Standard_00 // The Trades
There used to be a clock on the wall. You slid your card in on Friday and it made a sound. That sound meant you earned something. It meant somebody was proud of you and you were going out that night with money in your pocket and nothing hanging over you.
I was a framer. Sixteen-ounce Estwing, walking a top plate, back before most of us had a nail gun. Nobody handed me anything, and I have never felt better than I felt on those Fridays.
This is not motivation. It is arithmetic, and every figure below is published by the federal government or by the people handing out the money. Read it once and decide what you are going to do this fall.
That is not because you are lazy. That is because they took shop class out of your school and handed you a loan application instead.
Stephen ZeitvogelEvery one of these jobs is about to come with software attached. The only question that matters is who that software answers to. We built ours so it answers to the person holding the permit.
You write the permit. The agent works inside it and comes back for a new one when the job changes. You are not labor racing a machine. You are the licensed party signing for one.
Everything it does is written to a log you hold, on a machine you own. When somebody disputes what happened on the job, you are the one with the file. Ask anyone who has ever needed one.
Running and authorizing a governed agent sits on top of your trade instead of replacing it. The electrician who can issue permits to his own tooling is not the one who gets automated out.
Local-first by design. The record does not leave the country and no vendor can revoke your access to the proof of your own work.
The mikeroweWORKS Foundation is awarding ten million dollars in work ethic scholarships this year. No GPA requirement. No test scores. They cover two-year programs and shorter, including tuition, books, and tools. Since 2008 they have put more than sixteen million dollars into the hands of over twenty-six hundred people. It is the largest trade school scholarship fund in the country, and applications are open right now.
Their application is built around it. It is about showing up, staying late, and taking pride in the work. If that already describes you, this part is free.
Written, not long. They are reading for work ethic, not for prose.
Phone camera is fine. Face a window, never have one behind you. Say who you are, what trade you want, and why you will finish. Sixty seconds, one take, no music.
The deadline is October thirty-first. Put it in your phone right now, before you close this page.
Rogue Management Group is not affiliated with the mikeroweWORKS Foundation and receives nothing for pointing you there. It is simply the best money on the table for somebody willing to learn a trade.
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Get out of the house. Learn something with your hands. Find your clock and punch it. That sound is still out there.
Apprentices, trade instructors, union halls, and anybody building the physical layer of this thing. If you are teaching people to work with their hands, I want to hear from you.
stephen.zeitvogel@roguemgmtgroup.com