Specialist careers are the key to freedom

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You have to specialize. Not right away, but figure out how to own some sort of niche. It is the key to your freedom. A specialist in a large company can demand flexibility, but a specialist also has an ability to leave corporate life and succeed on her own, which is something generalists can’t easily do.

There is good research to show that you will have an easier time staying employed if you specialize. This research comes, in part, from Hollywood, where people say they don’t want to be typecast, but the reality is that being typecast is a great way to get steady work.

In the corporate world, headhunters always have a job description they are trying to fill exactly. If you are a square peg, you can go in a square hole. If you do not define exactly what kind of peg you are, a recruiter can’t put you in a hole: No calls from headhunters.

But most people who are strategizing their career right now are not thinking long-term employment, they are thinking entrepreneurship. (Industry pundit Paul Saffo said in the EETimes, “I think the unintended consequence of the dot-com bust is that we have created the largest generation of entrepreneurs this country has ever seen.”)

For this generation, specialization is key to getting OUT of corporate life and into a more flexible work situation. You can’t market yourself to clients if you don’t offer any specific, unique service. And you can’t start your own company by selling to everyone all at once. Specialization is what will make you stand out enough to make it on your own.

When you are wondering why anyone would go work for a big company, the answer is to learn a specialty. Think of corporate life as an apprenticeship so that you can start your own company. Big companies are crawling with mentors and training programs that will help you narrow your focus effectively.

If you’re looking for a road map, there’s a nice story this week about how Christopher Burge became a specialist in running snooty auctions.

And when you get a little further down the specializing road, check out the book Slightly Famous, which, of course, has a web site in an effort to dominate the how-to-be-slightly-famous niche.

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Extreme commuting is delusional

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According to Newsweek, more than 3.4 million people have a daily commute that is longer than 90 minutes. Insane. I know it’s insane because I used to do it – Los Angeles to Orange County — and I went nuts. My whole life was organized around getting up at 4am to beat traffic and getting to sleep in time to get up the next morning.

I took the job because it was much better than any offer I had in LA, but I didn’t want to lose the life I had in LA. The thing is, I didn’t have a life anyway with my commute. I left that job after a little less than a year. To be honest, the job was great and enabled me to land future jobs in Los Angeles, near my home.

But what blows my mind is the people who think an extreme commute is a long-term solution. It’s not. Your life starts rotting away. Your friends and family don’t see you, you have no personal time that is not in the car, and perhaps most importantly, there’s no time for sex.

Take this last point seriously. David Blanchflower, professor of economics, found that the most important factor in one’s happiness is not money, it’s sex. And the two are not related, according to him. On top of that he found that the thing people do that makes them the most unhappy is…drumroll…the commute.

So stop rationalizing that a long commute will get you something you need. And stop living in denial about the true cost of those hours spent in the car: It’s your happiness, and good money or a big house in the suburbs will not improve things.

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Training is the new office currency

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The best jobs are the ones where you are learning; the work is not too easy and not too hard. (The Yerkes-Dodson law says that optimum difficulty leads to optimum performance.) So forget looking for a pay increase (what is three percent of your salary going to buy you, really?) and forget a new title (titles only matter if you are going to stick around for twenty years and climb the ladder). Keep your eye on training perks. That’s what really matters. Training can change you, challenge you, set you up for the next great project, and generally make your work more fulfilling.

In an article about office politics, in Fast Company, it becomes clear that office politics is really about jockeying for the good training and good projects. Career coach Marilyn Moats Kennedy says, “Workers today compete for schedules and projects, for money and training. But they rarely compete for power – especially when that means power over others. Instead of power, people want assignments that build skills valued by the market. Learning experiences are what’s really important.”

That said, don’t settle for cheap, poorly run training. Ninth House published a white paper on what types of training top-performing companies use. Here’s a list to give you some ideas of what to ask for from your own company:

1. Executive coaching. No surprise here. But a good reminder that this sort of training is expensive and you should try to get your company to foot the bill.

2. Rotational assignments. Companies that grow their own executive management usually have intensive training programs that include many departments and businesses within the company. Push hard to get yourself into one of these programs. They are treasure troves in terms of both learning and prestige.

3. Quantitative measurement. There are ways to objectively quantify your leadership effectiveness (for example, 360-degree performance reviews). And then you can quantify your improvement, too. Ask for this. It’s a great way to find out what other people think of you without sounding lame for asking.

4. Learning by doing. Role playing is the best teacher there is, even though we all hated to do it. It’s the new rage. I see it in ads for business school, everyone claiming that they teach this way the most. I see it in image management consulting firms. I even noticed on Passover that my Haggadah has role-playing sections for kids. So even if you think you are too cool for role-play-based training, go to it if you have the chance.

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Cheating with a co-worker without getting undressed

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I founded a company with a guy who was single and good looking and everyone who met with us thought we were dating. We weren’t. He was almost twenty years older than I was, for one thing. But we did spend ten hours a day together, and at some point it’s hard to say it’s only business.

It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re almost married to someone you work with. In fact, 32 percent of workers feel that way. The Des Moines Register reports that this is generally a common and positive workplace trend. I have to say that my experience of the phenomena was positive, also. We were very in tune with what each other was thinking because we were so emotionally connected. We handled meetings better as a team, and we grew the company more effectively because we were so invested in the other person as well as the company.

This sort of relationship can go bad, though, according to this month’s Oprah magazine, (which, by the way, is really underrated by the intelligentsia. I love the magazine and recommend that you subscribe. After all, what other publisher has the power of Oprah to get anyone she wants in the whole world to be in her magazine?) So anyway, according to the magazine, when these relationships go bad it’s because the people are getting their emotional needs met by a co-worker instead of their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Oprah’s in-house therapist says that’s cheating, even if there’s no spit-swapping. And, she points out that if your marriage sucks, it’s a lot easier to fix it when it sucks than to fix it when it sucks and you’ve cheated.

So really, this sort of workplace spouse relationship only works well if you’re not in a relationship outside of work. It’ll work well as a stop-gap measure to keep things interesting until you can either get something going outside of work or start having sex with that co-worker. (If you’re going to do the latter, it’s tricky to not destroy yourself and/or your career. Here are four tips, along with the comforting fact that 40% of the working world has taken the same, insane risk.)

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You probably overestimate your emotional intelligence

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In case you have had your head in the sand for forever, emotional intelligence is what you need if you want to work with other people successfully. At this point, about four thousand studies have shown that emotional intelligence (“EQ” as in “emotional IQ”) makes people more successful at work. For you doubters, here is a quick summary list of ten studies from the Emotional Intelligence Consortium.

EQ is basically about being likeable. And the truth is that if you are not likeable people won’t work with you. Not that your skills don’t matter. If you need to learn media buying to do your job, then learn it. You will get hired because of your skills, but you will get fired for your personality. In fact, a study by Tiziana Casciaro at Harvard University showed that people would rather work with someone nice and incompetent than someone skilled but unpleasant.

The trouble is that everyone overestimates their own emotional intelligence. To make this point, I found an EQ test that you can take. And, to my chagrin, I found that I also overestimate my own EQ, Not that I am not at the top of the class. I am. But I didn’t realize that being good with one’s own finances is an indicator of EQ. (I confess that I buy the expensive, pre-sliced fruit almost every day.) At least I admit where I fall short. (Which, by the way, is a sign of high EQ.)

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Top ten jobs to have

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Salary.com and Money magazine just released a list of the top fifty jobs.

Here’s how they did the rankings:

Things that are bad are less than $50,000 average salary, dangerous, and small field with little room for advancement.

Things that are good are a growing field, low stress, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and easy advancement.

Here are the top ten:

1. Software engineer

2. College professor

3. Financial advisor

4. Human resource advisor

5. Physician assistant

6. Market research analyst

7. Computer/IT analyst

8. Real estate appraiser

9. Pharmacist

10. Psychologist

I dove for this list as soon as I saw it, but the rankings are not as useful as you might imagine. However it made me happy to see that psychologist is up there at the top — it’s hard enough to go to a therapist, so I at least want to know that while I’m talking she is enjoying herself.

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Don’t be the hardest worker in your job or in your job hunt

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If you work the most hours you look the most desperate. You shouldn’t look lazy, but don’t be the hardest worker. After all, why do you need to work so much harder than the next person? Are you not as smart? Not as organized? Not as confident in your ability to navigate a non-work world? In many cases all three are true for those who work the hardest.

The fact that the hardest worker is not necessarily the most successful rears its head before work even starts: A study conducted by Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows that when it comes to workplace success, it doesn’t matter if you get in to an Ivy League school, it matters if you apply. In this case what matters is ambition and self-image, not getting the best grades or having the best test scores.

Nonstop work offers diminishing returns after graduation as well. Marita Barth is a student at MIT in biological engineering. She is at the top of her field yet she makes time to play ice hockey and volunteer at local charities. When she talks about taking breaks from her lab, Barth says, I could not maintain focus and energy if I worked nonstop. I would completely lose perspective.”

Don’t tell yourself that you work nonstop because you love your work: If you really loved your work, you’d take a break so you don’t mess it up. People who work longer than the typical eight hours a day start to lose their effectiveness quickly. “If you work all the time, you lose your edge,” warns Diane Fassel, CEO of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of Working Ourselves to Death. “Often these people are perfectionists, controlling and not good team players. The hardest workers are “not the best producers in terms of efficiency and creativity.”

Ironically, moments that elevate your level of success at work often require time away from work. For example, a grand idea that impacts your company's bottom line probably won’t come to you when your brain is entrenched in workplace minutia. Anyone can work the hardest, but only special people can sit on a rock and come up with a brilliant idea. In fact, even daily troubleshooting requires some mental space. Barth has found that, “It takes a lot of thought to see what’s going wrong and make another plan. And at some point, if I spend too much time in the lab without a break, I’m not efficient.”

If you can’t stop working, you might be in for some bad news: Workaholism. Kevin Kulic, professor of psychology at Mercy College, says, “With any of those -holics, you are one if it causes you or other people a problem.”

But some people purposely create imbalance. “For many people, workaholism is about perfectionism or avoidance,” says Kulic. The hardest workers have actually lost the self-confidence to stop working. They are either terrified of making a mistake or a misstep, or they are terrified of the world that lies beyond their work — for example crumbling personal relationships.

Kulic cites the Yerkes-Dodson law that says too much or too little stimulation is bad. We need a happy medium in order to perform best. And Fassel cites worker surveys that support this law — the happiest workers have a workload that falls in between very heavy and very light.

This rule for working less applies to a job hunt, too. Many of you will be happy to hear that, “The amount of time you work beyond five hours a day has no impact on your ability to land a job” — good news brought to you by David Perry, managing partner of the recruiting firm Perry Martel International and co-author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters.

Perry told me that a job hunt is like training for the 50-yard dash. “Everything is aimed at getting the interview. And you need to be mentally prepared.” Just as an athlete does not over train for the race, a job hunter will also experience defeating fatigue if there’s too much energy spent on the hunt.

Perry is adamant that the best jobs do not go to the smartest person or hardest worker but to the person who best reads his or her situation. So forget being the hardest worker because you need to be “bright eyed and bushy tailed.” Get out from behind that computer each day, he says and “enjoy the rest of your life.”

 

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Use a to-do list every day

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If you don’t organize your life with a list then you won’t know what is most important. Here are the problems with not knowing what is most important:

1. You spend your life doing things that don’t matter.

2. You drive yourself crazy by doing things of little importance all day long and then having to stay up late doing the things that really matter.

3. You don’t spend enough time asking yourself hard questions. Because what is a harder question than, “What is most important to me?”

I am a fiend about lists. So I was excited to try out Ta-Da List. It’s software that allows you to make linked lists. I love this because I find myself, as a list obsessive, using comment fields in Excel for extra lists. So, for example, I have a list of people to call, and then comment-field lists of what to say to each person. With Ta-Da List, I can have lists embedded in lists without my Excel jerry-rig.

Sometimes, though, when I am writing my lists, I think, gosh, this is so much detail, and I am not a detail person. I wish I had an assistant to dump this stuff on. Then I read that Bill Gates does not have a to-do list. I was surprised, but it makes sense. This is the nicest benefit I have ever heard to being rich and powerful: He can actually think something and it will get done because he is surrounded by such a wide range of competent people (who are, of course, at his beck-and-call).

Until you are Bill Gates, though, you should manage your days with a to-do list. And you should set aside time each morning to organize the list. Otherwise, you will just be reacting to what happens during the day; other peoples’ priorities will dictate your own. And then whose life are you living?

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Title IX

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When is comes to aspirational reading, the Title 9 catalogue is my favorite. I don’t know anyone at the company, but I curl up on the sofa and read the catalogue like it’s a letter from a good friend.

Great things about this catalogue:

  1. The women who model the clothes. No pro athletes here and no models. These are career girls. This month there is Kathy, who is a business owner and pole vaulter and mom. There is Brigid who is a sales rep who competes in the Ironman. These are women I want to be like.
  2. The lifestyle. All good catalogues sell one. The Title 9 lifestyle mixes work and play. For example, the stash and dash satchel (which I will be buying) is pictured next to this description: “Flat zippered outer pocket fits files and documents perfectly. Plus two outer stash straps for a yoga mat.”
  3. The name. For those of you who don’t know, Title IX is the law that required girls to receive equal access to sports that boys do. So (theoretically) no more spending thousands of dollars on high school football and basketball for boys and nothing for girls. This law is constantly under threat even though people like law professor Joanna Grossman write that, “Title IX is arguably the most successful civil rights statute in history.” Women who play sports do better at work, according to a study published in the magazine Sports File. Title 9 is a great company for making the law a household name.

Read this catalogue to get excited about your life and your work. Really. You can find it online, but call (800) 342-4448 to get one delivered for optimal sofa reading.

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First post

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Here is my first post to my blog. About two years too late.

I know this because two years ago, my readers started telling me that I should blog. I ignored them, mostly, because it seemed like too much work to write every day. After all, I write two columns a week and I invariably do an interview from the gym or from my son’s preschool. I couldn’t imagine doing more work. But now I can’t imagine not having a blog.

One of the readers who made me think the hardest about blogging was Dennis Yang. In fact, he set up a trial blog for me. Which I never used but also never stopped thinking about.

And this reminds me of dozens of readers who told me I should write a book, two or three years before I did. (And my mom. She told me a lot, too.)

So now I have learned my lesson. If I had taken the advice of my readers, I’d have been ahead of myself in many ways. Hopefully, the blog will make it so I hear from more readers on more topics.

As for listening to my mom more, I’m not sure about that.

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