It's not easy to find your ideal job, even if you scour job boards and the classifieds and camp out in a career planning office.

But it is possible to get exactly what you want.

Seminar participants would listen to my introductions and marvel that my credentials were a perfect match for what I was doing.

This wasnt accidental. I didnt stumble upon my career, nor was I recruited into it.

I devised it, developed it.

Before my imagination came along, it simply didnt exist.

I decided to leave college teaching; that is by the semester and year, and teach, nonetheless, but by the day.

Instead of being indentured, or is that tenured, or certainly tethered to one school, Id spread my insights to as many campuses that would have me, and at the peak of my itinerant duties, that number reached forty.

Teaching through Continuing Education I earned ten times the money I got from being a conventional faculty member, within the first eighteen months, and I didnt look back.

Driving up to one of my former professors homes in my new Mercedes convertible, he asked, in genuine perplexity: Where did all of this come from?

It came from asking a simple, but crucial career planning question:

What would be an IDEAL situation for me?

The answer was teaching in circumstances in which teachers are paid well.

That answer stimulated me to do a little arithmetic and to determine that being paid $500 per day, which by no means was exorbitant, was a lot better than being paid $13,400 per year.

Irrespective of what youve seen in the movies, nobody will walk up to you and whisper in your ear a magical word, such as plastics or The Internet and set you on your way to a better career path.

You need to IMAGINE what would be ideal for you, and then ask if that position has already been created.

If not, develop it for yourself!