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Ten Career Resolutions
I believe these career resolutions are really worth
the effort to keep from breaking:
Act like a star at work. Whether you’re a
clerk or a CEO, do the things a world-class
employee would do, from the way you walk to the way
you talk to the way you tackle hard tasks and
difficult people. Act like a star and you boost
your chances of becoming one.
Talk more crisply, listen more intently. Most of
us think we’re good communicators. Alas, few
of us are. Keep your utterances under a minute, if
possible, under 15 seconds. After 15 seconds, most
people start thinking, “I wish he’d
finish.” And when you’re listening,
really listen to what your counterpart is saying
and how he’s saying it. Ask follow-up
questions. People love to be asked questions.
Follow The World’s Shortest Management
Course: Create a vision, inspire your supervisees
to achieve that vision, don’t micromanage,
fire the bad quickly, and take the time to hire
great employees.
Get your job description changed to suit your
strengths. Don’t know what your strengths are?
Make a list of things you’ve been praised for.
Your core strengths lie within.
Request a special project that you’d find
fun, would impress your boss, and the results of
which would be visible to many employees. For
example, if you’re a new and inexperienced
salesperson, ask your sales manager if you could
interview the other salespeople to create a booklet
of sales tips and tricks. If your boss agrees, you
get to learn a lot from the old hands and produce a
product valuable to all. Instead of being seen as
the green newbie, you’d be immediately seen as
the up-and-comer.
Forgo State U for You U. When your career is
stalled, it’s tempting to consider a
back-to-school stint. But there’s an
oversupply of degree holders. Thousands of people
have spent years and fortunes on finishing their
bachelor’s degree or MBA or even PhD to find
that career doors did not swing open. You can often
learn more of value, more quickly, and less
expensively by forgoing State U let alone Private U
in favor of what I call You U: self-and
mentor-selected articles, books, workshops,
conferences, and mentorships.
You might worry, “But an employer
won’t be impressed with that.” They will
if you write the right cover letter. Imagine you
were an employer and got an application letter from
this candidate:
Dear Mr. Moneybags,
I suspect you’ll be tempted to toss my
application because I don’t have an MBA but I
believe I’m worth a look precisely because I
chose to forgo it.
Having heard from so many people that they
derived little of practical value from their MBA, I
decided the two years could be more profitably
spent.
I contacted marketing directors at leading
Silicon Valley software companies and offered to
work for them for no pay in exchange for their
mentorship. A marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard
took me on. After three months, I felt I had
learned about as much as I could from him,
whereupon I made a similar arrangement with a
director of marketing at Cisco.
In those apprenticeships, I was deeply involved
in a number of projects similar to those mentioned
in your ad. In addition, I attended American
Marketing Association conferences, read the best
articles and books recommended by the AMA, and
spent much of my commute time listening to relevant
books on tape. To get the bigger picture, I even
read a couple of books by leading academics.
But now comes the moment of truth. I believe I
prioritized substance over form, but will you
interview me?
I hope that you will appreciate my having
developed a beyond-the box learning plan, that I
was assertive enough to make it happen, and
persistent enough to see it through to completion
even though I didn’t have a professor and
deadlines forcing me to do so. Perhaps more
important, in working at the elbow of top software
marketing executives, I learned a tremendous amount
about how to do the job well.
I enclose samples of the deliverables I produced
during my work at Hewlett-Packard and Cisco
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Jane Jobseeker
Would you interview that candidate? When, during
a speech, I asked that question of the 200
executives in the audience, 90 percent raised their
hand.
Procrastinator, overcome that career killer with
this three-step method:
1) Be aware of the moment of truth. There is a
moment when you, usually unconsciously, decide
you’ll put off that task. Consciously decide
whether it’s in your interest to do the task
now or whether you’d really be more likely to
do it later.
2) Start with one-second tasks. Open the book,
turn on your computer, whatever Those one-second
tasks aren’t intimidating, and once you start,
you usually find yourself continuing.
3) When you reach a stumbling block, struggle
for no more than one minute. If you haven’t
made progress within a minute, chances are that
additional struggling won’t help. So after a
one-minute struggle, get help or figure out a way
to do the task without that hard part.
Remember the serenity prayer: “Grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to
know the difference. So often, we let the
unchangeable destroy our peace of mind: for
example, a problem co-worker with whom we must
work. Make that person as small a part of your life
as possible, and when confronted with their
laziness, stupidity, or tactlessness, just as you
would with a brain-injured person, make the big
effort to react with sympathy and gratitude for
your superiority rather than with judgment and
anger at their inferiority.
Remember my father’s story. My father spent
his teenage years in concentration camps. When I
was a teenager, I asked him, “How come you
never seem angry about your lost teenage
years.” He said, “The Nazis took five
years from my life. I won’t give them one
minute more. Martin, never look back; always look
forward.” We all have had bad things in our
lives: parents or spouses who abused us, bad luck
that impeded us, weaknesses our genetics
perpetrated on us. But the people who spend time
looking back, playing victim, have much sadder
lives than those who can remember my father’s
words: “Never look back; always look
forward.”
© 2008, 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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