books. I would hope you could write code that solves problems, works and is reasonably clear, not that you can program well enough to work for Joel Spolsky. Sorry if I ruffled feathers.]
• Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids sports team.
• Start, run and grow an online community.
• Give a speech a week to local organizations.
• Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about.
• Learn a foreign language fluently.
• Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about.
• Self-publish a book.
• Run a marathon.

Beats law school.

If you wake up every morning at 6, give up TV and treat this list like a job, you'll have no trouble accomplishing everything on it. Everything! When you do, what happens to your job prospects?