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Create Your Own Job, Dirty or Otherwise: Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe of the television series 'Dirty Jobs' appears at an event to kick of American Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) advocacy campaign 'I Make America,' held at the Reserve Officers Association. The campaign is a national grassroots effort to strengthen American manufacturing jobs in the U.S. to improve economy and global competitiveness.
Tom Williams | Roll Call | Getty Images

On his show “Dirty Jobs,” Mike Rowe looks for people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do whatever it takes to put food on the table.

“It’s not just a tribute to blue-collar work and hard work, it’s a tribute to entrepreneurship,” he told CNBC’s "Street Signs"on Tuesday.

With unemployment running above 8 percent, Rowe said that“it’s not just about 10 million too few jobs, it’s about 10 million too many employees.”

(Read More: Top Ten Jobs in 2012.)

“On our show, we try to find people who are willing to, through a lens of entrepreneurship, roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and not wait for something to be created for them necessarily,” he said.

Rowe said that what gets lost in the debate about jobs, is that people don’t always need to wait for someone, somewhere to create a job before they can get back to work.

He cited the example of a man in Maine who spends his days digging through the mudflats at low-tide looking for bloodworms to sell as bait. It may be a "dirty job" but Rowe said the guy owns two houses paid for in cash. (Read More: Highest Paying Jobs in the U.S.)

Rowe's MikeRoweWorks.com site is an attempt to celebrate people who were willing to learn a skill, master a trade and who didn’t necessarily look at the path to success as one paved by a four-year degree.

“Knowledge is everything, skills matter, but there are a lot of ways to get smart and develop a skill,” Rowe said.