This week, a series for journalists

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I am speaking at the American Society of Journalists and Authors in New York this Sunday. So I thought that in addition to regular posts, I’d do a little series this week on tips for writers.

I have never done a series, but I’ve seen them done on other blogs, so I thought I’d try it. When other bloggers do it, they give a schedule. So, here’s my schedule:

Monday: How to be a freelance writer without starving

Tuesday: How to move from print journalism to online journalism

Wednesday: How journalists can use LinkedIn

Thursday Sunday: Why journalists misquote everyone… or do they? (And how I met my husband)

Friday Saturday: Seven ways to get an agent’s attention

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First reviews of the Brazen Careerist book

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Reviews of the Brazen Careerist book are starting to come in. Next week I’ll link to a bunch of reviews on blogs. This week, here are three of my favorite quotes:

Guy Kawasaki
author of The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
“Take everything you think you ‘know’ about career strategies, throw them away, and read this book because the rules have changed. ‘Brazen,’ ‘counter-intuitive,’ and ‘radical’ are the best three descriptions of Trunk’s work. Life is too short to be stuck in a rat hole…”

Bob Sutton
author of the New York Times Bestseller The No Asshole Rule
“A delightful book, with some edgy advice that made me squirm a bit at times. I agreed with 90% of it, found myself arguing with the other 10%, and was completely engaged from start to finish.”

Keith Ferrazzi
author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
“Brazen Careerist has the street-smarts you need to make your career and life work for you from the start. Read it now, or you’ll wish you had when you’re 40!”

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Paying dues is so old school

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One of the most important career moves of the new millennium is getting out of paying dues. Paying one’s due is an antiquated idea in a workplace where few people aspire to climb the same corporate ladder for 45 years.

Eve Tahmincioglu interviewed 55 leaders for her book, From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top. She found that one of the most common refrains during her interviews was the importance of paying one’s dues. People in leadership positions today think that is important.

However, Tahmincioglu reminds us that what you get from paying your dues is top-of-the-ladder positions that force you to give up almost all your time with your family. In ruminating about what she found from talking with CEOs, Tahmincioglu said, “?”?This is a ridiculous job. If you’re going to get to the top, you need to make sacrifices. You need a spouse at home and you should expect not to spend a lot of time with your children.”

Tahmincioglu echoes what most people today feel about the job of a CEO: Ridiculous. The 80-hour-plus work week is nothing to aim for, and once you decide that you’re not going to climb that ladder, why pay dues? The dues are what you pay when you’re at the bottom in order to get a proverbial ticket to try climbing to the top.

Today’s climb looks different. For one thing, people want personal growth and workplace flexibility – two things not typically valued by people who are hell-bent on seeing people pay dues. The other difference about today’s climb is being able to skip the bottom rung. So the climb looks more like a hop to a spot where you can enjoy yourself without having to worry about the next rung.

Laura Vanderkam has a word for this: grindhopping. In her book, Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, Vanderkam offers a smorgasbord of career choices and essential skills that will get you out of paying dues while still providing opportunities for challenging and rewarding work.

Her basic idea is for people to take personal responsibility for their goals and career development instead of relying on someone else. She advises people to create benchmarks for themselves and get used to the fact that if they are not climbing a ladder, there is no single clear path. You need to “?”?Get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” she advises.

Vanderkam suggests people think “?”?in terms of projects, and not jobs” and then perform like a star so they get more of them. But there are other ways to get past dues-paying as well: People can start their own companies, or skip the heavy dues-paying industries and go into an area that is not as cutthroat.

Raedia Sikkema did just that. She has a degree from the film and television program at New York University with a specialty in animation. Most classmates went to work on feature films for studios such as Sony and Pixar. But she worked on education projects for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“?”?I used to think that working anywhere else [but a big studio] would be sad and not that important. But years down the line, sure you’re working on a feature film, but all you’ve done is a character’s arm.”

Today Sikkema does financial graphics at Lineplot Productions. She works from home, sets her own hours, and controls a project from start to finish rather than working on only one small piece as she pays her dues.

For Sikkema, making the tough choice to not follow her industry’s dues-paying track has paid off: “?”?I feel my work is more creatively fulfilling because I got to do more, even though it was not in a glamorous position.”

The trick to all of this, of course, is being able to market yourself to the people who can give you the work you want. “?”?Position yourself in a way that is true to you, not just as a fit into someone else’s mold,” says Jennifer Kushell, whose company Your Success Network helps young people market themselves professionally. “?”?You need to know what’s special about you and what makes you different,” she says.

Like many things in life, what’s good about not paying your dues is also what’s bad: You get to do work that is true to you, but you have to figure out what that work is to ensure you are good enough at it to get work. So yes, that’s tough stuff, but many will say that it’s much less tough than paying your dues. And really, why do it if you don’t have to?

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Coachology: Knowing when to stop and hear the music

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There is room to be true to yourself within the framework of a career. Today we have so many options that when we are not being true to ourselves we cannot really blame the system. We make our own choices and create our own lives.

It’s very hard to know what we want, though. So often our priorities get sucked up into a blender and spit out as a smoothie. I am having this problem right now with going to the gym. I was already just barely holding things together having added the blog on top of what I normally do for work. And now I’m adding promoting a book.

So it seemed really smart, one night, to skip going to the gym. I got so much done. Then it was four nights. And now I’m at that stage where I am so used to not going to the gym that the smell in the locker room is going to bug me. But going to the gym doesn’t just change my abs, it changes my mind and my heart, and it really disappoints me that I’ve let things get to this point.

So it makes sense that I was really touched by an article in the Washington Post by Gene Weingarten, Pearls Before Breakfast. With a genius combination of multimedia and journalism, The Post did an experiment with the world-famous violinist Josh Bell. He went to the subway in morning rush hour, unannounced, and he played classical music on his million-dollar Stradivarius violin, and left the case open for people to drop dollars. The Post documented the event on video.

When Bell plays in a concert hall he makes $1,000 a minute. Here’s how much money he made in the subway: $32.

Clearly, not everyone knew they were hearing something special. And it’s interesting to read Bell’s candid discussion of what it feels like to be ignored when he has been the focus of adoring fans since he was a young boy.

But the part of this piece that really gets me is the video of a commuter who clearly knows this music is special, but he looks at his watch, and he has to decide to stay or leave. It captures every issue on the earth for me right now: How to measure what is important minute by minute.

I am certain about what really matters: Love, kindness, relationships, respect. But let me tell you something, those issues are not on the table 90% of the time. It’s usually a way more complicated decision about how to spend my time, which is really adding up to how to spend my life. I have thought a lot about if I would have stopped to hear the music in the subway. The answer is that it depends on a lot of outside, mundane time factors. Like, did I need to run an errand before work.

This week’s Coachology is about getting help figuring out how much time you should pay attention to the music. We all have music playing inside of us, and we all make decisions about how much to listen. Some of us have actually made it so we don’t hear the music at all: There is no passion.

Peter Vajda is a career coach with decades of experience who is great when it comes to helping people match their work life with their values and their passions. Peter would be a good match for someone who feels like their work needs more meaning but they don’t know what to do about it. If this is you, send me three sentences about what you’d like to get from 90 free minutes with Peter. The deadline is midnight on April 15.

Hat tip: Ben from Amver.

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Estimate time more accurately by admitting you don’t

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The first thing I did when I sat down to work today was do the easy stuff on my list that does not need to be done until the end of the week. Then, when I should have been going to bed, I started working on the stuff that has to be done today.

I know that I do this a lot, so I have started implementing tricks to stop myself. Like, I categorize everything on my list as an A, B or C, and I have to do all the A’s first. Sometimes I’ll give myself a little gift and do an easy C for a break. Steve Pavlina has written a treatise-length blog entry on the perils of doing the unimportant tasks first. I am hoping that will inspire me.

But research shows that we procrastinate because we are hard-wired to be time optimists; we overestimate the amount of time we have left to do a project. According to Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, we think we’ll have more time in the future because each day is different, so the nature of time fools us. But in fact, the amount of time we have today is probably the amount we have in the future. If you’re busy today, you’ll be busy then.

Alex Williams in the New York Times points out that this is such a big problem that we are frequently relieved and even euphoric when someone cancels on us: “In the Age of the Overwhelmed the cancelled date is a luxury gift.”

People also overestimate how much money they’ll have in the future, but the problem is not nearly as bad with money as with time. Our expenses are more often set in stone than our time commitments, so there is less room for us to poorly estimate the variables.

So recognize when you are looking at your to do list that you have less time than you think you do. And maybe you should only accept invitations for something you’d be willing to do that day, even if it isn’t scheduled for that day in reality.

But Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert gives us encouraging news in his book Stumbling on Happiness: The people who overestimate how much better the future will be are actually the happiest people. So maybe being realistic about our time is not so great after all.

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How to get your company to listen to your ideas

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One of the biggest complaints I hear from employees is that no one is listening to their ideas. In a large part this is not because the ideas are bad, but becuse most employees don’t sell their ideas to their company properly.

Selling an idea to an organization requires that you understand how the decision makers operate, then you cater your idea to the arcane decision-making process. So stop complaining about office politics and start leveraging them to sell your ideas.

A good example of how to sell an idea to an organization is this ad campaign run by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Whether or not you agree with the politics of the Center for Constitutional Rights, their approach is interesting:

“America’s leading group of constitutional attorneys present the case for impeachment of George W. Bush exactly as it could be presented by the House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate. Clearly and concisely, they delineate the four strongest charges against the president, citing precedence and evidence that you don’t have to be an attorney to comprehend.”

What is notable here is that the organization is trying to sell its idea by doing the work of the decision makers — in this case, the House of Representatives. This is the kind of campaigning you should do in your own organization. When you have an idea, sell from the perspective of the people who can make or break your outcome. Think about what obstacles would stand in the way for the decision maker, and then you do the work of making a plan to overcome them.

It is not easy to learn how to sell to an organization. Jeff Snipes, CEO of Ninth House, an online training company, told me that one of their most popular types of training is how to navigate the corporate process. “People need to learn to take an innovative idea and build a business plan around it.”

Snipes talked about skills to master in order to get your ideas implemented, and, no surprise, it’s all about emotional intelligence:

1. Solve a problem
The person who needs to give you approval has issues of her own. Everyone does. Getting someone to pay attention to your ideas is a sales issue. You are selling your idea. And the only way to sell something to someone is to solve a problem for them. You need to really understand the needs of the person you are trying to get approval from. And if you cannot figure out how you are helping that person, then you can’t really sell your idea to her.

2. Package your idea
You’ll get higher level people involved if your idea is aligned with the strategic ideas of the organization. In order to get people to buy in to your idea, you have to know what ideas they are focusing on themselves. You need to show them that you are presenting a plan to further their strategic goals.

3. Understand funding processes
Each organization has a different system for funding projects. But it’s safe to say that every system is arcane in its own way. You need to ask a lot of people in a lot of departments to find out the best way to get funding for your idea. If you rely on someone else to get funding, then you run the risk of not getting approval, because someone doesn’t want to deal with the financial implications of your idea. Taking care of a lot of this legwork and office politics yourself can go a long way toward getting approval.

While every company is different, the big-picture strategy for selling an idea is the same for most companies; A lot of rules hold true wherever you go. And even if you don’t end up getting someone to implement your idea, the experience of trying to sell an idea through a large organization is good experience in and of itself.

Sales is hard, and selling ideas is harder. But, like most things in life, you get good at it by trying and learning from failures. So try it.

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LinkedIn is sponsoring Brazen Careerist

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I am excited to announce two things. The first is that traffic to Brazen Careerist increased by forty percent last month. The second thing is that LinkedIn agreed to sponsor this blog.

The two are related. Of course, LinkedIn wouldn’t be sponsoring the blog if there was not a lot of traffic. But to be honest, they did not approach me for my traffic. In fact, they didn’t approach me at all. I asked them.

I have known the director of corporate communications, Kay Luo, for a while because she was on the phone when I interviewed Konstantin Guericke one of the LinkedIn founders. She was very fun on the phone, chiming in a few times. I ended up writing about how her network-challenged boyfriend should be using her network for his job hunt. And she was a good sport about that, so I liked her.

We kept in touch for a while, and after one email exchange when we were talking about my book, she sent me back a link that showed me how to find all the journalists in my network who could cover my book. That was really cool of her to think of. It didn’t occur to me that I could do that with LinkedIn.

So a few days later I broached the idea of her sponsoring my blog and my book tour. I couldn’t believe how quickly she got the idea approved.

This is a dream sponsorship for me because I am a huge fan of LinkedIn and I was writing about them all the time. Way before I thought of asking them to sponsor me.

Sponsorship is a difficult nut to crack in the blogosphere because there aren’t any official rules for blogger ethics except: Have them. I get approached often by people who want to do some sort of advertising/sponsorship/whatever deal. I always say no. The blog is a huge part of my life, and matching it to someone else’s brand is a big step. I have to love that brand. It has to be integral to my message. I think I’ve found that in LinkedIn.

So I will still write about LinkedIn on the blog, but every time I mention them, I’ll remind everyone that LinkedIn sponsors me. And hooray for that.

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If someone’s bugging you, change yourself

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Here’s a fascinating piece about an Amazon tribe that has no ability to use numbers. Even when the tribe members asked anthropologists to teach counting, the tribesmen couldn’t learn. The tribe is good at other things — fishing and making jokes, for instance — but not counting.

This immediately reminded me of couples therapy with my husband. My biggest complaint, for five or six years, was that my husband doesn’t understand tone of voice. For example, he says, “How was your day?” with the tone of voice that someone uses for “I’m going to kill you.”

It’s startling and disconcerting, to say the least. But our third couples therapist finally said to me that there’s nothing I can do. My husband’s brain just cannot learn tone of voice. I need to work around it.

So I do. I separate the meaning we typically attribute to tone of voice from what my husband is actually saying. The Amazon tribe works around the problem, too – they have a word for “a small amount” and a word for “a bigger amount”.

You need to do this at the office. The people you work with are not idiots. It is just that some people are unable to see things like you do. You need to figure out how they see things, accept it, and work around their deficits.

For example, some people are not very empathetic. Like not knowing numbers or tone of voice, these people don’t understand how some else is feeling. You have to take that into consideration when the person says something inconsiderate. Some people just cannot learn empathy.

So I’m recommending two books that are about getting along with people at work. Both are premised on the idea that you have to adjust yourself in order to get along. You Want Me to Work With Who? is very hands on and self-reflective. Working with You is Killing Me has a lot of case studies and examples. Both are good if you want to take a step in the direction of getting along with everyone at work without relying on them to change.

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Job hunt tips I’ve collected

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I am always coming across new ideas for being more effective when you look for a job. Here are some I’ve collected:

1. Don’t answer the phone when it wakes you up.
I know people get giddy for interview call backs like they get giddy for good-date callbacks. But the combination of giddy for phone calls, and sleeping late because you’re unemployed could be lethal.

Time magazine reports that “the morning haze you experience when the alarm clock goes off is known as sleep inertia, and it clouds your brain more than sleep deprivation. The impairment is most severe in the first ten minutes but can linger for up to two hours.” Bottom line: Let the call go to voicemail and go get some coffee.

2. Edit a wikipedia entry to show you’re an expert.
Writing a blog on a given topic is great for your career. It shows that you specialize and you know you’re stuff. But a blog is a big time investment. I got the idea of taking charge of a wikipedia entry from reading this blog post. It seemed totally natural to this woman to contribute to wikipedia in an area she was becoming knowledgeable in.

We should all think this way. In general, editing wikipedia is not rocket science. It shows that we are good at working in a team (which is what a wikipedia entry is), and that we have expertise.

3. Handle hard interview questions with a positive bent.
“Most times people ask trick questions, the person is looking for you to go negative,” says Cynthia Shapiro, former human resource executive and author of Corporate Confidential. An example of one of these questions is, Tell me about a difficult boss and how you got around it.

The impact of being positive in an interview, and in life, cannot be overestimated. Optimistic people are happier and more fulfilled than the not-so-optimistic.

4. Don’t provide two email addresses.
Why do I see so many resumes with multiple email addresses? If you can’t make up your mind which email address is best, then how will you make decisions for anything once you’re hired? Providing two email addresses is not being thorough. It’s being annoying. Know the difference.

5. Make your resume a tease.
I write all the time about how a resume is a marketing document and not a list of your achievements or (worse yet) your job duties.

But David Perry, author of the Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters, takes that one step further and says a resume should be a tease. You don’t want to tell absolutely everything. You want to tell someone enough to get them to call you to ask for more.

6. Pitch your cover letter from the right angle.
A reader, Harry Hollenberg, wrote in with this tip: “Don’t spend your cover letter telling me why my firm is perfect for you. Tell me why you’re perfect for our firm.”

7. Turn your job hunt into a publicity campaign.
This is actually something to do before you need the job. Debra Feldman, Job Whiz (and Coachology veteran) writes:

“Try Googling yourself. If you can’t find anything that promotes you as an expert in your field, take steps to establish a web presence so recruiters and colleagues can find you and learn about your strengths. You can do this and control the content by establishing your own professional website (not family trips) and including information detailing your achievements, links to other references, white papers, articles, presentations at industry conferences and keynote speeches, internal training you’ve developed or delivered, PowerPoint presentations of general interest.”

“The idea,” writes Feldman, “is to let yourself be found by recruiters and others who are looking for certain skills or qualifications. This tends to make you a more interesting and attractive potential candidate than if you submit a resume or write to introduce yourself. Think how you feel when you unearth a gem.”

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Twentysomething: 7 Ways to motivate your millennial

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By Ryan Healy – I want to work, I want to grow and I want to learn. What I’d really like is challenging, fascinating projects and the perfect mentor. The typical entry-level job doesn’t always allow this to happen. Below are a few simple ways to keep me interested and motivated.

1. Be Spontaneous
You don’t have to make any drastic changes. Something as small as going out for a long lunch with a few co workers could be enough to keep me from going insane in my cubicle. If you want to get a little crazy, tell me to go home at 1pm every once in a while – and really mean it. If I think you don’t really mean it, I won’t use it. Even holding a scheduled meeting in a different location, like a local coffee shop or deli can throw a wrench in the status quo.

2 Give me feedback
I love feedback. In fact, I need fairly consistent feedback and encouragement to know if I am performing up to par or not. And bring on the criticism. In fact, if I know that I’m not doing something right I will ask you how to improve, so be prepared to give me some guidance as well. Further, if I exceed your expectations on something please let me know. This won’t go to my head and I won’t think I am overqualified for the job, I just need an idea of what is expected from me.

3. Ask for feedback
I understand that a lower level employee does not typically openly critique their superiors, but why shouldn’t we? We are the ones who see your management style first hand and know what works and what doesn’t. The key to this one is providing an open, knowledge sharing atmosphere where no one will take offense or belittle anyone else.

If a manager makes it clear to me that they want honest feedback about their performance, I have no problem giving both positive feedback and constructive criticism. The normal performance evaluation gives the impression that you are the teacher and I am being graded. A two way performance evaluation will greatly increase communication and allow for a more engaged relationship.

4. An Optional Reward System
Sometimes a minimal percentage raise is not the most exciting reward for someone who will probably just put it toward their massive college loan debt or next week’s happy hour. A bonus is a more exciting performance reward for me, but an optional performance reward system would be a great way to keep me motivated.

For a twenty-two-year-old, an extra few days of vacation time is a lot more exciting then a small percentage raise that is barely noticeable after taxes. Other options might include extra flex time or occasionally working from home. I’m sure if you asked your twentysomething about possible performance rewards they would come back with a page full of options the very next day.

5. Keep me in the loop
Not having any idea about major business events on the horizon can be really frustrating. I realize there is often confidential information that needs to stay in the hands of upper management, but I want to understand where I fit in. For example, if I’m on the iMac team then it’s fine if you don’t tell me about the iPhone. But if you want me to do work on the iPhone, you have to tell explain to me what I’m working on. If you don’t trust me to keep confidential information confidential, you should fire me.

What makes business fun is seeing how management operates and executes on its strategies. I like hearing what you are working on and thinking about. Not only will this keep me interested and motivated, but it’s a great learning experience for someone who will eventually be in a management position. Also, I like to have some input. You probably won’t take my advice, but hearing a different perspective can’t hurt.

6. Be my friend
Don’t worry I don’t want to be your drinking buddy, and I’m not going to tell you my deepest, darkest secrets. But a little friendly interaction goes a long way. This could mean talking sports for a few minutes in the office or going out for a quick lunch and discussing both work related and non-work-related issues.

I have an excellent relationship with my manager right now. Not only do we get along in the office, but we play in a non-work-related basketball league together. This has created an actual friendship that doesn’t always revolve around work. And it transfers over to the job by creating a loyalty to my manager that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

7. It doesn’t hurt to smile
I can’t think of anything that would turn me off more than a manager who comes in every day with a scowl on their face, looking like they can’t wait to go home. If I have any plans of staying with the company, then most likely my goal will be to move up the ranks and take over my manager’s position.

If I see that this person does not enjoy what they are doing, then why would I want to stick around to take over that position? Obviously, I can make up my own mind about whether or not a job is a good fit for me, but dealing with a disgruntled manager every day will send me running for the exits. Be positive and at least pretend you enjoy your job.

If you don’t think these techniques will work, go ahead and ask your twentysomething what they think, I bet you will get some good feedback.

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