Friday, March 4, 2011

Career Advice from the Unemployed - Part 2

Here’s a continuation of my sagacious snippets of career wisdom, from me, a trusted source. My outsider’s perspective on this one is key, peering as I am at the prospect of employment from a comfortable distance.

      4. Look Busy, Your Boss (or Jesus) is Coming
       One day at a job I had once, I thought I would be an “energetic, independent self-starter” by “manning the phones” (such a sexist term, I know). Someone had to be close enough to the phones to answer them in a timely manner when a customer called - why shouldn’t that be me? I watched those ugly institutional phones, caked with sweat on the handle and slick with face-grease on the earpiece (is that what you call the part of a corded phone you hold to your head?). Surprisingly enough, it did ring a couple times and I did help the customer. But then there was a lull. A deathly silent void in which my own existence was called into question. I thought I was trapped in a Sartre play. All of a sudden, at the edge of my perception I heard the sound of high heels clicking murderously along the concrete floor, and my brain was screaming at me to get up and do something, that trouble was afoot, but it was as if I was lashed to my chair, forced to bear the burden of answering those phones like Atlas holding up the earth. It was too late. My boss appeared like a flash of malevolent rebuking fire, and I was chastised for just “sitting around”. But the phones! Could she not see the weight of their importance?

At any rate, from this I learned the easy maxim: make sure you just look busy at all times. Do a lap around your office. Pick up a pile of paper from one side of your desk, move it to the other, then move it back. Have a clearly discernible window with your work email client open and just type gibberish. It seems that the only thing worse than bad work is no work at all, so make sure you’re on the right side of that line.

      5. Take Rejection Easy - Blame It on Others
    Ah, rejection. Nothing twangs the heartstrings quite like it. I received an early primer in this most devastating emotion from the scores of girls I had crushes on in elementary and middle school...and high school...(okay fine!) and on into college. And it will happen as you search for an initial position and later as you try to advance your career. Many times, you just aren’t good enough or qualified enough for a position, and you must learn to take this in stride. But remember, it’s not you they’re rejecting, it’s just everything about you.

So how do you cope with such a soul-rattling blow? One great strategy is to blame it on others. God is a popular candidate, but I would avoid such a move, personally. It might come back to bite you (eternally). Instead there are plenty of viable options: Prospective employers who “didn’t even give you a chance to interview” are most definitely missing out on some amazing talent and therefore should definitely be ashamed of their actions. “The Economy” (whatever that is/means) is a super-popular thing to place blame on these days, and will usually bring you the most sympathy from family and friends, who are also getting screwed by “The Economy”. But lastly, never blame yourself. You are awesome, and you didn’t need that stupid job anyways. Keep repeating that until it sounds kinda true.

   6. “Live Like You Were Dying” - Tim McGraw
     This isn’t just great career advice, this is great life advice. If you were dying, would you spend every day at an unfulfilling dead-end job? Hell no, you’d go skydiving and take other needless risks. And as a side benefit you’d become a better person in the process. Note that this only applies to people who aren’t actually dying.


That’s all for now, but hopefully this entirely useful series will continue.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

iBad 2?

Well, the Apple cult reconvened in Cali yesterday, as you might have heard. And though I haven't actually touched ("experienced" in the cult-lingo) one of these new-fangled "iPad 2's", that certainly won't stop me from weighing-in.

Some personal background on where I'm coming from. No, I don't own an iPad, but I have one of it's little siblings, a 2nd gen iPod Touch. You know where that is? In a drawer. The battery died, i.e. it will no longer hold a charge, and Apple wants to charge $80 to replace the battery. So I have a teeny-weeny bit of bitterness toward Apple, which I lay out in full disclosure.

But let's be honest, I pretty much lust after everything Apple makes. Much like I said in my Charlie Sheen post, Apple doesn't even sell products anymore, they sell an "experience," a mystique, a desirable sleek cool that says something about the person using their products. Of course, this carnal craving that I and others know all too well has helped developed the Apple cult and made Apple fanboys/fangirls out of so many people. But love is blindness. 

Apple does many things well, especially battery life, which I didn't appreciate the value of until I got an Android. But are they perfect? Can one find no flaws?
Whenever Apple explodes the marketplace with a new product (or new version of a product, in this case), which after all makes sense because they are a company and trying to make money, the problem is that the now outdated device, which has served you so well, now takes on the drab unpleasantness of middle age.

Apple somehow makes you feel unattractive, ugly, in the process. For some reason, this doesn't happen nearly at all in the PC market. Yes, I have an older Dell. So what? I don't feel belittled in a hipster coffee shop when I pop the top and fire it up. But if I had an older Apple product...Lord have mercy. Forget it. I'll make my brew at home and cower in my shame.

The twist here, of course, is that my next computer purchase will be a Macbook Pro. I know what they're doing to the world with their systematic uncool-making project. But I can't get away from the excellence of form and function. A Mac just does what you want it to, in short. PC's take a little more finessing, which once mastered allows one the freedom to mostly do what one wants. Still, though, Apple seems to take a few steps out of the process, and for that I'm grateful.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be about the iPad 2? How would I know what to say about it? It looks cool and I want one.

Career Advice from the Unemployed - Part 1

What’s that, you might be thinking? Take career advice from someone who’s unemployed? Who do you think you are, Charlie Sheen? Look, it sounds crazy but I wanted to lay out what I’ve learned from my failed job searching of the past year. Learn from my wisdom. But mostly, just hire me, please?

  1. “No One Cares About Your Career But Your Mom...and You” - Carol Bartz (http://academicearth.org/courses/tailoring-products-to-customer-needs-at-autodesk-growing-your-career)
I just recently picked up this little tidbit that helpfully summarized the truth it took me a while to learn. A few months ago I was reading a career book that suggested you should set up networking lunch meetings with people working in the field you’re interested in. What kind of blithely overly optimistic wacky tobacco was that person smoking when they wrote that? Here’s the truth. People are busy. And most people are selfish. Some are openly so, but others are in denial about this. In this economy (ha right it’s getting better?) the people who are established in their field don’t really care about helping others, and those who are becoming established and might want to help don’t because they’re worried about their own jobs and don’t want the competition. So, that pretty much leaves you. And your Mom. I guess the basic lesson I drew from this is: unless a relative’s name appears somewhere in the title of the business/firm/etc. you alone have to make everything happen. Or not. You could play on the internet all day.


    2. “Just Get Your Foot In the Door!” What door?
I’ve heard this one at least 1,196,493 times (the number of Twitter followers @charliesheen has at the time of writing). It’s like everyone is running around with an undiagnosed disease that makes them see doors everywhere. And they all happen to be open just wide enough for a foot to fit in. Here’s the reality: entry level jobs either don’t exist or exist purely to suck you dry and kill your soul. And I’m not talking about this in a pseudo-Jeff Bridges hippie hipster anti-consumerism way, like “yeah man, corporations rule the world, man, man”. I mean it in all seriousness. Starting out, you are totally expendable. You have no training or experience. In short, they don’t need you. By that I mean, they need someone to do whatever menial task is out there, but they don’t need YOU to do it. And being valuable is all about being needed. Without a specialization, without having a niche in such a way that NO ONE ELSE can do something exactly as well as you can, you don’t matter. Your name will fade from water cooler gossip faster than Charlie Sheen wins (sorry can’t help myself!).


    3. “It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know.” Absolutely True.
Saying this as humbly as I can, because I’m just a schmuck like everybody else,  I would say I’m on the more educated side of the spectrum. I’ve had some amazing opportunities to attend some great schools, for which I’m truly grateful. I’m an avid reader of “The New York Times” (a major news publication you might have heard of...sorry of which you might have heard). I would probably do pretty well on Jeopardy and Cash Cab, based on my track record playing from home. But you know what? Nobody cares. Seriously, no one cares about any of the general stuff you know, your familiarity with current events, or your critical thinking skills developed by a liberal arts education. Why doesn’t anyone care? Because knowing the thesis of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism doesn’t help make anyone money. It might help make me money if I was worried about my salvation, but by itself knowing that fact doesn’t put a dime in anyone’s coffers. Employers don’t really value critical thinking skills because the more people think, as independent thinkers, the more threat there is to the corporate ethos and to management, which is bad for you. In addition, knowing stuff generally doesn’t help when it comes to knowing how to do specific things, which I guess is what a job is. The main point here is, lots of people are smart and work hard, but not a lot of people have the connections necessary to get in on the superb cronyism and nepotism running rampant in corporate America and the government. So get out there and start ingratiating yourself to powerful, important people. If you see a Mercedes in a parking lot, just start washing and waxing it. Whoever owns it will thank you profusely, albeit nervously, right before they call the cops.

Well, that’s all for now, but check back for more posts in this series! Also, get to work you lazy bums! No more government handouts!

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Charlie Sheen: Marketing Genius

The whole world is laughing at Charlie Sheen. But I get the feeling that he's laughing at us, too. I've been doing a little research into marketing of late, and I'm telling you, the man's a master. He fired his publicist? Of course he did. He didn't need him!
Without endorsing or condoning Charlie Sheen's drug-fueled craze of the past couple months, you have to admit that it was a masterstroke in creating a "brand" for himself. He's now known as the celebrity walking the tightrope of sanity right before our eyes, and we love it. We love celebrities that act out because we live vicariously through their terrible decisions, as they do things we never really could but secretly want to.
All the delirious TV interviews, which piqued our curiosity trying to guess what drug(s) he was on at the time, only drew us in more. Was he acting out because of his altered mental state, or just because he doesn't care any more? This too we secretly desire and wish to emulate. And let's be honest, he was funny. His babble was intriguing and ludicrous had its own strange internal logic to it. Winners win, I guess. At any rate, he has remarkably built up the riveting sense of anticipation: what is he going to do next?
So what did he do with this "Charlie Sheen" brand of crazy? Well, he just made a Twitter account. Brilliant. When I started following him two nights ago, he hadn't even tweeted a thing and he had some 200,000 followers. Professional social media consulting firms would kill (probably literally, as a promotional stunt, perhaps?) to cull that many followers for a client...but it would probably take months, maybe years. Charlie Sheen did it in less than 24 hours.
At the time of writing, @charliesheen now has 505,990 followers. At this point we almost don't care what he actually says (partly because we know it will be the same gibberish about "winning"). We just know it's going to be crazy and funny. He's a phenomenon now, not even a man or a brand. What sort of marketing firm could produce an effect anything close to this? Of course, you might ask, what is the "value" of his brand, i.e., what can he actually do with it? The best answer is, whatever he wants. Genius!

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Here I Stand

I just performed a splendiferous purge of my Google Reader feeds, and I'm feeling like a new man. It's interesting how many subscriptions I added because they were sources I thought I was supposed to be reading instead of things I actually want to read. It just reminded me how much baggage we all carry - the weight of other people's expectations of us, and most especially the often delusional expectations we place on ourselves. (On a current events note, for delusional cf. Charlie Sheen and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom have wild misinterpretations of reality, or at least can't accept what they know to be true as reality.) Both others' expectations and our own self-imposed burdens are frequently out of touch with reality. I don't know why I struggle so often with accepting myself as I am and working from there, instead of making my ideal self the baseline of my personal expectations. I think such a baseline makes ever making progress toward that ideal self that much more difficult, because the reality of who I am now is ignored, so what I'm working on (and working with) is an almost alien superman self. It's probably so difficult because I have little tolerance for weakness in myself and others, which is ridiculous because it is just as much those places where we fall short as where we excel that make us interesting and vital. I want to work with myself as I am, and embrace those terrifically rough edges that no doubt make me who I am.
On a related note, I'd really like to learn how to care about what people think while simultaneously not caring what people think. I want to care about what people generally, and my friends and family particularly, think because they are people with a voice and a heart and good parts and bad who deserve my attention and my respect. Also, I know that others see the world in valuable and interesting ways, and have insights into me and my life that I can't see because they are blind spots to me. Yet there is a limit to this caring, when it supersedes my own shaping of the world, when I'm afraid of holding a particular position or belief because it might offend someone I care about. I know I have a healthy contrarian streak already, but this isn't about rebellion for rebellion's sake. It's about taking a stand, declaring meaning where I find meaning to reside, and living with the consequences of such a stand. It seems to me that the most insightful and wonderful and world-transforming people have this "double-consciousness," a terrible intimacy with humanity's deepest longings and fears, and yet also a singular vision that says, in spite of all that, this is who I am, who I need to be at this time and this place. I can't help but think of Martin Luther's oft quoted but simply beautiful "Here I Stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen." Here's to the courage and inner fortitude such a stand requires, and creates in us when we take it.