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The Twisted Path of a Job Experimenter

Posted: Thursday December 22, 2011 under Lead Myself

Back in the early 90s, in the first and only real job I ever had, I got some career advice. My boss’s boss told me I should try to change jobs every three years. Three years in any job was long enough, she said. After that it was time to move on. Do something else. Learn something else. Climb the ladder or move the ladder.

Because she was my boss’s boss, I didn’t tell her she was already talking to a master job changer—a job experimenter, we prefer.

I’ve always had rather iffy career aspirations. My mom got this book for my brother and I before we started kindergarten called “[insert your name]’s School Years.” One of the things you can record each year is what you’d like to be when you grow up…. Boys had a choice of fireman, policeman, cowboy, astronaut, soldier, baseball player, and ‘other.’ (It’s kind of an old book.) There’s no indication of what I wanted to be until the 6th grade — my last year of elementary school. For ‘other,’ I wrote in “duck farmer.” Now, I remember liking ducks (we lived on a little lake back then), and I’m not completely sure how duck farmers make money, but I’m guessing it doesn’t end so well for the ducks. Anyway, I could work that out with my guidance counselor.

By high school, I’d decided I’d rather kill trees than ducks. I was going to be a writer … a journalist, in particular. My brother and I started a little neighborhood newspaper called “The Toilet Paper Tribune.” The first issue was about four pages with little articles about our neighbors, celebrity news, bad jokes, stuff like that. Our next-door neighbor owned his own business, and we proudly handed him our first issue, which he agreed to take to work and copy for us. What we didn’t know was that our neighbor had his own iffy career aspirations, in politics, and he apparently wasn’t thrilled about our press coverage of he and his wife (who he was not actually married to at the time). He said the copy machine ate The Toilet Paper Tribune, thus ending my brief sojourn in journalism. He went on to be president of the state senate.

Over the remainder of my high school and college years, I had a nice array of job experiments. I call these my beer-money jobs. I could tell stories about each one but we’d be here all day, so I’ll just run through them.

• “Bottle boy” at a grocery store. (Back when Cokes, Pepsis, and RCs all came in glass bottles, I was the poor kid who hauled the empty recycled bottles off in a cart and stocked them in a cold, soul-crushing room at the back of the store.)
• Dishwasher at a night club
• Gopher for a flooring company
• Dishwasher (again) at a Chinese restaurant
• Mail sorter at the post office
• Medical records clerk at a hospital
• Door-to-door encyclopedia salesman
• Movie theater usher
• One-hour photo lab technician
• Graveyard shift at an insurance company data center (for three consecutive college summers, before you think I’m a total flake)
• Ad proofreader for the Yellow Pages
• Bookstore salesman
• Writing tutor for undergrads and foreign grad students

Between college and grad school, I spent several weeks in Europe where I took up journalism again, sort of. In southern England I heard on the news about a team that was conducting the definitive search for the Loch Ness Monster, so I hopped a train. I semi-pretended to be a freelance journalist, which got me a lengthy interview with the team leaders at a pub in Drumnadrochit, Scotland. They invited me back for the following year’s definitive search, but it wasn’t to be.

I thought I might go back to Europe after grad school, to live, but I took a quick temp job (for beer money) and ended up getting hired into that first and only real job. AT&T Universal Card Services was a new credit card company that had just launched in Jacksonville, and they hired me as a writer, first writing relocation materials for execs moving down from other states, then writing HR policies, then writing management training courses. I started as the lowest Level 2 manager and was a Level 6 manager when I decided to leave five years (to the day) later.

It wasn’t duck farming that lured me away from my blossoming corporate career, but it was close. I moved to the gulf coast to become a clam farmer. The short explanation is that you take very, very small clams and raise them to a size that can be sold to restaurants and other places for consumption. It involved scuba diving every day and lots of dirty, physical labor. Over the next several years, I learned a million ways to kill a clam, but I never really figured out how to keep one alive long enough to make any money.

Luckily, at the same time I was killing clams (and scraping barnacles off the bottoms of yachts for side money), some of my old AT&T colleagues had moved on to other companies and were offering me freelance work writing management training courses again. In 1997 I officially started my own little training business, and contrary to what my boss’s boss suggested to me back at AT&T, I’ve gone a bit past the three-year mark with this one. Although, every new project with every new client is a bit of a job change, and I get just enough exposure to the corporate grind to keep from running off and buying a passel of ducks.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments the better.” I think Ralph would have approved of my twisted path as a job experimenter. And, if everything were to go south tomorrow, I’d throw on a new lab coat and try something else, again.

Happy experimenting in 2012!

How to Do Something You’ve Always Wanted to Do (After Putting It Off Your Whole Life)

Posted: Saturday November 19, 2011 under Lead Myself

I can think of three big things I wish I’d done years ago when I first wanted to do them.

• Invest in Apple back when I got my first Mac in 1990 (and thought it and I were the coolest things around),
• See Paul McCartney in concert back in the 70s (instead of waiting until he was in his 70s), and …
• Finish the novel I started back in 5th grade (though, granted, the story of a mob hitman turned on-the-run circus clown was a little thin).

Not so horrible I guess, as regrets go. And, I’ve been making amends lately. This year I bit the Apple and bought six shares (it’s really pricey now), I’m tracking Sir Paul’s upcoming tour dates, and I just finished my first novel, which has nothing to do with hitmen or circus clowns. Buying a stock and going to a concert are really too easy (ugh!), so I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at what I learned from finally taking the plunge into novel writing, after putting it off my whole life.

Lesson 1: Figure out what’s been holding you back.

The main question I had to ask myself (and, I think, we all have to ask ourselves) is: Why do I keep saying “some day I will” instead of saying “today I will”? The top things on my list are probably pretty typical:

• Writing a novel is hard.
• It’s going to take a long time.
• I write all day for work, and the last thing I want to do at the end of that is sit back in front of a computer and write some more.
• I’ve waited too long; I’ve missed my chance.
• There’s a good chance I’ll work really hard and really stink at it.
• Maybe it’s not as important to me as I thought.

All these thoughts went through my head for years as I kept putting off the thing I kept telling myself, and other people, was my biggest dream. These are the thoughts that had been holding me back.

Lesson 2: Chip away at what’s been holding you back.

I knew that writing a novel really was important, during all those years of not writing it, and I never gave up on it completely. I had ideas, I took notes, I read other first-time authors, I kept loitering around the bookstores, and I kept saying “some day I will.” Then some key things aligned that finally got me thinking differently.

• More Time – Thanks to a lull in the economy and in our workload a few years ago, I wasn’t spending 10 to 12 hours a day writing for work. I was still working, but the idea of splitting my time seemed a lot more doable.
• Short Novels – A lot of the new books I was reading were under 300 pages and read like glorified movie scripts, which didn’t seem all that hard. These authors weren’t writing Moby Dick or anything. I figured I could do that. I could even do better than that.
• Old Authors – I began noticing authors who started writing later in life. Ian Fleming didn’t write his first James Bond novel until he was 44, and he wrote a bunch of them. One retired engineer was Paul McCartney’s age when he started writing a popular mystery series (he just released book four). I realized it definitely wasn’t too late for me.

This was how I, personally, started chipping away at the obstacles and justifications that had been holding me back. One at a time. Figure them out and challenge them.

Lesson 3: Take the first small step.

It’s easy to look at the giant task ahead of you and decide it’s just too much to tackle. For me, there was the writing 3 to 5 hours a day, most every day. Then the trying to find an agent and trying to get published and trying to market a book once it’s published. You look at all the books in the bookstore and you don’t realize that an extremely small percentage of writers ever get published and a much smaller percentage of them ever make any money at it.

But my basic goal was to write a novel, not THE novel, or even a published novel (though that would be great). I just wanted to take the leap, take the step. I figured after doing one I’d have a pretty good idea if I had any desire to do more.

So, I tried not to think about the whole scary animal sitting in front of me. My first small step was committing to sit down from 6 to 10 in the morning to try and write. I didn’t put any pressure on myself to crank out 5 pages a day or anything. Just sit in the chair and try. I had a vague sense where I wanted to go in the story, but no definite path. I just hoped one small step would lead to another until I ended up somewhere.

Lesson 4: Keep at it.

The one thing you learn after your first small step is that there are lots of reasons to step back off, to take a day off (or a week or a month), to let those things that held you back before hold you back again. It’s not easy to keep at a first novel: you get writer’s block, you read over what you wrote yesterday and gag, you spend a whole day trying to get one sentence just right. Even if you’re not writing Moby Dick, it’s hard.

But it helped to go back to my one simple goal: to sit in that chair, just that, even if nothing came out. That wasn’t so hard. Sit there. Think. Doodle. Play with a character’s name. Something. Anything. One small step at a time.

Kathryn Stockett submitted her first novel, The Help, to over 60 agents before anyone even agreed to try and sell it to a publisher. That’s 60 rejection letters. (I’ve gotten about 10 so far.) What if she’d given up after rejection number 10? Or 20? Or 40? Or even 60? She didn’t. She kept at it. Now she has a bestselling debut novel that also became a hit movie.

Lesson 5: Enjoy it … Enjoy the journey.

This is the biggest lesson I learned. Life’s too short to fill your days with sucky stuff. Writing is hard, and it can really suck sometimes, but the overall doing of it is highly gratifying, I found, enough so to get me to well over 500 pages in my first draft (which is way too long). After four drafts, I’ve gotten it down to 400 pages, and now I’m five chapters into novel number two, which I’m enjoying … mostly.

I reached my goal of becoming an unpublished novelist, and now I can work towards my next goal of becoming a published one. I’ve learned some good lessons about how to do things I’ve been putting off. Now I’m just trying to make sure I take some leaps, take some small steps, and enjoy it all as much as I can.

Wonder if I’d enjoy reading over those old hitman clown chapters.

Banning Words for Fun and Profit (Part 3)

Posted: Sunday October 16, 2011 under Lead Myself

Welcome back, Grasshopper. When we finished Part II, you may have been thinking that you’d found the soft white underbelly to my theory that can’t is an abomination of a word that should be stricken from the language. But the very questions you asked in steps 2 and 3 are the same questions you’ll answer to remove the barriers you found in steps 2 and 3.

• Step 1: I can survive unprotected at the bottom of the Mariana Trench when I genetically modify myself with gills to extract air from seawater, and reinforce my cell structure to survive in the pressure, but I can’t genetically modify myself.
• Step 2: I can genetically modify myself if I become an expert in genetic engineering.
• Step 3: I can become an expert in genetic engineering when I go earn a BS in Biology, then earn a Master’s and a PhD in genetics, then work for a dozen years on genetic engineering project with a group of scientists who are focused on developing water survival modifications.

See? You can dig as deeply as you need to, but eventually you will find a way to achieve your goal. Let’s look at one more:

• Step 1: I can quit my job and start a business when I downgrade my standard of living while I build a business, but I don’t know what kind of business to start.
• Step 2: I can know what kind of business to start if I research possible business opportunities that would be a good fit.
• Step 3: I can know what would be a good fit when I invest in career coaching, skills and interests tests, and time alone to figure out how my blend of skills, values, and interests intersect.

Question 4: Do I really want it?

Now you know that you can do that thing you were sure you couldn’t do, and so there’s only one question left for you to answer: Am I willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen?

Am I willing to go back to college to earn another Bachelor’s degree? Am I willing to then spend another couple of year’s to earn a Master’s degree? Am I willing to then spend yet another several years on coursework for a PhD, followed by another year or more of largely unpaid work to complete my dissertation?

If the answer is yes, then go forward and achieve that goal. If the answer is no, then you don’t really want it. Or maybe you really want it, but it isn’t that high a priority for you. Either way, you’ve freed yourself from the notion that you’re powerless to make it happen.

You can use this technique to overcome any obstacle that’s getting in your way, and it’s a simple matter of changing your perspective. When you’re tempted to say you can’t, stop. Think about what would have to happen for you to be able to do your thing. Then choose to do it or not, but don’t give away your power to make that choice by using the worst four-letter word there is.

Kick the can’t.

Challenge your thinking.

Change your life.

Change the world.

(Contributed by CYMer, Kathleen Jaffe. Twitter: http://twitter.com/kathleenjaffe)

Banning Words for Fun and Profit (Part 2)

Posted: Monday September 26, 2011 under Lead Myself

If you haven’t read Part I, go do that. I’ll wait.

Done? Fantastic! Now, get out your homework, because today you’re going to take the next steps toward doing what you want to do.

Those fleshed out reasons why you can’t do your thing contain the seeds that will help you blow the roadblocks away, because what you’ve just done by answering ‘Why?’ is explain that you can’t do your thing at this moment, with your current resources.

Question 2: What if?

Take your I can’t and rephrase it as I can, if… The goal is to list ways around the obstacles, and it doesn’t matter if the workaround is plausible. This is brainstorming mode, so every possibility goes on the list.

I can be Miss America if…

• I can remove the age restriction, or
• I can convince people that plump, middle-aged women are the epitome of sex appeal, or
• I can travel back in time and enter the pageant circuit when I was young and lovely.

I can survive unprotected at the bottom of the Mariana Trench if…

• I can genetically modify myself with gills to extract air from seawater, and reinforce my cell structure to survive in the pressure.

I can grow to 6 feet tall if…

• I start growing again, or
• I pay a surgeon to perform bone-lengthening surgery.

I can live forever if…

• I discover a way to salvage my brain without having to keep the rest of my body alive (hey, if they can do it on Futurama, why can’t I?), or
• I design artificial organs that work effectively and don’t cause rejection.

I can quit my job and start a business if…

• I save enough money to pay the bills while I work on building a business, or
• I move the family into my sister’s house while I build a business, or
• I’m willing to downgrade my standard of living while I build a business.

I can change the world if…

• I find other people who think like I do, and we band together to do something big, or
• I come up with an enormous idea that will change the way people go about their daily lives.

Question 3: When?

The next step is to change if to when. This is important, because you’re taking a group of nebulous possibilities and funneling them down into tasks you could conceivably complete. Using the same examples:

• I can be Miss America when I remove the age restriction.
• I can survive unprotected at the bottom of the Mariana Trench when I genetically modify myself with gills to extract air from seawater, and reinforce my cell structure to survive in the pressure.
• I can grow to 6 feet tall when I pay a surgeon to perform bone-lengthening surgery.
• I can live forever when I design artificial organs that work effectively and don’t cause rejection.
• I can quit my job and start a business when I downgrade my standard of living while I build a business.
• I can change the world when I find other people who think like I do, and we band together to do something big.

But wait!

When you review your I can, when… list, you may find there are still things you think you can’t do. This could lead you to think that my premise is flawed. It’s not, and I’ll show you why in Part III. Today’s homework: Answer questions 2 and 3 for the thing you want to do but think you can’t.

(Contributed by CYMer, Kathleen Jaffe. Twitter: http://twitter.com/kathleenjaffe)

Banning Words for Fun and Profit

Posted: Tuesday August 16, 2011 under Lead Myself

I have a deep and abiding affection for well-placed and well-phrased expletives. Certainly, I don’t pepper every conversation with four-letter words (they are surprisingly unwelcome at parent-teacher conferences), but sometimes, nothing else will do (case in point: watching the Sunday morning political news roundup).

Not all four-letter words are created equal

There is, however, one four-letter word that is so evil, so vile, so sinister, and so flat-out destructive that it needs to be removed from our collective vocabulary. That word is can’t.

We use can’t to say that a task or goal is impossible, and we’re wrong. Can’t is often I choose not to, dressed up so we can justify not taking action. You may think I’m wrong, and I understand; I used to be a can’t apologist myself, and like any bad habit, it’s difficult to shake.

You may think, So maybe we overuse ‘can’t.’ But surely there are times when it’s perfectly appropriate.

I maintain that it’s never appropriate. (And, because it can’t be said enough, don’t call me Shirley.)

By now you’re probably wracking your brain for the most outlandish situations you can think of that will help you prove that can’t deserves to live, right? Okay, I’ll play along:

• I can’t be Miss America
• I can’t survive unprotected at the bottom of the Mariana Trench
• I can’t grow to become 6 feet tall
• I can’t live forever
• I can’t quit my job and start a business
• I can’t change the world

Proving that you really can do any of these things is a matter of answering four questions:

1. Why?
2. What if?
3. When?
4. Do I really want it?

Question 1: Why?

The first thing you have to do is figure out why you can’t do the thing you’re so sure you can’t do. Why is that the first step? Because it forces you to think beyond the knee-jerk, “I can’t possibly do that,” so you can clearly state the real (not imagined) obstacles that stand in your way.

• I can’t be Miss America because I’m in my mid-forties and, as my hubby says, pleasingly plump (ok, I’m a fat chick). Miss America has to be young and beautiful.
• I can’t survive unprotected at the bottom of the Mariana Trench because I’m a land-dwelling, air-breathing mammal and would be crushed by 16,000 psi.
• I can’t grow to 6 feet tall because I finished growing at 5′1″.
• I can’t live forever because entropy is a galactic given and we all die.
• I can’t quit my job and start a business because I have bills to pay and a family to help support.
• I can’t change the world because I’m just one person, and the problems of the world are too big.

In Part II, we’ll cover questions 2 and 3. Your homework assignment is to identify something you really want to do, but that you think you can’t do. Write it down, and then write out the reason (or reasons) why you can’t do it.

(Contributed by CYMer, Kathleen Jaffe. Twitter: http://twitter.com/kathleenjaffe)