Career Advice, General Comments (0)
The other day while I was siting in the waiting room for a doctors appointment I picked up a magazine called “ Good Times” it was the February edition. “Good Times Magazine” is a Canadian magazine that has some pretty captivating and informative articles. One article in particular really caught my eye. The article was an interview with Mike Holmes - the infamous host of “Holmes on Homes”. I used to call Mike Holmes the Jack Bauer of home renovations. I have always thought of this guy as being really really awesome, but after reading about him in this article he had moved up for me by a several notches. If you are a hard working person you have probably seen his show or at the very least heard of him. He is a hard working machine of a man that is at the head of the Holmes group which is the parent company of 35 construction companies and about 200 employees and not to mention a great show with a cult following. One might wonder how he achieved all this. Well you know the old expression that hard work pays off, that’s how he did it. Hard work is the life blood of Mike Holmes. In this article Mike Holmes talks about how his father was really hard on him and taught him the true art of hard work, not to mention many other admirable traits. We can learn a lot from this as when most of us are confronted with an obstacle we go around them. While someone like Mike breaks right through obstacles and moves on (literally on occasion). His actions speak the philosophy of hard work, focus and relentless desire to beat the status quo. He is like I mentioned before a machine who is always looking for a way to improve, grow and succeed at all he does. One of the most admiring thing about him is that he helps as many people as he can along the way. Mike and his TV crew repair about 13 houses a year. He has setup a foundation for people who want to study a trade or skill related to construction this foundation is called “the Holmes foundation“. He also recommends this site “careersinconstruction.ca” if you seeking a job in construction. I strongly encourage all of you to reflect on how hard work and focus can help you in your everyday life, current job and finding a new job. Some of these old fashioned traits are the very foundation of successful people everywhere.
Shadi @ March 30, 2008
Ever wanted to take a course to learn something that may enhance your ability to get a really really good jobs? But you didn’t have the time or the money to go to school. Ever dream of going to an ivy league school…hmm I don’t know like MIT but didn’t have the marks, money or even knew what the application process was.
Well thanks to the open source era you can now get online courses for free from a miriad of great universities including MIT.
How you may ask? Well MIT developed an OpenCourseWare site. You have access 1800 courses ranging from Engineering to health sciences, they even have cources for Humanities and the arts.
Take a look at this
You know what the best part of this is…they aren’t the only ones who are doing this. There are a whole bunch of them and they are part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Their MOTO is “Universities working together to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.” How do they make money to subsidize this great initiative…by donations and corporate sponsorship. I encourage all of you to take a look at this amazing resource. Whats the catch…no catch execept that these courses you take cannot go toward a degree, certificate and does not count for any credits. But on the upside it isn’t all reading, the courses have audio and video content as well. There are many educational instituations from around the world that are a part of this program. In the United States alone there are 12 prestigious instituations that are engaged in this very web 2.0 wikinomics program.
The full list of American institutions are as follows:
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michigan State University
Tufts University
University of California, Irvine
University of Massachusetts Boston
University of Michigan School of Information
University of Notre Dame
Utah State University
Utah Valley State College
Wheelock College
University of California, Berkeley
Now you can tell your friends that you went to MIT (wink wink nudge nudge) and at the same time you would of learned some amazing things to help improve your abilities at your current job or and getting into that really amazing job you’ve always dreamed.
Check these links out: http://ocw.mit.edu/ and http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
Shadi @ March 17, 2008