Career Opportunities

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Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

Humans are great at procrastination, especially if pain, either physical or mental, is involved. We can convince ourselves in any number of ways that we are better off ignoring the problem instead of facing it. You might think to yourself, “It isn’t the right time”, “They are already suffering”, “They’ll only get mad at me”, “They should just ‘know’ what the problem is”. The truth is, now is always the best time to discuss and act on a problem. Once a problem is discovered, each passing day makes it harder and harder to address. Our resistance builds up. Our courage falls away and we just tell ourselves we’ll talk about it…later.

I see this very often with parents. Instead of addressing a behavior issue immediately, they convince themselves that they will address it later…and later…and later. The problem is, of course, that addressing a problem immediately will usually quash it forever with very little emotional pain, but trying to resolve a long standing problem can be gut-wrenching. If you have allowed your son or daughter to engage in a behavior you dislike for years and years, their reaction to the conversation is going to be much more forceful and dramatic.

In some extreme cases, you might not be able to solve the problem at all. By allowing the problem to continue year after year, your tacit approval has shown that you don’t really think it is a problem at all. Children may even lash out at you for being unreasonable after so many years. The conversation quickly becomes about you and your behavior instead of the problem at hand.

In the worst cases, addressing a problem too late can even cause a split in the family, in the relationship or in a marriage. Imagine facing a painful problem that could have and should have been addressed years before. While you were trying to avoid a little pain, you eventually caused yourself a great amount.

What to do?

The most important action to take when faced with conflict or problems is to talk about it. If something bothers you, say so. Don’t let it fester inside of you. Get it out now, when it is a small problem. Start the conversation early. Yes, if you are like me, you might feel uncomfortable for a little while, but it is nothing like the discomfort you will feel if you leave the problem unresolved.

As a son from a somewhat reserved farm family in Ohio, I learned a great deal about conflict from my Sicilian-American wife. She doesn’t let a problem pass. If she is peeved, angry or upset about something, she will let you know immediately. We might even have a bit of loud discussion about it. That said, what’s over is over. Everyone says what needs to be said. Everyone gets heard. Changes are discussed and devised and life goes on. As my wife often said about her Sicilian Grandfather, “We might fight tooth and nail during the day, but every night we kissed each other on the cheek before we went to bed.”

It might look and sound volatile to some, but getting the problem out into the open and actively discussed and debated is the most healthy way of dealing with it. It is only when we sit and stew, harboring resentment for days, weeks or even years, that problems turn into hateful arguments, resentful families and broken marriages. 
Don’t let the fear of a little pain stop you from addressing important issues. Talk about them now. Deal with them now. Solve them now. If you don’t, they will only grow more scary, more intractable and more painful with each passing moment.

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It’s not my problem

Too often in our careers, we choose to do nothing about an issue or problem simply to preserve the status quo. We don’t want to rock the boat. We don’t want to cause trouble. We just want to keep our head down, do our work and get paid. Sure, there are times in our lives when the problem really isn’t worth the conflict. Did you find that Joe never feeds the coffee kitty in the break room or Jill takes home a stack of Post-It Notes occasionally? It is socially acceptable to let these offenses slide as the turmoil they would cause would be more damaging than the act itself.

But then there are the big issues — the issues that cannot, or should not be ignored. What do you do then? For most of us, our innate sense of self-preservation kicks in. We ignore the embezzlement that is occurring, the kickbacks, the customer ripoffs and possibly worse. We don’t want to lose our jobs so we simply do nothing, hoping that someone else will do something.

The problem though is that these are not small, social, offenses. These are crimes — usually multiple crimes — and unless you are very, very lucky, those crimes will come to light with or without your action. And once those crimes are discovered, authorities are going to have some very tough questions for you. You are going to be asked why you didn’t report the crimes when you knew they were occurring?  They are going to wonder if you didn’t report the crimes, were you perhaps involved in them in some way. Your inaction has led authorities to wonder, and perhaps prove, that you directly benefited by letting these crimes continue. You might have been simply trying to keep your head down, but you can find yourself directly involved in an investigation that could end your career and may even land you in jail.

What to do?

So what can seem like self-preservation often lands us in the trouble we were trying to avoid the entire time. If we think more deeply about it, reporting criminal behavior is another — and perhaps the best — form of self-preservation. Reporting a crime means that we place ourselves on the correct side of any investigation from the start. We might also find that we are protecting others who also knew and did not report because they were deeply afraid of losing their job. Reporting a crime is never easy, but it is always the right thing to do.

Yes, being a whistleblower can be very difficult and, perhaps, even dangerous. Losing your job can be extremely painful and disrupt your life in many ways, but it will be nothing compared to the destruction of your reputation, even if you don’t go to jail. Reporting a crime might be the most important, and in some cases, most heroic, thing you will ever do in your life. Be ready to stand up when called. Don’t let others be cheated or abused. Stand up for yourself and others just as you hope they will stand up for you.

Culpability

From a more personal view, failing to report a crime, even a suspected one, makes you culpable for that crime continuing. If you don’t take action others will be harmed and a small part of their harm will rest on your shoulders. By failing to take action, you allowed a con man to continue stealing. By your inaction, you allowed an abuser to continue to abuse. By your willing blindness, you allowed more and more people to be hurt. This can be a heavy burden and we should all feel it as such. Our biggest failures, as individuals and as a people, happen when we do nothing about crime, injustice and abuse.

It may sound cliche, but Edmund Burke had it correct when he said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We have seen this to be true in the world many times over. I call on you to break this cycle and do something when you see the need. You may be afraid for your job, your career or even your life, but you will have failed, both yourself and the world, if you do nothing.

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Social Media Self Preservation | The High-Tech Career Handbook

Now, of course, I don’t mean that you should start acting like some of our most at risk stars involved in drugs, alcohol  or a highly publicized 27 day marriages. Your goal is a long and productive career, not a a bright shining moment that ends in a crash. In fact, these bad examples can often be more useful than good examples. They warn us of the dangers and pitfalls to avoid.  The good examples then serve to give us a guideline as to how to handle our career paths.

You are on your own

Anyone who works in the various entertainment fields learns a hard lesson immediately. While you may have a manager, an agent, a record label or a publisher, you are truly on your own. No one can ever care as much about your career as you do. We shouldn’t even expect them to care that much. They are most interested in their own career, just as you should be. This means that you are directly responsible for the health, growth and protection of your career. No one else. When Leonardo DiCaprio selects his next movie, he will take advice from his agent and such, but in the end, it is his face on the screen saying the lines. It is his reputation at risk when the movie does well…or poorly. He can’t blame his staff for his failure. All the blame will be laid at his feet.

The same applies to your job no matter what it might be. You might try to blame your staff, your peers, your management, your company, but it is you who will suffer when you make bad choices. If you make bad choices, you have no one to blame but yourself — or more properly stated, no one else will except the blame for you. Forget this lesson at your peril.

Don’t let others make decisions for you. Take their advice. Discuss the possibilities, but when you make a decision, make sure it is truly your own. I see people allowing others to make their decisions every day. The fact is, there are many people who would love to make your decision, if you abdicate that power to them. Once you have made your own, personal decision, accept it wholeheartedly. If you don’t, it will fail. It may fail otherwise, but your waffling will only increase the chances of that failure. An actor may find that a given movie is not what they imagined, but they can’t give up. They need to make sure that their performance is at the same level that their audience expects. At least then they will have the comfort of knowing they did their best.

Your Audience

Actors have an audience. So do musicians and comedians.  So do you. You may never have thought about it in this way, but you have an audience — an audience that may be smaller than Leo’s audience, but is probably much more important. Every person you touch in your work — every client, peer, manager, customer — is your audience and should be treated as such. Your work is your “performance” as much as any actor. Ignoring this fact can be quite destructive to your overall career. If you are constantly disappointing your audience, it is likely that they will walk out of your career theater sooner or later.

Your audience is what will sustain your career over the long term. These are the people that go to the theater to see a movie with a particular actor no matter the subject matter, role or reviews. These are what author Ken Blanchard described as “Raving Fans.” People who will support you in whatever you do. Developing a few raving fans of your own can help you rise to incredible heights in your career. They will be the people recommending you for a new, more prominent position. They will mentor you from their own experience. They may even hire you themselves to present your ideas to their company or organization. Cultivate your audience — your raving fans — at every turn.

How would your favorite actor, musician or comedian face your career choices? Knowing what you know npw, how can you take the reins of your career and build your reputation and audience. The entertainment industry may have some bad lessons to teach us, but it also shows us how careers will be defined in the future. “All the world’s a stage…”, as Shakespeare said, but we need to work carefully and diligently to insure that it doesn’t turn into “…a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We have many parts to play and being the lead actor in our own career is but one.

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Social Media Self Preservation | The High-Tech Career Handbook

Entitlement

First, a college degree does not entitle you to a great job with great pay. If you were told this by college advisors, or even intimated it, they were wrong. They left you with the idea that creating a lucrative career was simply a matter of paying your money and putting in your time. Sure, there are some unscrupulous sales people at various colleges and tech school that might actively try to deceive you, but unfortunately, in many cases, we also fool ourselves. We want to believe that simply checking all the boxes on the college rubric will lead us to great (and high paying) jobs. We want to believe it is all easy and straightforward, like getting our first Driver’s License. We pass the test and get our license. Careers, however, are nothing like that.

When building your career, it is better to believe that you are entitled to nothing, that you have to earn everything you get. You have to earn every job along the way. You have to earn the pay you receive.  You have to earn your raises, your promotions. Sometimes life will be unfair and you will be denied them even when you feel you are entitled to something better. Whether you believe you are entitled to them means nothing and only leads to deeper frustration. In a case like that you need to redouble your efforts to earn those rewards or make a change to a company that better recognizes your talent and skills.

What is college for?

Attending university isn’t some grand panacea for all your career worries. It is place to learn, to grow,  to explore possibilities. You will learn a lot of different facts, but more importantly, you will learn a lot about yourself. You will start to discover what type of person you are. You will learn how to work with (and sometimes simply tolerate) other types of people. You will learn your career likes, dislikes, goals, and dreams. What you won’t get is a license that allows you to walk into any business and demand a job. It just doesn’t work that way.

Yes, in many ways, businesses have come to see college degrees as a license — a basic confirmation of your viability as an employee. Careers for those without college degrees can be difficult to find and develop. While college degrees may be important in that way, they are also important for what you learn during your education. You may be getting a degree to fulfil some basic business requirements, but what you learn in school and what you do there, is all about you and your career. If you miss this aspect of university life, I think you are missing the largest and most important part. Your college time is about you — plain and simple. It is as much about building the career you deserve as your first — or 20th – job.

Is it worth it?

I think a college education is greatly important for a variety of reasons. As I mentioned above, I think university is a time for learning many different things in many different ways in a relatively safe environment — an opportunity you may never have again. If you see it as a life learning opportunity and not as a “license to career”, I think it can be worth every penny you pay. If, on the other hand, you attend university simply thinking you will then be entitled to a great job, great pay and a wonderful career, you will be sadly disappointed. University is what you make of it, just like your career. You get out of it what you put in and in some cases much, much more. University is the start of your career and it should be treated with the attention you hope to apply to your future work. Learning can be difficult work and is, in a great sense, your “job” for those 4 years – and for the rest of your life. Constantly be thinking of what you can be doing to get the most out of your college education. Don’t expect the doors of opportunity to swing wide just because you have  a diploma. You will soon find out that it is up to you to open those doors on your own.

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