If you are young and not Dangerous, your dreams and passions are almost certainly pathetic shite. If you are not Dangerous, you have probably never been exposed to the full-spectrum world out there. So, here’s a word of advice: Don’t follow your passion. Discover the real world first, then you can start to work out how you might fit in that world.

Mike Rowe is a TV personality who championed the concept of “dirty jobs” — jobs that frighten or repel most people, need to be done, typically pay well, and are very low down on the list of most persons’ “dream jobs.”

Mike Rowe has a foundation, the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting “skills jobs,” work that doesn’t require a 4 year college diploma — but instead requires real world competence and skills. Rowe wants to repair the mismatch he sees:

* A trillion dollars in student loans.

* Record high unemployment.

* Three million good jobs that no one seems to want. The mikeroweWORKS Foundation started the Profoundly Disconnected® campaign to challenge the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success. The Skills Gap is here, and if we don’t close it, it’ll swallow us all. Which is a long way of saying, we could use your help… __ MikeRowWORKS Foundation

Skilled workers are growing closer to retirement age. Farmers, welders, skilled construction workers, skilled maintenance workers, and a host of other pivotal “dirty jobs” requiring competence and expertise are growing older and retiring. They are not being replaced fast enough with good enough young replacements.

… the hardest segment of the workforce for employers to staff with skilled talent hasn’t been registered nurses or engineers or even web developers. It’s been the skilled trades – the welders, electricians, machinists, etc. that are so prevalent in manufacturing and construction. But if these skilled-trades workers are difficult to find now, as Manpower MAN +2.25%’s survey indicates, just wait a few years. The skills gap is likely to become more acute. In 2012, 53 percent of skilled-trade workers in the U.S. were 45 years and older, according to EMSI, and 18.6 percent were between the ages of 55 and 64. (We are using the Virginia Manufacturers Association’s definition of skilled trades, which encompasses 21 particular occupations.) __ Joshua Wright

Too many young people cannot focus on one thing long enough to develop competent expertise, cannot go long enough without using drugs to pass either a scheduled or a random urine test, and cannot be trusted with hazardous machinery, materials, or tools. But if young people were exposed to the real world of responsibilities and consequences early enough to understand what it takes to earn, save, and go independent — their attitudes might well undergo a significant adjustment for the better.

A lot of the “dirty-jobs” people that Rowe highlighted on his TV show episodes were unheralded multi-millionaires. The money goes to where needs are filled, and glamour often doesn’t enter into it.

Rowe is an advocate for blue-collar workers and is the CEO of the MikeRoweWorks Foundation, which he started in 2008 to help connect people with skilled jobs. Rowe also uses it to challenge, what he calls, America’s “dysfunctional relationship with work.” __ Source

Mike Rowe has some unconventional ideas which could contribute to the improvement and prosperity of virtually any country’s educational policies. And he offers these ideas freely to every US president — whether Democrat or Republican.

“When the dust settles, and The White House gets a new tenant, I’ll make the same offer to President Trump that I did to President Obama — to assist as best I can in any attempt to reinvigorate the skilled trades, and shine a light on millions of good jobs that no one seems excited about pursuing,” he said. __ Variety

Mike Rowe wants to match people with jobs. But he also wants to improve skills training in the US, starting at the high school age level. Because of this and many of his other ideas, Rowe is light years ahead of most of his contemporaries in television and the entertainment media when it comes to contributing to useful change.

Mike Rowe goes beyond the surface fluff of politics, media, academia, and activism, and gets down and dirty in the real world. He is opening minds one by one. Perhaps if President-Elect Trump decides to give him a louder voice, he can open more minds and empower more people to develop practical skills and find ways of using them profitably.

Make no mistake: There are a lot of things that Mike Rowe knows which he cannot easily communicate to modern youth and workers , raised as they have been in a milieu of short-attention-span frivolity and superficiality. But he is working hard to overcome the gap, and does us all a great service by continuing in what he is doing.

Dangerous Children Start Earlier and Go Much Farther

Dangerous Children know more than just blue collar skills, of course, although they cannot achieve their fullest potential without developing a wide range of practical skills and competencies — regardless of what careers, professions, vocations, and working pathways they may “ultimately” choose. And Dangerous Children have the utmost respect for other people who master practical skills, do dirty jobs, run their own businesses, and personally keep communities and societies running through their own competence.

But somebody needs to go beyond the way things are and how they could be better. Someone must understand how the larger workings might break and how to build the parallel infrastructures and disruptive intermeshing technologies that would allow societies to re-form and self-organise along more practical and self-sustaining and self-reforming avenues of development.

This is a higher level of the “dirty job” concept, but sooner or later it will be needed.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. It is never too late (or early) to have a Dangerous Childhood.