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Straight Talk About Your Career
People place a premium on being positive. That
extends to career advice. As a result, I believe
that important negative statements go unsaid.
I’ll remedy that here.
Many people fail to land a good job because
they’re lazy, yes lazy. Psychotherapists may
make those people feel better by labeling their
laziness “fear of failure” or blaming it
on their good-for-nothing parents, but I’ve
concluded that most of the time, the core reason
people don’t land a good job is laziness. Ask
yourself honestly: Have you worked hard enough to
find a good job?
Networking isn’t for everyone. Yes, 2/3 of
jobs are acquired by networking. But most of those
are obtained by natural-born schmoozers or by
already well-employed people who network their way
into even better jobs. If you’re currently not
well-employed or tend to not be instantly likeable,
and especially if your network is small and
unlikely to help you, you could end up homeless
before networking lands you a job. Focus your job
search on finding lots of on-target ads to answer
and doing a great job of answering them.
Procrastination is career cancer. You may have
first acquired the habit of procrastinating in
school. You waited until the last minute to do an
assignment or study for a test, the adrenaline rush
motivated you, and lo and behold, you got a good
grade. Soon, you became dependent on the adrenaline
to get you through an assignment.
But there’s no grade inflation in the real
world. Procrastination is career cancer. If you
must do a task, please start it as soon as
it’s assigned. Be aware of the moment of
truth: when you’re deciding, consciously or
unconsciously, whether to start the task or
procrastinate. If you say you’ll start it
later, chances are you won’t until the last
minute, at which point, you probably won’t
have time to do a quality job.
When you reach a hard part, struggle for no more
than 15 seconds. The odds are that additional
struggling won't help. At the 15-second mark,
decide to get help, to come back to it later, or
that there’s a way to complete the task
without doing the hard part. People tend to
procrastinate hard tasks because they fear
they’ll never figure out that hard
part—that’s agonizing. The 15-second
struggle technique makes tough tasks less
painful.
Owning a home with a big mortgage usually hurts
your life more than it helps. It often forces you
into a career that pays well to compensate for its
not being intrinsically rewarding. Spending a
lifetime in an unrewarding career usually hurts
your life more than a nice house helps it.
Unless you’re smart, driven, and
well-connected, do what is commonly loved (e.g.,
the arts, media, biotech, fashion) and you risk
starvation. If you’re a more average person
and your passion is commonly held, do what you love
as a hobby.
Higher education is America’s most
overrated product. Yes, if you do school much
better than you do life, school may be your best
bet for career enhancement, but other people should
avoid a long back-to-school stint. Consider
foregoing State U let alone Private U for You U: a
combination of mentorships, articles, books,
workshops, and conferences.
The musts for successful self-employment
Self-employment makes ever more sense in an era in
which you usually must be a star to land a good
non-offshoreable job. Self-employment enables you
to instantly go from schlepper to CEO. However, to
avoid failing you (or your partner) must:
1. Be a self-starter, not a procrastinator.
2. Be smart enough to quickly solve real-world
problems.
3. Have a nose for buying low and selling
high.
4. Make a good first impression.
Even more important:
5. Keep your business simple: selling one
high-profit-margin, not-faddish product or service
that requires a small investment. One example: Help
website owners drive more traffic to their
site.
6. Don’t innovate; replicate. Most
innovations fail—at great expense. So, only
wealthy individuals and corporations can afford to
risk innovation. Most people are wise to copy a
successful business in a different location or to
buy a franchise. Interview at least a half dozen
franchisees before signing on the dotted line.
7. Hire smart, fire early. Put the time into
hiring a great person. If, in the first day or two,
you sense he or she is not working out, fire the
person fast. Significant improvement on the job is
rare and each day you wait increases the risk of
having to endure a painful wrongful termination
suit.
Enough of the negative. Next week, a column in
praise of a kind of worker that most people
criticize.
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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