Good advice

Seeing as to how this week has gone down a kind of careers pathway, I’ll close it out with this Pro Tip:

While I’m sure that no hiring manager is favorably impressed with a job aspirant screwing up his/her name, it’s pretty much the kiss of death for any career that revolves around communication through the written word. 

This Mr. Holton's ears must still be crimson at the memory 40 years on. One wonders if he left the field of journalism altogether and became, perhaps, an investment banker, where all anyone cares about is the number of digits to the left of the decimal.

 

Career sidestreet

Further to yesterday’s post about not signing up to the course that’s all about writing a book, I was thinking about the instructor’s suggestion that it would be swell if I wanted to use publishing my idea about strategies women use to shift careers around age 50 as a way to start, say, a coaching and speaking business.

This guy framed the suggestion within the context of knowing me, but if he did, he’d know that such a business is not anything to which I’d aspire. Spending 14 weeks writing about anything doesn’t make you an expert in it; it only—best case—scratches the surface. I’m not going to prance around yapping at people about the one tiny part of the subject I think I understand; so, no.

But it occurred to me, looking at the profile of a self-described coach and speaker on Twitter, that this is in fact the model for a good number of people describing themselves as speakers and coaches. They keep regurgitating the same few one-size-fits-all “guaranteed [number] of steps” to success, regardless of the audience. The only guaranteed success element of their methodologies is the one that fills their bank accounts. I wonder if they started out in a writing course?

I’m insulted that the instructor thinks I’d want to join their ranks.

Cradle me

Yesterday was pretty craptastic, even before we got to #SOTU.

I’d been toying with the notion of taking a course whose object is to publish a book. My idea was to write about mid-life career changes, but turns out there’s no point to going through the course if all you’re going to do is publish a book; it’s supposed to be a stepping stone to something else—a great job offer or a new gig. Well, I know I’d never get a job offer on the back of my book idea, and I’d rather swallow coarsely-ground glass than start up a coaching or speaking career about mid-life career changing.

So that was a bummer.

Then, I spoke with someone who’d said he’d be happy to help with my job search (but has been remarkably unforthcoming), and asked him about a specific company that makes community engagement software. He knows most of senior management of this company, so I asked for an introduction. Oh, well, um—I should talk with my recently ex-manager about this company—he introduced him to the company, and I probably wouldn’t like the culture there. (Dude—my ex-manager doesn’t know I’m job hunting; I’m not going to ask him about the culture of a company I’m looking into as my next gig. Just come out and tell me you’re not going to be any help.)

So that was a bummer.

Then there’s all the news from the cesspool that’s the White House and Capitol, which I don’t have the stomach to summarize. Suffice it to say I did not watch the Kleptocrat struggle against sundowning to read the teleprompter last night.

And that’s a real bummer.

No, I got home yesterday afternoon and just inundated myself in something that’s unequivocally beautiful: music. And here’s one of the pieces I chose.

I first heard Natalie Merchant’s “Motherland” a couple of weeks after I returned from my European assignment in October, 2001. I was in my car, listening to someone from NPR interview her on a Sunday morning, and she sang it live in the studio. I kept driving down Route 7 until I got to Tower Records in Tysons, and I bought the CD.

I’ve not thought about it for a while, but its lyrics seem especially appropriate these days. What’s crawling about a thousand miles a day now is worse than concrete. Lust and avarice? Yeah. 

We have got to figure out a way through this.

And I have to figure out a way to get over the bummer that was yesterday.

Lost and found

One of the straps on my backpack bag was starting to disconnect, so I dropped it off at a repair place last Saturday. Since I won’t get it back until this coming Saturday, I had to swap my stuff into an alternative. I’ve had that bag in constant use for two-and-a-half years, so having to carry around something different is a huge break in my pattern.

Sunday morning, I popped out to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for my workweek breakfasts and lunches. I didn’t want to haul my substitute bag, which is a cavernous canvas jobber from J. Peterman that’s mostly used for travelling (it will hold two cameras, a laptop, a folding umbrella and my journal with way too much room to spare for more stuff), so I just took my wallet and a tote bag with me. I paid for my groceries, popped my wallet in the bag and came home, thinking to myself, “Self, remember to put the wallet back in your bag, because you’re going out to lunch later.”

Well, I put away the groceries in the refrigerator, made breakfast and did some work until it was time to meet my friend for lunch. As I was about to walk out the door, I thought it might be good to check that I had, in fact, put the wallet in the bag, and I discovered that indeed I had not.

You ever had one of those searches where you start out looking in logical and reasonable places, and then move on to ridiculous and stupid places? Yeah, that was me. For 20 minutes, I looked in the J. Peterman bag (which only had three things in it) repeatedly, checked the pockets of my parka, ran upstairs, riffled through papers; bupkis. Also: I looked in the refrigerator, behind the container of cottage cheese I'd bought. Twice. Eventually I grabbed a couple of twenties from my backup stash and went out to meet my friend.

On the way over, I called Whole Foods (even though I distinctly remembered dumping the wallet in my tote bag after I paid for the groceries, but remember: once you start down Stupid Street, you find it’s one-way, and you just have to keep on). Nope, no wallet.

I had a nice lunch and a major catch-up, which is always nice, and then I came back for another round of searching. I recalled one of my friends going through a similar exercise the week before—she was trying to remember where she’d put her passport. Someone posted something like “Seven Steps to Finding Everything You’ve Lost”: methodologies for trying to remember where you left stuff. I didn’t read the link, because at the time Susan was looking for her passport, I hadn’t lost anything. But just as I was considering PMing her to ask for the link, I recalled how she eventually found the passport. She associated it with the last time she’d used it (on an African trip), and then fished out the envelope where she’d put all her leftover Rand. Hey, presto!

So, I started associating what I do when I come home with shopping; one of my constants is to put the receipt in a kitchen drawer. I opened the receipt drawer, and Eureka!

Massive relief, because I almost never use cash, and in addition to my driver’s license, two credit cards and ATM card, my wallet holds all my supermarket and restaurant affinity cards, my Dolcezza frequent drinker and District Taco frequent eater punch cards, library cards for four local systems, and the paid receipt for my handbag repair. I would not fancy having to replace that lot.

Gratitude Monday: a helping hand

A couple of weeks ago I got a message through LinkedIn from a woman who said she’d just moved to the District They Call Columbia from San Francisco, and noted that we seemed to have some similarities in background. She asked if I’d be willing to share my experience in making the transition from California to DC, and from tech to non-profit.

Well, you know—LinkedIn, right? But I thought, oh, why not, and I connected with her (I’ll call her Carol) on LinkedIn. She said she was interested in a couple of positions at my company, and would I be willing to meet in person to discuss?

I did a bit of sleuthing and discovered the reason for one of the requirement for a Ph.D. in one of the essentially social media positions (basically, they’re looking backwards, quelle surprise), and set up a coffee date for last Wednesday. Further to that, I asked my ex-manager what he knew about the non-Ph.D. opening. He got very excited—this position, it seems, is one of the best in the company, melding social media with social policy. Apparently, next to [communication and collaboration platform], this remit is the innovation that’s going to change the world. One component (the SoMe) will be led by someone who’s certainly sold herself as a thought leader/guru/disruptor in the area; the other (the policy content) will come from a woman who is a globally-recognized treasure in the field. So the incumbent has an opportunity to learn a great deal while doing some good work.

I met with Carol, and we commiserated on The Weather—that’s always a good conversation starter—and how we’re adjusting to it, coming as we do from what’s essentially a climate paradise. (If you leave out the droughts, fires, floods and earthquakes/tsunamis.) Carol moved out just before Christmas, and hasn’t yet bought real winter clothes. We’ve both recently started looking at Uggs, for pity’s sake.

I’d looked at her LinkedIn profile and seen a string of short-term contract SoMe gigs at Valley They Call Silicon giants. I didn’t ask her about them because I’m painfully familiar with that employment model of indentured servitude practiced by the tech industry—they hire contractors through vendors in a system where the actual providers of labor get no benefits, no future and no sense of being valued. Instead, I gave her a data dump on the position—such as I knew, which wasn’t in depth, tbh—and my take on the organization.

As it happens, she mostly grew up in the area, with a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland, and she added an Ed.M. in public policy from Harvard. (My ex-manager has an MBA and an MPP from Harvard, so when I discussed Carol with him, I made a point of bringing up that connection.) She’s also worked in non-profits before, so she really didn’t need much from me on that score.

Well, the short version of this is that when we parted, Carol was visibly energized. Back in the office, I sought out the madam who’s doing the screening for the position (and who will be the dotted-line supervisor of the SoMe part of the job), who declared herself “happy to have an informal chat”, and I made that introduction. They had the conversation on Friday, which elated Carol further.

Naturally, there’s no predicting how this will turn out. (Over the weekend I recalled my difficulties filling an intern position once HR inserted itself into the process before I could even see the submissions. The “talent acquisition specialist” passed on applicants without qualifications, and I had to ferret out someone who I knew had applied, but hadn’t been sent on to me, so I don’t know what good researchers never made it to me because of HR. There’s no telling what could happen to Carol’s application before it even makes it to the interviewers’ eyes.) There are also other people in the works, with whom Madam has also had informal chats, and I have no insight into that.

But my point, on this Gratitude Monday, is that I was in a position to offer help to someone who’s standing where I’ve stood in the past. And I did. It’s pretty ballsy to do a cold call via LinkedIn (our mutual connection is someone I don’t recall); most of the unsolicited communications I receive there are spam, and get filed in the appropriate bin. But I recall people who surprised me by offering help, and I recall how very much those offers meant to me.

Over the years I’ve sunk into the mindset that I don’t have much to offer; I’m not well connected, I don’t have a wide expertise; I feel my limitations acutely. This time, I was able to do a bit of digging and make connections that may help Carol find a job sooner rather than later, one that makes good use of her background and sets her up for more good things in the future.

That’s best-case scenario. Worse case is that I’ve given her encouragement early in her job hunt, made her a more confident networker and become a new acquaintance with common experiences in this area.

In turn, she’s reminded me that I do have things to give, and that even small acts of generosity can warm the soul and be banked against the days when everything looks bleak. And I am grateful for this.