It’s not your job to reject yourself, other people don’t need your help. Your job is to think through how to most effectively communicate and demonstrate your competency.
You can spend time thinking about why you might get turned down, but it should only be in the context of honing your approach.
You’re too smart and resourceful to concern yourself with whether or not a door is locked, your focus should be on where to apply your heel on said door after getting a running start…
I’m an Everlane fan, customer, and unpaid product evangelist.
For Black Friday, they chose not to engage in the madness that is American consumerism:
— BUY LESS, BUY BETTER —
As a business, we appreciate holiday shopping,
but we feel the excess around Black Friday has put
the focus on quantity over quality.Because we want to help people consume
less by creating fewer, longer lasting products,
we decided to shut down the site today.Have a wonderful holiday and
we’ll be back tomorrow.
That takes balls. But this message sends a very clear signal to the kind of customers that Everlane is looking to attract.
Among the comments when I posted this on Facebook:
I have been getting their emails for a while but haven’t purchased anything yet. Extra tempted now.
I’ll be buying from them tomorrow 🙂
That is SO cool, and I had never heard of that company. Because of your post, I’m now looking forward to finding out more, tomorrow.
And lots more discussion on Twitter.
To the company that makes 80% of their revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years (not uncommon in retail), this move probably looks like suicide.
But to the company that stands for something and that’s willing to draw a line in the sand, this is a (brilliant) no-brainer that will pay dividends for many weeks and months to come.
“I don’t know what I want to do with my life” is a common statement among my peers who are trying to find their calling. There are all sorts of terrible ways to address this issue, but here’s an approach that might be helpful:
Instead of trying to discover (in a vacuum) what gets you fired up, look back at the jobs you’ve taken and the projects you’ve completed. What are the common themes? And how did you feel?
Working backwards (and skipping over my last job, for reasons that will be clearer in a moment):
So if I wanted to draw some lessons from my own life and I needed to know what I should look for in a vocation that gave me joy, I’d find something that:
All of these jobs helped me hone my soft skills, my ability to connect with strangers, my ability to work under pressure (Saturday nights in a busy restaurant? Man.), and other things that benefit me to this day.
And if I were to ignore these lessons and get a cushy desk job where I interact primarily with spreadsheets and corporate drones, it might not work out so well.
Ignore the lessons staring you in the face at your own peril.
When I first started in my current role as a web performance engineer, I used to disrupt my entire department (albeit on Skype) when I was working. I wanted all hands on deck when I took on a task I was unfamiliar with because I was afraid to ruin someone’s site or break their server.
[Now that I understand a bit more about how business works, I’m aware of how awful the impact of this was for the department and company (if a project was worth $xxx and my time was worth $xxx/hr and each one of my teammates time was worth $xxx/hr, we end up losing a lot of money with every project). Whoops.]
I grew to the point where I could successfully break things without the assistance of others, but old habits lingered: if something was out of my area of comfort, I’d “outsource” the completion of it internally. It felt good because the work was getting done, I wasn’t breaking anything, and I could complete more projects in the same amount of time. Perfect!
Well, not really.
The problem is that I wasn’t growing. In my line of work, I need to develop a sixth sense for the root of problems as soon as the symptoms are introduced. There’s no other way to run support and competently (and profitably) deal with issues at scale.
In other words, I need to develop a mastery of my craft. This can only come from a tireless and focused dedication to it, regardless of how long the work takes and how painful it is.
Looking back, it’s clear that I spent the better part of a year stunting my own growth. Once the crutch was removed, there was a near overnight uptick in my rate of learning and growth. Additionally, my confidence has gone up since I now understand that the issues that seemed terrifying to me a year ago have simple fixes, or at least a very clear path to resolution.
This confidence allows me to sell better, spot potential issues from afar, and delight customers with my increased competence. Winning.
The lesson to me, aside from the obvious danger in developing a dependence on things that harm me, is that I have to be in a constant posture of evaluating the net effect of the things I do while on “autopilot.”
Habits make a man.
I forgot to mention this sooner.
The I’m Fine, Thanks site is live so the documentary can be purchased (DVD or direct download) now. Originally mentioned on the blog here.
You’re probably not too busy for a 15 minute phone call.
What’s more likely is that you don’t want to have it in the first place.
But why?
With a little effort, you can save everyone some time and create some meaningful dialog around why an opportunity is a poor fit for you or why you’re not open to discussing the opportunity.
Examining the “why” helps me a lot, even if I’m not sharing it with someone.
It’s the thinking that matters.
This applies to virtually any field or vocation:
1) Work your way up and get known through association and paying dues. Find apprenticeships, study under well-respected industry leaders, give back, and work hard.
2) Go rogue. Build a brand/name based on your observations and leverage your audience (once you’ve built it) to get where you’re trying to go.
No wrong answer here, but it’s helpful to decide up front how you’re going about it.
…is that it’s often not cheaper.
They use 0.0000872-ply paper towels at my office, and they make wonderful tissues (to give you an idea of the thinness). They do this to save money, sure. I get it.
But when I dry my hands, grasping for one results in it tearing…so I grab a few more out of necessity. This invariably causes a wad of paper towels to leave the machine as I watch in horror.
One huge deposit of slightly-used paper towels in the trash can later, I exit the restroom with a frustrated blog post in mind. They pay a lot more for paper towels in the long run because they’re being cheap.
Cheap clothes fade faster, cheap shoes fall apart, and you get what you pay for.
Typed with damp, angry hands.
I heard this phrase while listening to a webinar last week.
It resonated with me in the context of career and vocation because I have a technology degree and it has taken me years to get to the point where I could consider doing something (for money) outside of technology.
Which is funny, because I try to jump out of proverbial planes (take risks) for a living. My interests are many and varied — music, fashion, poetry, writing, technology, traveling, etc. — but I, out of habit, confine my life’s trajectory to a narrow spectrum of possibilities.
Lunacy.
The modern artist (yes, I’m an artist and you are too) combines their interests and skills and mastery and motivation to plot an original course.
I always go back to this example: when I first left my job in 2010 and started freelancing, I wasn’t able to make a living because I was particularly skilled in the areas of web design and development, I was able to build a reputation for myself and make a living because I understood what I was selling.
That is, I wasn’t selling someone art or lines of code, I was selling them a story and the ability not to worry about things that are terrifying to the people who hired me: FTP, PHP, HTML, CSS, etc. (So it seems I intuitively grasped the concept without appreciating its significance.)
In the same way, Zappos is a customer service company that happens to sell shoes, Apple is a lifestyle cult company that happens to sell computers, and a lot of luxury brands are actually selling the ability to tell others that you’re associated with them.
(Years of reading Seth’s writing has taught me how to analyze what’s actually being sold in a business instead of just taking their apparent model at face value.)
So the lesson for me here is that at the intersection of courage and insight and art and practices…lies the life I’m truly after.
I discovered in college (when I first started journaling semi-regularly) that I could gain a deeper understanding of my own positions and biases on different topics by writing about them. Writers will know what I’m talking about.
I noticed a similar phenomenon when discussing issues on the phone with friends of mine. I’d work myself into a frothy lather about a particular topic (typically things like freedom, work that matters, sticking it to the man, etc.) and find myself understanding my own positions much more clearly by discussing them.
In many cases, I’d actually surprise myself with the clarity I had and the coherence with which I spoke when passionately opining.
I’d contrast this with the distinct lack of clarity and direction on the same topics that I felt when considering them in solitude. And as I reflect on some of my old writing on this blog (which is pretty awful), I’m more motivated than ever to continue writing, sharing, and learning.