When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, right?

I can already hear some of you groaning, but seriously, take a half-hour break and watch the short flick Lemonade anyway. I’m no fan of pep talks. In fact, I’m usually the first person in any given room to point out the ominous dark cloud about to choke the life out of the wretched silver lining everybody else wants to focus on (hey, somebody has to do it!), but even I enjoyed this inspiring little film.

I teared up in a couple of places too. Me. I s**t you not.

Lemonade tells the story of 16 advertising professionals who got laid off and discovered (after the requisite period of mourning, confusion, and pissed-offedness) that losing that steady job was the best thing that ever happened to them.

I’m no ad exec, and I’ve never made anything close to the kind of money the people in this film made from their ‘real’ jobs. Nor have I gotten fabulously wealthy since becoming a fulll-time freelancer when I lost my own ‘real’ job in 2008. Even so, I found myself identifying with much of what these folks had to say. 

The truth is, corporate work tends to be unhealthy and uninspiring, but most of us keep slugging away at it anyway because we think that’s the best we can do and we think that’s what we are supposed to do. But what if each and every one of us decided to instead do what we cared about regardless of the potential for immediate monetary compensation or the presence or lack of benefit packages?

The world would become a different place fast, and I personally think it would become a better place fast. Transformation happens person by person, not all at once, and not easily. At some point, lots of individual changes reach critical mass and become societal changes, but it is still a hard fact that the only person you can truly change is yourself. So why not go for it? Why not start there?

Not that jobs are bad, or that people who work at jobs are uninspired or lesser human specimens. Not everyone is capable of doing the bootstrap thing—starting a company, making a film, writing a book, or whatever. But many of us are capable, and we know we are, but we don’t even try to strike out on our own because of shame, fear, security addiction, insecurity affliction, or all of the above.

If you are that kind of person—the kind of person who has always wanted to do or try something specific but you’ve always felt that actually trying it would be too selfish or too impractical—then getting laid off can be less of a pink slip and more of a permission slip. That is the whole point of this movie.

We meet a woman who practically rejoices when she is laid off and becomes a the yoga instructor/personal trainer she always wanted to be; a man with a child who has cystic fibrosis who makes a film about how surfing can ease the symptoms of the disease; a man who changes gender at midlife and starts his own website for transgendered people; a man who starts a blog about recently displaced advertising professionals called Please Feed the Animals; a man who starts painting again and finds he can downsize his life and devote himself to his art and still eat regular meals; a man who follows Lance Armstrong around on the Tour de France; and a man who starts to roast his own coffee at home and sell it by the pound or the cup.

The movie doesn’t soft soap the process. Not all of these people become rich. Not all of their creative enterprises last. But all of them, to a person, no longer lusts after a 9 to 5 position.

Most wouldn’t take one if offered, and a few have had multiple offers.

One caveat: Once you’ve experienced the freedom to be who you really are, you can’t go back. After that experience, you’re pretty much ruined as an employee. Corporations don’t want creative people who think for themselves and have active, interesting lives. How can you control such people? One guy in the film admits that if he ever took another job, he’d almost certainly be fired the first week—but he’d never take another job, never again.

That’s good news for the people out there looking. The dismal truth is that the U.S. economy would have to grow at a superheated, nearly impossible rate for five solid years and add at least 150,000 jobs per month for that entire period in order to get back to anything remotely resembling full employment. Six applicants currently vie for every one job out there, but because that figure is an average of all jobs and all people, the truth as most of us experience it is actually much more grim.

Crunch the numbers however you want, it all comes down to this: There aren’t enough jobs in the country for everyone who wants one, and that is likely to remain true in the U.S. for years to come.

That being the case, the begged question then becomes, “Why not make lemonade?” In times like these, people with dreams and ideas don’t just have an opportunity to try them out, they practically have a responsibility to try them out.

One of the best bits of advice offered in the film is:

“Do something as soon as you can, but don’t make it about job hunting. Don’t be the person looking for a job—be the person doing that interesting new thing.”

OK, these are advertising people. They would say that. Of course they would.

Still, it’s not bad advice.

That’s how some of us ended up at Eye on Life after all. That’s why the managing editor went out on a limb and started the site. That’s why I’m writing today (and paying bills!) instead of telling 15,000 people per year that I won’t refund their overdraft fees.

What would you rather be doing, if only you didn’t have to do what you are doing?

Once you’ve answered that question (and I know you can) you’re going to be way too busy to read my columns anymore.

And that’s a very, very good thing.