One of my guilty pleasures is watching The Apprentice. The guilt comes from the fact that I watch it with my two sons, and I worry about the show?s underlying messages. For example, success for women in business is inversely proportional to skirt length and directly proportional to cleavage.

Using the show as an hour-long teaching moment, I?ve explained to my boys how far all this is from reality.

I?m rethinking the message about being fired, though, because I?m learning there are a number of people out there who believe that being fired was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Peter Shankman looks back on being fired as an impetus to change his life for the better. Shankman, was one of 300 employees laid off from America Online in two hours in 1996. He ?freaked out for about 20 minutes,? he recalls, and then decided to move to New York from Virginia. ?Around the time Titanic was coming out on video,? he said, ?I had T-shirts printed up that read, ?It Sank. Get Over It?.? He sold thousands and used the profits to start his own PR firm, Geek Factory.

A changing world might just be transforming being fired from a humiliation to a rite of passage. ?Equate it with divorce,? says Harvey Mackay, a best-selling author whose latest book is We Got Fired! ... And It?s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us. ?In the old days, it was unspeakable. Now, it happens, you cope and move on.?

Mackay says he has interviewed dozens of celebrities who clearly have not suffered in the long term from being dismissed. Walt Disney, Mackay goes on to point out, was fired from a newspaper job because he didn?t generate ideas. J. K. Rowling lost several secretarial jobs because she wrote stories on her office computer.

The belief that being fired can eventually lead to happiness clearly won?t pay the bills, but it might provide some solace. Knowing others were in her same boat certainly helped Cathy Wald, a non-fiction writer who was trying to become a novelist but having a hard time getting going. Rejection letters are the writer?s version of pink slips, and Wald acquired a substantial collection.

Fighting back, she proposed a book about rejection, The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors. It was rejected by several publishers, but eventually, Persea Books bought it, which will be published this year.

?NYTNS