Many Americans are scrambling this week to pay their taxes before the April 15 deadline. It's a stressful time for many of us. Do we really need the added stress? Add to that the stresses of work and it's almost easy to see why Americans take so many anti-depressants. Our lives become a pressure cooker balancing all the responsibilities of home, work, and family.

Sometimes the stress from work comes from being in the wrong place. We are working long hours at jobs we hate to make money to pay bills for things we buy to take our minds off the work we hate. Cool, huh? How about the following statistics from my friend Dan Miller's book 48 Days to the Work You Love:

Social Media has exploded onto the scene in the last few years. There are almost too many sites to name. The biggest ones are probably MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. What you are doing on these sites, or not doing, can aid or hinder your job search success. You need to remember that the information you display on these sites is visible to virtually anyone.

I'm a very fortunate guy. After yesterday's article, a friend I greatly respect emailed me and took me to task for conveying a hopeless situation to readers of the article. That certainly was not the intention. She ended her note to me with the admonition "They need hope, help and encouragement." This is a very fair statement and I am taking it to heart. As I have stated before, my goal is to motivate individuals to take charge to not only find work, but to find work they love. The truth is, even though we do get a lot of doom and gloom from the media, there is hope for job seekers, and they should be optimistic.

The statistics continue to show that unemployment is rising still. It certainly isn't getting any better. The numbers show that the majority of job gains were in Government, Education and Health Services, Other Services, and Leisure and Hospitality categories. Jobs were lost in the Manufacturing, Financial Activities and Information categories.

If you look at the job gains, most of them show in the government sector. One of the reasons people in the past have worked in the government sector was for job security. Unfortunately, government positions and salaries have grown so large that it is going to be unsustainable. Government will have to cut back. This is already being seen at the local and state level.

Unemployment for young people ages 16-29 is at 15.2%, the highest since 1948. The current recession has seen young people moving back in with their parents to make ends meet, and college grads are facing a difficult job market with lots of student debt.