You Don't Want a Job

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I have two kids in college now and they've asked for advice on getting a job.

What I tell them is, you don't want a job. You want a career.

I've had a few jobs. I was lucky to be fired from them. The firings let me seek my passion, which was this Internet medium. Watching it grow, commenting on it, peering around its corners has given me enough money to raise two great kids and enjoy a wonderful marriage.

What else could you want?

There are three kinds of jobs opening up in the 21st century. The cheapest are jobs serving people. Then there are jobs serving machines. Finally there are jobs using machines to create something new.

The last are the only jobs worth going for, but they're not jobs at all. They're careers.

You can learn anything you want on the Internet. You can drill down to the very bottom of every field here. You can learn who are the experts and where they work. You can talk to them and they will talk back because what the best experts most want is for young people to ask them good questions.

So learn all you can and figure out what you want to contribute to the world. What excites you the most? That's what you want to do.

For example:

My daughter is concerned about the problem of urban wildlife. All sorts of animals are now living in our cities and suburbs, with no habitat left of their own. Cities and suburbs are indeed ecosystems. They need a balance of predators and prey. If evolution is to stop going backward we need to create policies adapting to this reality, and find ways to enforce them.

Her eyes light up when she talks about this. It's a brand new field. She's in on the ground floor, just as I got in on the ground floor of this medium 30 years ago. Her pending degree in range and wildlife sciences gives her an interesting perspective. She doesn't hate hunters, for instance. She has learned they have their place.

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