Needle, Meet Haystack

The job: Halloween costume designer

You might like this job if: Do you like dressing up for Halloween?  And making your own costume?  Do you want to make other people’s costumes?  If you answered yes to all three of these questions, you might like this job!  If these criteria seem familiar, it’s because they’re similar to another job we’ve previously discussed.

The good: You get to make Halloween costumes!  Masks, full-body outfits, props and more… whenever you see a gorilla or a superhero or a slutty pumpkin, you will know that your handiwork is on full display.

The bad: You are, regrettably, making disposable fashion that will most likely only be worn once.  And oftentimes, you will be making costumes that are almost identical to last year’s model.  Sure, you might get lucky and have the chance to design a line of costumes around a recently departed celebrity, but odds are you’ll be making tiny tweaks on Dracula or Frankenstein.

Summary: A fairly fun and creative job, but your pay is forever tied to one day of the year.  And no matter how creative a lot of your costumes may be, chances are they still won’t break the top  20 of the year (with witches and vampires almost always in the top spot).

Rating: Three sets of wax lips, which are definitely not an acceptable substitute for candy, out of five

Tomorrow is October 31, quite possibly the greatest day all year, provided you are one of the many people who enjoy dressing up and being silly.  Liking candy also helps.

During a recent conversation with a friend of mine about costumes, we discussed the theory of internalized expression of one’s aspiration group based on their choice of attire.  While my theory is that people wear costumes to the extent of their creative ability and desire for social acceptance (ie: people who want more attention dress more outlandishly, while those who are more insular or self-focused do not), he had a different idea.  My friend believes that Halloween costumes reflect an aspect of what a person wants, but currently lacks, in their life.  For example:

• A hobo represents the desire to live a simpler, less connected life
• A devil represents the desire to act on impulse and not be so concerned with consequences
• An astronaut represents the desire to make new achievements that are noticed by others
• A topical/political costume represents the desire for fame and to be talked about
• A lack of a costume represents the desire for a better sense of individualism

But regardless of the costume, the motivation for choosing it carries with it the idea that whatever identity the wearer is taking on, there is some aspect of it that they feel that they lack.  A James Bond might wish he was more suave, or a policewoman might wish she had more authority.

What attributes do you wish that you have that are prominent in your costumed self?  And, in a slight continuance of an earlier post, how can you add these characteristics to your personality and everyday life?

When I was in the third grade, my teacher had a big sign that had been printed years before, on paper that still had the tear-off holes on the sides that older printers had used.  On it were four words, all written in bold capital letters:

NO EXCUSES, JUST RESULTS.

This message might seem a bit strong for a group of eight year-olds who were still mastering handwriting and basic arithmetic, but it is one that has stuck with me ever since.

Everyone makes excuses, passes the blame onto others, and refuses responsibility.  After all, it’s much easier than owning up or providing a solution to a problem.  But the next time you find yourself complaining or making excuses, think to yourself, “What can I do to help fix this situation?”  Most of the time, it will take just a few moments to come up with the rather simple solution to your problem.

It doesn’t take much to quit complaining and become more proactive.  So stop creating excuses; make results instead.

It seems like a lot of advice that’s given to new job seekers is focused around failure.  In the past month, I’ve seen dozens of articles with titles like these:

• Don’t Be Afraid To Fail
• Failure Can Help
• Why Everyone Needs To Fail
• How Failing Helped Me Succeed

The basic premise is that everyone needs some failure in their professional lives to learn how to better gauge and appreciate success.  Failure is necessary to help you learn from your mistakes.  You need to learn humility, which can only come around through failing.  Failure is the best teacher.  Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

While I agree with the sentiment, if I wanted that much fail, I’d just go to Failblog.

There are plenty of people who have overcome failure to become successful.  In fact, some people failed so hard that they started to win.  Hell, I spent a year after college slowly failing until my bank account couldn’t take it anymore.  Since then, I’ve learned how to work smarter and have become a more effective and efficient worker.  But failure, despite its many forms, is nothing without success.

Failure is okay.  It’s not the end of the world if you fail.  But setting out with anything except total success in mind is just leaving the door wide open for anything but victory.  In order to do anything well, be it keeping a job or playing sports, one should always try to have more wins than losses.

And sure, it’s better to fail when you’re young, so you don’t have as many social or familial obligations to attend to.  But burning out on a start-up, losing a client for your company, making an accounting error or making any mistake is something that should be done partially, not totally.  In any good company, there should be a system set up to help correct mistakes before they become failures.  For those who are new and might make mistakes, there should be a support system of co-workers and managers to help catch them.

So if you feel that you absolutely have to fail, get it over with by failing at something inconsequential.  Lose badly at a poker game with friends.  Strike out with someone at a bar.  Enter a dancing competition even though you have two left feet.  The feeling of failure will still be there, and you can learn from it there.  But to obsess over failing (or not having failed yet) won’t help you.

Everyone will at some point experience full-blown, no-holds-barred failure.  And it will be devastating.  But to work in the anticipation of failure is to mitigate success.

After last week’s post, some readers have written to ask me how I answer the ever-present “What do you do?” question.  I usually say something like this:

I’m doing marketing for a few small start-ups, though I also have a job blog and have been spending time working on music and video production.  I really enjoy all of the challenges that are presented to me through these different activities.  What do you do?

And the follow-up to this statement, from both readers and questioners, is “How do you do all that?  I wish I had the time to do that.”

But here’s the thing: you do have the time to do that.  And more.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of reining in your breaks from work.  Or creating a better routine.  A lot of the time, it’s a matter of motivation.  But the ability to do multiple things for fun and/or profit comes from the ability to weed out the less important tasks from your day.  But the secret to improving your time-management skills comes from cutting back on two things that have become bastions for procrastinators and time-wasters: television and the Internet.

I’m not saying that all TV is bad.  In fact, I’m wary of those who claim to “never watch” or “don’t own” a TV – there’s no reason to cut off all exposure to an entire medium if for no other reason than the silly belief that it will turn one’s brain into mush.  In fact, I’ve used TV as an example quite a few times.  But unless the show is conducive to your career or goals (ie: Shark Week for marine biology, Bloomberg for financial updates, etc.), chances are you can skip it.

I love the Internet, too.  Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Texts From Last Night, College Humor, Cracked and Wikipedia…there are so many great sites to find information on, read and enjoy.  But these sites are also time-wasters.  Instead of cutting yourself off from the Information Superhighway completely (and when was the last time someone called it that?), if you limit your focus to only sites pertinent to the task at hand, you can save yourself hours of time each day.  By limiting the time I spend checking social networks and emails to the end of the day (and doing the same with the Internet for leisure purposes), I’ve gained about 2.5 more hours of productive time every day – that’s over 12 hours per week!

If you can cut out the extraneous activities in your daily schedule, you’ll be amazed at how much more you can accomplish.

There are two words that most job seekers should fear more than any other, that permeate the current domestic (and to some degree, global) work climate, and can spell certain doom for almost anyone who is complacent in their current position.

Those words are “lean production.”

If you had an introduction to business class (or checked Wikipedia), you may remember lean production being defined thusly (on Wikipedia):

Lean production (or manufacturing) is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.

But in this case, we’re using the term lean production in the context of human capital.  And as companies are tightening their wallets, the chances of them using this practice increase.  Here’s a fake-textbook example:

Herman and Martha both work for the Acme Company making Widgets.  They both get paid a salary of $40,000 each, and have a monthly production of 100,000 widgets each.  The Acme Company is in a tight financial spot, so they fire Herman and tell Martha to increase her production rate.  Fearful of being fired, Martha starts making 150,000 widgets per month, without any change in pay or benefits.

When both Herman and Martha were working, the cost of a widget that they made to the company (versus their salaries) was 3 cents.  With Herman gone and Martha’s increased production, a widget now “costs” 2 cents.  Despite a loss of 50,000 widgets per month, the company still comes out ahead.  And now that Martha is more cost-effective, an improving financial situation still gives Acme no reason to hire Herman, as production levels would return to where they were, making the company lose money.

Boy, that sounds like an exaggeration, huh?  Well, not really.  Companies across the country are laying off workers and having their remaining employees pick up the slack.  New responsibilities are added without any financial compensation, and production remains virtually unchanged.

Even though the economy may be improving, there’s not enough incentive for them to hire new employees, especially when the costs are so low.

But doesn’t that drive up the value of employees to the companies, causing more problems when they get sick, demand extra pay, threaten to quit, or so on? You ask.  In most cases, no.  Because there’s the ace in the hole that has been created by the loss of jobs and the need for employment: freelance workers.  And since freelancers are often paid at a different rate than full-time employees (usually without benefits), more money can be saved than by making a new full-time position.

So how can a job seeker combat against lean production and freelancers in the marketplace?

We’ve previously discussed some options for the unemployed that don’t involve directly combating the job market, but for those who insist on joining the corporate world, there are four solid options:

1. Start freelancing. Some companies hire on a contract basis to determine whether or not to employ someone full-time.  There’s no reason to not dive into the freelancing deep end, provided that you have some way of getting health benefits.
2. Intern or volunteer. It’s much cheaper for a company to take someone on for little (or no) cost as an intern or office volunteer.  Besides getting more knowledge about your future position, you may get offered a full-time job after your internship/volunteer period is over.
3. Move laterally. If the company is hiring for a position in another department that you are qualified for, go for it.  You can then begin taking the steps to make the move to the department where you want to be.
4. Work for a competitor. Not every company is using lean production; many are hiring right now.  Check out industry news and related job search sites to find other businesses that you could work for in the same capacity – you might even find something better!

Even though many businesses are not hiring, there are still options for job seekers to get where they want to go.  With a little ingenuity and know-how, you’ll be on your way to the job you want in no time!

Here are a few employment sites that are a bit more specialized and can help you with the online job search:

• Like previous site addition LinkUp, Hound also searches through employers’ career pages.  However, the code and resources are different for each site, so you should use both to maximize your search results.
• You may have seen some news stories recently that discussed the prevalence of available government jobs.  Take a look at the official government job site, USAJobs, for the best listings of government jobs in your area.
• Looking for part-time or hourly work?  Snag A Job is your best bet for finding reliable job openings in your area for non-salaried positions.

All of these sites are free, so use them to help find the career you’ve been looking for!

Hound.com

USAJobs.gov

Snag A Job.com

The job: Superhero

You might like this job if: You like truth, justice, the American way, striking fear into the hearts of evildoers, exercising great responsibility with your great powers, defending a world that fears and hates you, etc.  Also, a healthy dose of hating evil and enjoying kicking bad guys in the face wouldn’t hurt.

The good: You get to fight evil, champion the innocent, stop super-crime, and possess abilities far beyond those of mere mortals…

The bad: …if you were in a comic book.  If you tried to be a super hero in real life, you’d probably end up like these guys, dressing up in homemade costumes and doing more community outreach than crime-fighting.  Not to mention that being a vigilante is illegal.  And forget about making money doing it.  Want to make cash with superhero licensing?  Get into making comic books.

Summary: A nice daydream, but if you really want to fight crime, join the police.

Rating: Five mint-condition copies of Action Comics #1 out of five

So let’s say you’re at a get-together, like a networking event, a party, a potluck and so on.  Suddenly, an acquaintance slides up to you and says, “Hi, have you met So-And-So?”  You haven’t met, so you start chatting.  The small talk is proceeding well enough until So-And-So drops the big one.  The dreaded, generic, incredibly open-ended “So, what do you do?”

What do you do when someone asks you, “What do you do?”

The problem with this question is that people often ask this question as a generic, getting to know you type of inquiry, wanting to feel comfortable with another person on at least the first level of communication.  Instead, the answer usually falls into one of several uncomfortable categories:

• Poor attempts at humor. “I’m a disposable lighter repairman,” they might say.  Or “I put the pimentos in green olives.”  Unless you actually do these jobs, it’s best to stay away from doing this.
• The job put-down. Sure, this might be an attempt at humor, but by putting down the job (ie: “I pollute the Internet because I make online ad campaigns,” or “Oh, it’s really boring…”), there comes an almost anticipated amount of pity and negativity that can sour the interaction.
• Complaining. We’ve all had a bad day at work, and sometimes, the question can lead to a long monologue about the injustices of the workplace, stupid bosses and so on.  The long-winded complaint is only effective in that it will make your new acquaintance want to move away from you very quickly.
• The technical explanation. Another way to get your audience scrambling for the doors is to offer the minute details of your job.  Unless they’ve expressed interest in your field, you don’t need to fill the conversation with talk of TPS reports.

There is, however, one response that works well.  And that’s the brief and effective response. If you can give a short (re: less than three sentences) description of your work, possibly the company you work for, and why you do it, you’ll be answering the question effectively and keeping the conversation moving well.  For example:

Sue: So, what do you do, Bob?

Bob: Well, Sue, I’m a creative director for Acme Advertising.  I get to make a lot of fun commercials for some really cool companies.  What do you do, Sue?

Yes, it might seem a bit plain and trite, but by being direct and succinct with your response, you let people know what you do without dancing around the issue and invite them to ask further questions.  Rather than guessing how someone might respond to your humor or using them as a free therapist to complain to, you will be setting the foundation for future conversations.

So, what do you do?

There’s been much to do lately about what qualifies someone to be an expert.  Whether it’s discussions on Brazen Careerist, a quick how-to guide in a New York Times bestseller or past posts on this very blog, expertise seems to be something that’s a bit tricky to define and explain.  Many people proclaim themselves to be experts, but not as many are.  Unless they happen to have “M.D.” after their names, or “Professor” before them.

Believe it or not, I’ve been called an expert in many areas that I personally thought that I had no business being an expert in.  I helped to teach dating classes when my love life was at an all-time low (though they went surprisingly well).  I made presentations to clients on topics that I only had a rudimentary knowledge of (thanks, Wikipedia!).  And then there’s the time my friend Ben asked me to cut his hair because I had at one point worked at a hair salon (as a receptionist, hence the problem).

The issue with expertise is much like the problem with art.  How do you define someone as an artist?  I was once taught that there were three criteria that should be used as a base for defining an artist:

1. Has the person self-identified as an artist?
2. Do others agree that this person is an artist?
3. Does their art stand the test of time?

You must have the answer of “yes” to all three of these questions to be deemed an artist who has produced real art.  It’s how we can distinguish the professionals from the amateurs.  It’s what makes the Mona Lisa a fixture in the Louvre and your preschool drawings a fixture in the box in your parents’ attic.  So I propose a similar set of criteria for experts that must all be fulfilled completely in the positive in order to prove their expert-ness:

1. Has the person self-identified as an expert?
2. Do others agree that this person is an expert?
3. Does the content that they produce give reliable and valid results that stand the test of time?

So if you proclaim yourself, say, a social media expert, you will not only have to have others agree that you have expertise in social media, but will also be able to produce real, calculable information and results that prove your expertise is correct (higher click-through rates, a certain number of active followers, a high ROI, etc).  Those who cannot fulfill all three areas are not experts.

So in conclusion: Tony Robbins?  Expert.  Doctors?  Experts.  The guy who hangs out by the bus stop yelling obscenities into his shoe?  Not an expert.

The next time someone tells you that they are an expert, check their credentials, what others say about them, and whether what they offer is valid and reliable.  You might end up being more of an expert than they are!