What I’ve Learned So Far

Probably not for me . . .

[This is one of those things that you write once so you can refer people to it over and over. If you’re not interested in my academic history or future, feel free to pass this one by — especially because it’s quite long.]

You’ll have guessed the punchline of this story from its title: it’s likely that I’ll never finish the Ph.D. in United States history that I started in 2004 at the University of Texas. This post explains why. (And don’t worry — it’s a story with a happy ending.) Read the rest of this entry »

Exciting news for me: this week I start my new job as a content marketer for BreakingPoint Systems here in Austin.

Just some of the reasons I’m stoked:

• BreakingPoint is a small(ish), fast-paced company that will provide me with daily opportunities to expand my business skills.
• The job description might have been written specifically with me in mind. Besides drawing heavily on my writing skills, the role will build on the chops I laid down as a marketer and social media pro over the past three years at Hoover’s. And even though I don’t already have specific grounding in the network security hardware business, I’ll be able to draw on the seven prior years that I spent in Hoover’s editorial department, when I covered hard-core tech like semiconductors and scientific instrumentation.
• I get to work alongside my good friend Kyle Flaherty. [Cue Troy McClure voice from The Simpsons . . . ] You may remember Kyle from his role as my co-panelist in this year’s South by Southwest Interactive session on sports metaphors. [End Troy McClure voice.] I know I’ll learn a lot from Kyle, as well as from our boss Pam O’Neal, whom I’ve already known for a couple of years in Austin’s social media circles.
• Kyle and I talk a lot with each other about fitness, but now we’ll get to work out together regularly. (He tells me that this was the aspect of my hire that made him most skittish, but that’s only because he knows I will CRUSH him.)

It’s bittersweet to leave Hoover’s after ten (!) years. Besides being the place where I’ve had the longest job tenure — I worked there longer than I lived in my boyhood hometown — Hoover’s is also where I learned the most about business, as both an analyst and practitioner, and where I made the most good friends in business.

I’m particularly grateful that Hoover’s gave me three starts in my career: as a full-time writer, as a marketer, and as a social media practitioner. I’m also pleased to say that I worked for ten years there without ever reporting to a bad manager, which sounds like some kind of miracle unless you’ve been inside Hoover’s walls and grasped its tradition as a workplace where people treat each other like human beings.

Oh, and in case anyone’s curious, it was purely my decision to leave Hoover’s. I was ready for something new, the opportunity at BreakingPoint opened up at a perfect time, . . . and the rest is history. I’m glad I worked on — and in some cases built — the ground floor of Hoover’s social media efforts, and I look forward to seeing how the company grows in years to come.

So, the short version: cool new job, nifty people and product, starts Wednesday, woo-hoo!

Comments? 

I’m putting together a little database of my friends and acquaintances who are job hunting.

If you’re a friend or acquaintance (if you read this blog, you likely qualify) who’s looking for work, feel free to leave a note in the comments, or to send me an e-mail or tweet about your job hunt.

Here’s what I need from you:

• Your name. This seems obvious, but I know plenty of people primarily by their Twitter handle, then by their first name, and sometimes not at all by their last name. So go ahead and tell me your first and last name if it’s not obvious from your e-mail address or Twitter handle.
• Your Twitter handle, if you have one.
• Your e-mail address. If you leave a comment here, you have to fill in your e-mail address in the comment form, so no need to type it again in the comment itself.
• Your LinkedIn address. Mine, for example, is http://www.linkedin.com/in/tewalkerjr. (Don’t list one of the generic or ultra-long URLs that LinkedIn sometimes generates while you’re clicking around inside your account.) If you don’t have a LinkedIn account . . . you probably should, if you’re looking for a job.
• The geography of your job search. It doesn’t matter to me where you live now; I need to know where you’re willing to live if the right job takes you there.
• Your preferred field(s) of work. In just a few words, please. If and when I need the full-monty description, I can always check your LinkedIn profile for that, or just send you an e-mail.

No guarantees that I’ll be able to help you out, but I do often hear about jobs through friends, colleagues, vendors, Twitter listings, et cetera.

Fair enough?

~

(Photo by Ben Tesch.)

See that beehive? Don’t poke it.

If you know you have a particular weakness, steer away from it.

Examples:

• Recovering alcoholics avoid bars.
• Recovering overeaters stock their fridges and pantries with adequate amounts of healthy food, not cake and soda.
• Writers with an Internet addiction — e.g. John Scalzi — know when to unplug the DSL and just work.
• If you know that a non-essential topic is a sore subject with your friend / family member / boss / colleague / whomever, just don’t bring it up.
• If you’re prone to distraction, turn off your e-mail and your RSS feeds.

I’m sure you could supply me with more examples from your own life (and please do). My point is a simple one, but when I consider my own penchant for, say, online grazing, I think it bears repeating: each day will bring enough trouble of its own, so don’t go looking for more.

~

(Photo by Sara Schroeder, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

In the old days, soldiers marched behind a standard bearer, who’s flag or sigil represented the nation or the military unit. The symbol was up at the top of a pole so everyone, friend or foe, could see it. It gave courage to those marching behind it — and sometimes struck fear in those facing it.

The “standard” I’m talking about is your own dream or goal or vision for what you want from life. It could be primarily about work and job titles and money. It could be primarily about happiness and fulfillment and connection with loved ones. It could be your dream to travel around the world, or to run a marathon. Don’t let me or anyone else tell you what it “should” be — it’s your standard.

If you’re anything like me, you know it’s easy to take your eye off the standard. You mean to focus better, work more diligently, write every day, exercise regularly, spend quality and quantity time with your kids, track your finances better, et cetera et cetera. But you avert your gaze.

Sometimes it’s unintentional: A work project blows up right next to you, and your whole week — when you were going to get your inbox cleared out and spend some real time thinking about Gamebreaking Project X — goes to the dogs.

Sometimes the aversion grows from our own weakness: You’re scared of how badly the first draft of your Great American Novel is going to turn out, so you never even get started on it. You’re so scared, in fact, that you can’t even admit that you’re scared. You just hide your eyes like a small child.

What’s the antidote? I think you have to plant your standard somewhere obvious so that you can’t help but look at it. In his essay “Do It Now,” Steve Pavlina talks about the simple tricks he used to enforce clarity on himself when he was starting out as an entrepreneur:

Years ago (during the mid-90s), I went around my apartment putting up signs in every room that said “$5,000 / month.” That was my monthly business income goal at the time. Because I knew exactly what I wanted, I achieved that goal within a few weeks. I continued setting specific income goals, even amidst occasional setbacks, and I found this process very effective. It wasn’t just that it helped me focus on what I wanted — perhaps even more important is that it made it easy for me to disregard those things that weren’t on the path to my goal. For example, if you set a goal to earn $10,000/month, this can help you stop doing those things that will only earn you $5000/month.

Whether you reach your goals in a few weeks, as Pavlina did in this case, or just make steady progress toward them, the lesson is clear: plant that standard.

If you don’t know what that standard looks like, then you have your first task already cut out for you. Pavlina addresses this in the very next paragraph of his article:

If you aren’t yet at the point of clarity, then make that your first goal. It’s a big waste of time to go through life being unclear about what you want. Most people wallow way too long in the state of “I don’t know what to do.” They wait for some external force to provide them with clarity, never realizing that clarity is self-created. The universe is waiting on you, not the other way around, and it’s going to keep waiting until you finally make up your mind.

You need something to fight for — to work toward — in this life, or you’ll be forever coasting toward . . . whatever happens to come along. You might achieve the clarity you need with just a few words on an index card that you put in your wallet, or by drawing a picture, or by tacking up a photo clipped from a magazine above your desk, or by writing a treatise that only you will ever read. Use whatever works, but get clear on what you’re after, and then stay clear by planting that standard, literally and figuratively, right in the big middle of your life.

What can YOU do to plant your standard where you’re sure to see it?

~

(Photo by Alan Jones, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Mine’s writing.

My advice, in a nutshell, is to build your career around your “Main Thing” — your most distinguished ability or your most consuming passion — that will set you apart from others in your field.

For me, it’s writing. No matter what title my business cards carry in the future, my work will always center around writing, because that’s what I’m best at, and what I can’t help doing even if I try.

For you, it could be . . . well, I don’t want to jump the gun, so please tell me: What’s the “Main Thing” of your work?

I do a fair amount of speaking, and friends sometimes ask me for advice on how to speak better. Sometime I’ll write more on that topic, but for starters, here are three books worth reading:

1. Dale Carnegie, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking — A fundamental text from one of the all-time leaders in the field. Carnegie trained thousands of businesspeople to be competent speakers, and his advice here can help anyone getting started on the road of public speaking.

2. Richard C. Borden, Public Speaking As Listeners Like It! — This book is worth finding in your library or elsewhere even though it’s been out of print for a long time. I dug it up after Guy Kawasaki recommended it (can’t remember where), and I was glad I did. It’s full of pithy, on-point advice that’s just as relevant today as when the book was written decades ago. (My favorite: the magic of using “For instance . . .”)

3. Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen — This is a new-school title to complement the two old-school books above. Reynolds, who also has a great blog on this subject, has done a lot of deep thinking about how modern PowerPoint-driven presentations can be much better. He’s a clear writer who keeps the audience’s interests firmly in mind.

Now, what would you add to this list?

I like a sweet as much as anybody. I have my other vices, too. And all sorts of activities are worthy when taken in small doses.

But how much indulgence do you let yourself get away with? I’m not just talking about what you eat, but the whole of your life. Do you let yourself run into the embrace of your vices unchecked? Do you insist on indulging your destructive appetites, even though you say you want change in your life?

Lately I’ve been working to interrupt my habits of overindulgence. It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to say “I work really hard, so I deserve this” or “Yeah, I know what I said, but I can afford to let that go” — whether or not it’s true.

It’s better to take a hard dose of reality around the question “Is this beneficial?”

Sure, we can leave some slack in the system. Plenty of us rebel if we try to follow a new behavior in lockstep, especially if that behavior makes us feel deprived. But we should be honest with ourselves about what’s fruitful and unfruitful in our lives, especially in the areas where we know we overindulge. It takes life-shaping honesty to change those habits.

Again, it’s not just about food, although in the holiday season it’s never a bad idea to remind ourselves of our long-term goals for our bodies. It’s broader than that. What I’m really talking about is rooting out laziness and cowardice in ourselves, and using unflinching honesty as the tool.

No one can do it for you. You have to confront the variance between what you say you want and what you actually do in the direction of what you want.

• If you say you want to lose weight but you drink soda all day, you’re indulging yourself — and lying to yourself — and you need to stop it. Period. Stop making excuses.
• If you say you’re tired of your job, tired of being underpaid or underchallenged, tired of not pursuing your dreams — yet you indulge the same old habits that have kept you stuck in place — you’ve got to cut it out. It’s time to stretch yourself, and the fact that the stretching stings is a sign that it’s working, not that you should stop.
• To turn the lens back on myself: I if say I want to write books, yet I let days go by when I flake off about writing, then I’m full of it. Writing books takes a lot of stubborn, focused work. Indulging my habits of laziness just won’t get it done, and it’s idle to think that they could — or, more to the point, that it’s okay to indulge those habits.

It’s not okay. At some point (now? yesterday? last year?) your indulgence went from a minor vice to a great big dream-wrecking lie.

Enough already. Cast off your indulgence and get to work.

Who’s with me?

~

(Photo by chotda, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

A couple of friends pinged me in the past 24 hours to either (a) congratulate me on striking out on my own as a full-time freelancer, or (b) ask whether I’d been laid off.

No.

I’m happy as a clam in my work at Hoover’s, and in fact I’m having as much fun as I have at any time in my 9+ years with the company. We have ambitious plans for our social media efforts in 2010, and it’s gratifying that my bosses at Hoover’s have given me so much room to run in the social-media area.

One little part of our plans for 2010 is to land me more speaking gigs in front of business groups. To help with my shameless mercenary self-promotion prospecting in this vein, a while back I added a “Public Speaker” heading to my LinkedIn profile, to go along with the “Freelance Magazine Writer” heading that had been there for ages. The basic idea was to give more LinkedIn users a heading to search against when they’re looking for a speaker, and to give my LinkedIn contacts a specific heading if they ever wanted to write an endorsement for me as a speaker. (Hint, hint.)

A-a-anyway, even though I haven’t touched either of those “self-employed” job headings for a while, somehow LinkedIn’s technology decided to tell my contacts that I’m now “Self-Employed” in the grander sense.

But no. Happily collecting a salary from my current employer — and hope to do so for many years to come.

In case it’s not obvious, I’m the ‘thinky’ type. In my line(s) of work, being smart and intellectual is like being athletically gifted and skilled in sports.

But being athletically gifted, and even being highly skilled, aren’t enough to dictate success on the playing field. The best competitors, regardless of sport, are those who have the best combination of athleticism, skill, and other qualities — psychological qualities — to help them succeed.

Sometimes, great physical attributes come together with great mental attributes, and you get Pele or Tiger Woods or Donald Bradman or Pete Sampras. But many of the greatest sports heroes were notable more for their mental attributes — especially tough-mindedness — than for their physical gifts. (Case in point: Jerry Rice.)

The more I travel through this life, the more I come to believe that talent is a shallow attribute. Great, the kid is a talented Little Leaguer. Great, the marketing VP is really smart. It doesn’t mean much until you see how those talents play out — how the person puts them to use — and that relies much more on mental approach to the task than it does to talent for the task.

So, for now I’ll just say that I’m working on my mental toughness, and doing it methodically. In a later post, I’ll spell out my approach.

What do you think? Is mental toughness as important as I make it out to be?

~

(Photo source.)