Green Options

You can’t beat the satisfaction of making the world a cleaner, more pristine place. For this reason, more and more people want green jobs. The more President Obama talks about them, the better they sound. In reality, many of us can have a tremendous impact, without working for a wildlife reserve or a solar energy company.

Here are some ways to green your existing job:

Start a Game
People love competitions, even if it is ultimately for a mundane goal. What department can reduce their electricity use the most or have the largest number of employees commute by bike? How can you replace bottled water consumption with filtered tap water?

“We have people here in our offices that are creating contests around printing,” said Matt Arnold, Partner, Pricewaterhouse Coopers in an interview with PlanetSave. “Think about how day-to-day this can get. We are having a contest to see who can print the least, floor by floor, department by department. We are keeping score and it’s a little game. The people that designed it are having a blast and we’re reducing paper consumption.”

Hello, again! This job search post will be formatted slightly differently than usual. Instead of detailing my job search experience over the last few weeks, I will provide an extensive comparison between my old resume and my completed resume in order to point out where I was falling short and how I have corrected my mistakes.

This is the resume I was using about two months ago:

Schools don’t foster it. Most parents advise against it. Corporations crush it.

Passion, often, unfortunately, ranks as an optional side dish on the buffet of life. If you can find a job that provides the staple meat and potatoes, lucky you. Dessert, or feeling passionate and fulfilled by what you do, adds a nice touch if you can get it — but is definitely not necessary.

In ECOpreneuring, my wife and I write about going for dessert first (we’ve also been known to start at the back of a menu at a restaurant and work forward). Identify your passion and build your work, your business, your life around that which makes your toes tingle. A reverse perspective to the normal career path, we realize. It took us almost a decade of soul-searching, global travel and life-changing experiences — both positive and negative — before we started to unearth the human beings we were deep down inside, our core that represented our heartfelt passions, reflected our values and our Earth Mission that guides our life. Partner your passion with small business and satisfaction blooms far richer than just dollars of a paycheck.

Shift Your Thinking: Become an Eco-effective Mosquito Business

Ecopreneuring stems from a paradigm shift in how we approach a career and how we define livelihood. Like nature, we thrive on interdependence while aspiring to a greater degree of self-reliant independence — the ability to make it on our own in a supportive community. This shatters the prideful image of a generation ago where the “company” would “care” for you and your family after you retired.

Think independent and multidimensional: a Portfolio Perspective. Look at your life as multidimensional; Different rather than just one paycheck coming from one job, have a range of income-generating sources. Different elements contribute to fulfillment and satisfaction. If one project disappeared, you’d still have others. One interest fuels ideas or business leads in another area. Like a diversified stock portfolio, by having multiple income sources stemming from your passions, your livelihood provides multiple benefits. A Portfolio Perspective also provides the opportunity to integrate and overlap these interests intelligently and strategically, using business deductions effectively. Such a shift fundamentally alters the historic perspective separating your “job” from your “leisure” activities. Your job earns you money to pay for your leisure interests. What if you love photography or helping people savor healthy and locally grown food? Why not make that part of your livelihood?