Jun 7, 2008

The Work Ethic Is a Terrible Mistake

Photo of Istanbul



This started with an e-mail I received in April:
    Good morning,
    My client KalDer has asked about availability and fee for Ernie Zelinski to participate at their 17th Annual Congress in Istanbul, 24th - 26th November 2008.
    KalDer is the Turkish National Quality Organization.
    Their annual congress brings together approximately 2,500 persons from the Turkish business community, academics, students and journalists.
    I would be pleased to provide you with additional information and look forward to hearing from you.
    Speakers Bureau International

As I pondered whether I wanted to consider going to Istanbul and what I should charge (initially I was thinking of $1,500 plus all expenses including busines class travel) I got a call from the Speakers Bureau.

Asked what I would charge, I said $2,500 for a one-hour speech, business class travel from Edmonton to Istanbul, and all associated expenses including meals. I was told that I would be paid $3,000 plus all expenses.

I still didn't know if I wanted to go but when my friend Michael Attwood and his wife Willy who live in Vancouver said they would likely fly to Istanbul and be there the 3 days that I would be there, I decided to give this a little more consideration.

After it was confirmed that I could be put up at the Ritz-Carlton in Istanbul for three nights in a suite, I decided to take this gig seriously even posting as an important speaking event on Morgan James Publishing. and an important event at Ernie Zelinski's Book Tour.

No doubt the interest in having me make this one-hour speech came about because of my book The Joy of Not Working: A Book for the Retired, Unemployed, and Overworked which has been published in 17 languages including Turkish.

The cover of the Turkish edition is shown below:

The Joy of Not Working - Turkish Edition

I thought about a number of topics that I could address:

I sent an e-mail to the woman of the speakers bureau and she replied with this:

"Here is their translation into English of the text for the event brochure:"

    The Joy of (not) Working
    Questioning our point of view about work life as an individual and organization, Zelinski says that when working meets with love, it pleases and he reveals that expectations like materiality and career contributes lowly to individual and organization.
    When listening to Ten Speed Press Author Ernie Zelinski, you will find the opportunity to revaluate your outlook for work life and consider your organization's human resources policies and approaches differently. Working tires, what about not working?
    Zelinski introduces the features of the every activity of pleasure and improving the life quality made for working or not working. He tells to workaholics whose lives consist of only their jobs an neglects their family, friends and above all themselves that work but turn your job into pleasure and joy and by working efficiently become happy and he tells about how to make their life cheerfully despite everything to his retired readers.
    Where should we put work life in our lives?
    For this, first by completing our own adventures we should bring our life purposes to code which is open for change. For positioning money which is ranked one in our lives, everyone should ask this question to themselves: If we think that happiness can be bought by working too much or earning too much money, why don't we try to sell some part of our own happiness?
    This is one of the most critical questions and an NLP anchor that shows us by balancing working or not working how can it be the key for pleasant and calm life. If you are thinking about how to work efficiently and pleasantly, what can be done for making physical and mental health better, how to live for physical health and inner calmness pay attention to Zelinski.

Wow! This is confusing. These people want me to talk about something I don't know anything about.

So what am I going to talk about?

Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)