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From “Career Prescriptions” – Career Opportunities Podcast with Douglas E. Welch)
Transcript:
In the past we have sort of had a very, very scarcity-based idea about our lives, our work, our jobs, our knowledge. I keep it. If I know this little piece of knowledge. If I know how to get that purchase order through the system, I’ve got a little piece of power. It’s mine. It doesn’t work anymore, because the fact is there are a thousand other places that people can got to get that information. By sharing what you know — and I want to reinforce this a lot — what you’re passionate about, you expose your ideas and yourself to a huge number of people out there. Again, what did I say at the beginning? We don’t know where out next job is coming from? So, our goal is to share our knowledge and to expose what we do and how well we do it to as many people as possible out there. And the way you can do that very easily is with a blog. Yes? (inaudible) Ah, yes, a friend of ours is a woman who suffers from dissociative disorder. Yes. It used to be called multiple personalities, but dissociative disorder and she had a blog in which she wrote about that and a number of other things. She’s also an amazing photographer. She’s an amazing writer and she shared this information especially about the dissociative disorder so that people who also suffered from that had somewhere to turn and someone who knew what they were talking about. There is a show on Showtime called The United States of Tara, which is about a woman with dissociative disorder. Well, the fact is, Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno (young kid), she went looking on the Internet for information about dissociative disorder and guess what? She stumbled across our friends blog. They started conversing via email. Diablo said, “You know what? You are so in tune with what is going on right now — the current research, what people are dealing with — I want you to become the technical advisor on my show.” And our friend came to us and said, “Should I do that?” And our response back was, “Well, what are they going to pay you?” And she went, “They’re going to pay me?” (Laughter) And we said, “They should!” And that is exactly what happened. This turned into a side job for her, if you will. Basically, reading the scripts, discussing story ideas with the writers and saying — the writers would come to her and say, “Well, would they do this or would they do this? What’s your experience when” — that show deals a lot with how it effects her family — “what does your family deal with when you change into a different personality? — when you become, I forget the different character names — but when you become one of the other characters?” And she would be able to go through — she wasn’t really writing the scripts, but she was providing technical advising, much like you would hire a police officer to advise about a police show or doctor about a doctor show. Ok? That is, obviously not a story that is going to happen to all of us, but I will say in many, many, smaller ways, that will happen to you, if you start a blog. If you start a blog and you start putting stuff out there, people are going to find you. People are going to be searching Google about rose gardening and you’re going to pop up. And they are going to “Ooo, that’s cool! What’s that? Ooo.” and they are going to send you a question or they are going to refer you to someone else. They’re going to spread the word about you. I’m mot saying you have to go out and do blogging as a living. There are people that do that. Frankly, I blog a lot, but I don’t blog as a living. I blog to share stuff. Much like I am advising you to do. My wife is a television writer and I am often fond of telling her, “scripts don’t sell themselves in a drawer. Books don’t sell themselves in a drawer.” If no one see it, it has zero chance of selling. They same thing applies to your skills, your passions, your knowledge. If you no one sees them, what good is it doing you?
Douglas is writer and host of Career Opportunities, a long running column and podcast dedicated to “Helping to Build the Career You Deserve!” Career Opportunities began in 1997 as a magazine column and expanded to a podcast in 2004. Douglas is also a New Media Consultant, Technology and Career Consultant with over 30 years experience in high-tech. You can find all of Douglas’ work at DouglasEWelch.com.
