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March 19, 2012

What is the best career advice?

Mark Cuban gives advice about following your effort over passion and people listen because of his success and authority. Dick Bolles sells millions of copies of What color is your parachute? and people listen because, well, a lot of other people are listening. The idea of social proof continues for Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, both successful entrepreneurs who promote a start-up mentality to work and life fulfillment.

Everyone's right in some way. All these perspectives are vetted, come from credible sources and help people get jobs. The authors though have differing opinions when it comes to passion v. effort in deciding which career path to pursue.

It's similar to love v. arranged approaches to marriage. Going after your passion is a strong Western sentiment. Love comes first and effort maintains it. Arranged marriages are set on the opposite premise. Put effort into a relationship you may or may not have passion for. It develops over time the more you work at it. Mark Cuban support this mentality when it comes to careers. Often love of work comes directly through the effort.

The hybrid approach to marriage also seems to be gaining popularity. You have a short courting phase where you test out the potential relationship and eek out whether personalities will jive. Then, after a period of 2 weeks to 3 months, you decide to get married and put in the effort.

Extrapolate to the job market and it looks very similar. You try out a job for a few months, perhaps through an internship, freelance work, informational interviews or mentor shadowing. You gauge whether it's a fit with your personality, work ethic, lifestyle balance, income needs, etc. Then you solidly give it your all.

It should be noted that he hybrid analogy breaks down when you look at the structure of the market. Though the changing nature of arranged marriages may harbor greater equality in decision making for future partners, in the job market employers still have much more power than applicants. Most are not lenient to a courting phase. They have the ultimate hiring power. This isn't very beneficial to either party as employers hire employees with good skill sets but poor fit and employees struggle to find power in a one-sided dynamic.

Regardless, the approaches to discovering one's career path are diversifying, sending a strong signal that the status quo is shifting. It's not so much that Reid Hoffman's advice is better than Mark Cuban's advice or that there's one right way.

It's once again a matter of what fits you in particular. Some people would find a passionate approach more suited to them and others would prefer an effort-based approach. For some, testing the market through a hybrid method might work.

It's not so black and white. There's never one prescription that works for everyone. By writing this post, I too am giving advice. And in a world of advisers, being a cautious judge is a necessary skill, perhaps the one skill that will determine personal fulfillment.

March 17, 2012

The Dirty Life of an Entrepreneur


Kristin Kimball's transition from city to farm held strong notes of my personal transition from 9-5 work life to the free-wheeling, self-disciplined road of entrepreneurship. Though The Dirty Life came second-hand as a fast read, it took me a while to get through it. I almost fell into my habit of putting books down 3/4 of the way through and coming back to them later.

I'm glad I didn't though, because a brilliant observation about being a pro versus an amateur was waiting in the last few pages.
"...I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life."
There's steadiness in a 9-5 job that is nonexistent in self-employment. The steady stream of ups and downs are the only constant. You get used to it. You learn the pulse of your industry and match your own bursts of productivity to it. When the lull comes, it require utter patience, a careful waiting and watching and knowing when you'll need to act again. 

You keep yourself occupied with the never-ending upkeep you could never anticipate when starting a company; the banking, the outreach, the cold calls, cold emails, cold social media, writing contracts, writing copy, writing claims, the back and forth of scheduling anything with more than two people, the warmer in-person coffees, the building of relationships commonly misconstrued as networking. They're not exactly chores, though they seem like it at first. Here's where The Dirty Life comes in to explain:
"The word chore connotes tedium, but that was not how I felt about them. I had missed my chores. Chores were the first taste of the weather, first effort of limbs, a dance to which I knew all the steps with certainty."
The outcome is uncertain, but the steps are all familiar, whether you're just out of college or a 20-year corporate veteran. Writing is a necessary skill, market research becomes a part of daily life, conversation always holds a hint of personal and professional. The transparency takes some getting used to. In a large work environment, the buck can always be passed. The only person negatively affected when you pass the buck on your own dime is you. Personal accountability reigns supreme. You find you, which can be a scary prospect. You're not self-reflecting anymore, you're self-acting.

The part of The Dirty Life that resonated with me the most was Kristin Kimball's evolutionary loss of the meme of daily commerce. When you're off the clock so to say, time isn't an elephant in the room anymore. It isn't to be contended with. You discover a rhythm for yourself, not realizing it's discordant with the society you used to know. Kimball conveys the essence of this shift away from the "norm" with her disappearing longing for shopping:
"The last old habit to fall away was shopping. I could feel the need to shop building up in me during the week, like an itch. I'm not talking about shopping for clothes, or shoes, or any of the other recreational kinds of shopping people generally do. I mean only the oddly comforting experience of flowing past shiny new merchandise, the everyday exchange of money for goods. In the city, most of the landscape is made up of objects for sale, and it's nearly impossible to leave your apartment without buying something - a newspaper, a cup of coffee, a bright bunch of Korean market flowers. When I went for days without buying anything, without setting eyes on commerce, without even starting the car to burn up some gas, I felt an achy withdrawal."
I especially feel this way when I don't get out of the house all day. I often wonder what I spent so much of my money on though. The coping coffees, the hot truck lunches appealing to that longing of wanting something "different", the regularity of eating out that makes eating in seem a luxury. The cycle of self-fulfilling commercial life sustaining itself.

I'm cognizant of being an amateur and the new beginnings I'm going through. Loss is not something you get used to easily, but it feels different when it's a shedding of habits you didn't really mean to acquire in the first place. They came packaged with the environment. A farm is quite different from a company, but I found a kinship to Kimball's personal evolution in a new environment that she only partially chose herself.

March 8, 2012

OHIO, the most productive state

I was introduced to the only handle it once (OHIO) principle a little over a month ago through John Halamka's very informative blog. I had to try it out and see for myself if it worked before sharing it.

The idea seemed so simple and obvious, I put it into effect immediately after reading his post. Handling the majority of work-related tasks only once is as easy as it sounds. Maintaining it is about making friends with your conscience. John puts it simply:
"The end result of this approach is that I truly only handle each issue, document, or phone call once. It's processed and it's done without delay or a growing inbox. I work hard not to be the rate limiting step to any process."
That's it.

I used to check my email right when I got out of bed, simmering over my responses as I got ready for work. The ten minutes I took to do so was mostly deleting, prioritizing and marking items as unread so I could get back to them. This added little benefit and made my morning routine more stressful.

Now, when I open an email, or even unlock my phone to check it, I know for a fact that I'm going to deal with it then and there. No putting it off, no delays. This doesn't necessarily lessen the pile of work on my desk, but it lessens the noise in my mind. Putting my entire focus on the task at hand lets me read, digest, respond and move on.

I've only mentioned email so far because it represents such a huge portion of my work, but OHIO works in most cases. Research, writing, brainstorming, scheduling, delegating all work well when handled only once. If there's follow up necessary, I've only sped the process along so I can take care of the next step.

What happens when I don't handle it once? It's a constant nag if I skip out on something and say I'll do it later. I know from years of experience not doing it this way that I'll have to deal with it anyway the next day on top of whatever else arrives. It's not worth it and I get back on track as quickly as possible.

I have become much more efficient by following OHIO and my mind is much more at ease tackling only what I put in front of it. Quality and efficiency.

Try only handling tasks once and see what happens. I hope you have as good an experience as I have had.

March 7, 2012

How to "Be here now"

In light of my last post, I'm going to give you the philosophical summary right away and then build to it with the actual story of how I got to this summary. When I read this summary much later, which I typed on my iPhone right after the conversation that led to this stream of thought, I as the author didn't understand it. It was like trying to read your hand writing and not having a clue what it says. It seems zen, overly contrived and kitschy now. But that's because, like most philosophical ramblings, it has no context. Hopefully it will make sense after the fact.
"We are in the perfect place and don't even realize it. Expectations explain everything. If I told you your future, you still wouldn't be happy because who wants to know the ending of a story before they read it? Your story, your life, has to transpire for you to think back on it.

Be here now, because no one can set you up for the perfect. If they did, it wouldn't be perfect. So stop seeking the perfect. Nothing will be more uncertain, more random, more spontaneous, more surprising than it is now. You're already in the perfect state of mind to experience the unknown."
I was at a dinner party the other night with a lot of artsy people. Literally, there were sculptors, architects, graphic designers, and such. Being on the business side of healthcare, this was not my usual crowd, and I was loving the change of social scenery.

I got into an engrossing conversation with a young couple consisting of a sculptor and an art student. The ambiance was perfect. We'd all had about one glass of wine, a little food, the lights weren't dim nor were they bright. The general noise level was medium, there was a hum of conversation but not too loud so you didn't have to yell, like in a club. It was the definition of "chill".

As it goes at these events, we were talking about what each of us did and somehow the conversation drifted towards expectations. We all came in with strong expectations of what the event was supposed to represent. We assumed it would be a gallery-like exhibit with an uppity Manhattan hipster feel. The presentations would be extremely abstract, sensible only in the vacuum of the current crowd.

We were generally right, but the people at the event made all the difference. They were strong-minded, yet open-minded. Firm, but friendly. Rich, but gracious. Whatever picture we came in with was repainted by the people there. It wasn't fun in the sense a house party with your friends is fun, but the warmth of the attendees made us all amenable to deeper conversation (than expected).

The couple and I discovered we all shared a similar sentiment about the unraveling of our expectations and talking to others in the crowd only reinforced our view. We realized we were also a part of that friendliness that made it so welcoming. The way I'm describing it makes it seem like some kind of like-minded commune party, but it just happened to have the right elements to make all of us "click".

We were all very much made aware that nothing could have prepared us for this moment in time. It wasn't overly special or exciting, but it befuddled our expectations of what we supposed it to be. One could say our expectations helped to shape our view of the event after all, considering how our perspective changed because we held onto preset beliefs coming in. In this light, I suppose expectations can create a favorable outcome, but very rarely. They didn't add to the effect so much that they were needed.

Understanding this gave us a reality check about being in the moment. No matter what someone tells us about a place, no matter what hype is built around it, nothing can prepare us for the actual thing, boring or thrilling though it might be. It just is. And that zen sort of explanation was palpable right then, prompting me to write about it in a such an abstract way.

From this experience and others like it, I've come to believe that zen-like spiritual writing can only make sense in the right context. You could in fact call this an expectation. It's more of a premonition though.

If you read a simple zen quote, for example, "The obstacle is the path", at first it's frustrating. Second time around, you start relating it to personal experience and understand it's wisdom. But until you truly feel it, in the atmosphere from which it came, understanding the context behind it, it's difficult to ingrain into your life, and even more difficult to pass onto others. Some sayings you hold onto and at some point in your life, it hits you "SMACK", like hands clapping together hard right in front of you. You "get" it. Grok it, perhaps?

I hate when people say "you had to be there", so I tried to describe the origin of abstract thought. We all do this daily with each other, using narrative, song, theater, art, and other mediums that will get our message across. Language is only the start. Our communication depends on effectively explaining the "you had to be there" moment.

Explaining "Be here now" and making it actionable is tough. As an abstract writer and thinker, I personally find this to be an even greater challenge. "The obstacle is the path" and I'm pushing through it I'm riding that wave.