We just learned that 263,000 jobs were lost last month and for three days were besieged by headlines that scared the pants off everyone. Now how about a look at some ways to create your future instead of lose sleep over it?

I am hardly a cockeyed optimist. But I do believe that if you change your outlook you can change your outcomes. As Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shar, who teaches the popular course, Positive Psychology, says: "Optimalists are not those who believe everything happens for the best. But those who make the best of everything that happens."
What's happening in the job market? For one thing, as I wrote last week, there's a wave of emerging jobs in science, technology and engineering that are mathematically based, but not enough people with the education to fill them. One reason: Parents and the world at large haven't encouraged students to follow these paths.
"We struggle to get students to fill classes," wrote Bruce Hesher, who teaches electronics and renewable energies at the Engineering Technology program at Brevard Community College in Palm Bay, Fla.
"At the same time, I have local employers asking me to send them graduates." Students tell him "they don't want to study engineering because it is too hard. As with all things, you get out of it what you put into it."
If you want to make the best of our employment situation, you'll heed what people like Hesher are saying: Do the hard work and (maybe) the less popular thing, and you'll be rewarded.
The more specialized your skills and more difficult the training, the higher the dividend, explains Peter Morici, former director of economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Accounting, for example, is more tedious. "It's not fun learning the tax code. But it's a marketable skill. If you do what the average guy does, you'll only get what the average guy gets."
Another thing that's happening is regular upheaval. The job you're doing today will look different tomorrow.
As we've seen play out, many jobs today didn't exist 10 years ago and other jobs, as business guru Tom Peters once said, will be "destroyed or altered beyond recognition."
If you want to make the best of this and be on your toes, stop thinking and acting like there's one place you're headed for the rest of your life.
Yes, we have lost a lot of jobs. We might lose more. But I say that unless we stop focusing on the drama of what is lost, we won't have the outlook that's needed to create a better future.