Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART II
Life Skills 101
8
The Job Hunt
Looking for a job has almost always been tough.
It’s been a long time since high school or college graduates could walk down to the widget factory and sign up for their forty-years-and-pension-guaranteed jobs.
Some who did that paid for their affluence and security by first living through a Great Depression or fighting in a war. The 1950s and 1960s were mostly boom times, but the 1970s were mired in stagflation and economic malaise. The 1980s saw a roaring economic recovery, but the 1990s were a boom or bust depending on your industry: dot-com (boom), aerospace and defense after the Cold War (bust). And remember all those Generation Xers then allegedly mired in McJobs? The twenty-first century has been dominated by a war on terror that few of us have had to fight (and whose soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are now getting pink slips with defense cuts) and a Great Recession that wiped out a lot of jobs. Many companies have reevaluated whether they really need those entry-level, recent-college-grad positions. For you, they might have been the first rung on a career ladder. For them, they’re something that an unpaid intern could do.
You can’t choose the job market or economic circumstances you’re in. You can only choose how you respond to that challenge.
The two keys are momentum and hunger. NFL-player-turned-motivational-speaker Eric Thomas summarized it simply, “When you want to succeed as badly as you wanna breathe, then you will be successful.”
Yes, it’s not fair that you’re not working during a 1980s boom or a 1990s dot-com mania. But you might as well purge the words “it’s not fair” from your vocabulary. For starters, every time you say it, you sound like Luke Skywalker whining, “But I was going to the Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”
Yes, it’s not fair that they’re not handing out on street corners six-figure managerial jobs requiring no experience. Yes, it’s not fair that so many companies feel so little loyalty to their employees, and that you can do your job well and still get laid off if the company hits the skids. Nobody ever said the world was fair.
And what’s more, the odds are good that a lot of people around the world would say you’ve got some unfair advantages of your own. You might have parents that love you. You might have been raised in a safe environment. You might have gone to good schools, or at least okay ones. You might have good health. You live in a country where you’re free to pursue any career you like; no authoritarian regime is dictating what you’ll do with your life. There are people around the globe who don’t have any of that.
(“Check your privilege” is an insufferable term of derision heard on campus and in Internet debates. “Count your blessings” is the better way of putting it.)
The late sportscaster Stuart Scott, discussing his diagnosis of cancer in his memoir Every Day I Fight, observed:
I haven’t allowed myself a single Why me? moment. Because, if I start asking Why me? as it relates to cancer, I’d have to start asking Why me? as it relates to all of my good fortune: Why was I able to do this job I love? Why was I blessed with [daughters] Sydni and Taelor and such a great family? Once you start questioning the bad stuff that comes your way, you have to start questioning the good—and I wouldn’t trade the good for anything.*
Stuart Scott with Larry Platt, Every Day I Fight (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2015), 25.
There are choices you can make to create your own advantages. You can make the choice, for instance, to be more determined than anyone else out there.
It does seem that a lot of people swim in waters of either ignorance or misinformation about what it takes to build a successful career.
Movin’ on Up
Someone once told Cam how lucky he was to have a career hosting his own radio and television shows; he didn’t know, of course, about how Cam had gotten there—doing years of low-paid drudge work as an informal apprenticeship.
Cam handled that guy a lot more calmly and politely than I would have. You want to be where I am, pal? Go work sixty hours a week when Congress is in session on a complicated Rube-Goldberg-designed computer system, recording every vote of every one of the 435 members of the House, knowing that you’ve already been warned that if you screw up one more time you’re fired. (That job was the one time in my life I’ve ever experienced hallucinations, because I was so overwhelmed with stress that I began remembering making mistakes that I hadn’t actually made.) Then go work at some dot-coms where the financial handwriting is on the wall and you see the staff getting smaller and smaller with each round of layoffs. Then work at a wire service where the paychecks bounce, your competitors are making twice what you make, your computers are several years out of date, and you are your own tech support.
Even in those difficult jobs, I was making connections, building up a thick stack of clips, and demonstrating that I could do what I wanted to do: write. After a while, my freelance submissions stopped being from Jim Geraghty, Some Schmo, and instead were from Jim Geraghty of States News Service, whose work appears in the Boston Globe, Bergen Record, Washington Post, and elsewhere. I took a giant step forward when I stopped seeing my job as a burden or a source of grief and aggravation and started seeing it as a giant opportunity that few other people get. It took three years, but it finally opened the door to the dream job at National Review.
It’s often said that one of the problems with Millennials is that they’re not getting ahead because they’re focused on glamour jobs that few of them will ever attain. If you want to be a professional athlete, Hollywood star, or rock star, God bless ya; I wish you the best of luck and success. When it comes to your talents in those astronomically competitive fields, your family, friends, and loved ones are probably like that poster from The X-Files: they want to believe.
Sharp minds will notice that wanting to believe is not the same as believing. You might be great at your dream profession. You might be merely okay at it. In those extremely competitive fields, there’s this nagging fear that being talented might not be enough. Connections matter. Luck matters. And having something to fall back on matters (you know, working on additional skills applicable to other careers).
Relentless determination, a stubborn refusal to quit, working hard to succeed, and developing options in case option one doesn’t work are crucial to your eventual success, wherever it may lie. Everyone who cares about you needs to know that whether or not you ever get that big audition or tryout, you’re inevitably going to achieve something, and that something will help you keep a roof over your head, put food on the table, and build a happy future for yourself and perhaps someday a family.
Here are two similar expressions of this attitude, from two highly successful men:
“Don’t quit your job after six months. Your first six months in most jobs can be really tough. You probably all have that experience, where you say, ‘Oh, my goodness, what a mistake have I made, I gotta get outta here.’ Live through the first six months. Put your head down. Work real hard. Remember to do your present job really well. Perform as superbly as you can, and then just soak up as much learning as you can. Always look for opportunities, for gaps in the marketplace, opportunities to create new innovations of one kind or another. Almost every successful entrepreneur I’ve seen did not begin by sitting down with a p
Learning on the Job
You might not be lucky enough (and yes, despite the need for hard work, perseverance, networking, and a good attitude, luck is still important) to land a job in a field that you love right away. My oldest daughter’s first job out of college was in a hospital gift shop, which might have (mostly) paid the bills but certainly didn’t offer much in terms of job satisfaction. You might even find your career path taking you in a direction you never thought it would go.
Work can define who you are, but that doesn’t mean that it always will. I remember telling my daughter after one particularly awful shift in the gift shop that “sometimes our job is fulfilling, and sometimes our paycheck allows us to do the things that fulfill us instead.” My daughter is incredibly artistic, and during her time toiling in the gift shop, she was unleashing her creative forces through sculpture, painting, and photography. Eventually she made her way into the culinary world, which allows her to use her creativity in the workplace, even if not in the direction she originally intended. She’s also going back to school and studying engineering, which would allow for her to use her creative side while also (hopefully) providing a good-paying job.
In 2012 Bentley University published a survey on Millennial attitudes toward work.* About half of the survey’s respondents agreed with the statement that “Members of the Millennial generation have a different set of priorities than previous generations. What seems like Laziness is really evidence that they aren’t willing to sacrifice control over their own personal fulfillment just to achieve success at a job. Today’s young adults want flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles, and skills. They grow impatient with situations that they find stifling, and they resent it when the demands of work take away from their personal lives.”
Center for Women and Business, Millennials in the Workplace (Waltham, MA: Bentley University, 2012), https://www.bentley.edu/centers/sites/www.bentley.edu.centers/files/centers/cwb/millennials-report.pdf.
In other words, they think of themselves as precious little snowflakes. I understand. Compared to my parents, I’m a precious little snowflake too.
My dad joined the Navy as a seventeen-year-old in 1944. He served in the Pacific in the waning days of the war on a destroyer and saw some action, mostly during the Okinawa campaign. In comparison, when I was seventeen, I thought I was a badass because I went to a writing camp at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom didn’t live in a home with running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity until she was eighteen. I didn’t live in a house with cable until I was seven.
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between the Greatest Generation and their progeny. And it has only gotten worse in succeeding generations, each more spoiled and coddled than the last. No matter how many trophies we get as a kid just for showing up, most of us eventually come to the realization that fulfillment comes through hard work and responsibility. You have to earn it.
My first real job on my career path was as an associate producer. I worked, as the low man on the totem pole, the graveyard shift from 11 p.m. to 8 or 9 a.m. Most of that time was spent in a draining, mad scramble working with a skeleton crew to get ready for the three-hour behemoth morning show. Scripts had to be written, printed, and distributed; last-minute changes had to be reloaded into the teleprompter, with new copies of the script run out to the anchors during commercial breaks. It was hectic and frantic, and it would have been a lot more fun if it had been done from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
I never got used to the graveyard shift. Every morning I would drive back to my apartment, draw the curtains in my bedroom, and immediately fall asleep. I’d wake up around 4 or 5 p.m. still feeling exhausted. I’d stumble to the kitchen and pour myself a bowl of Cocoa Krispies, and then when my roommate/bandmate/best friend Todd got home from his day job (an actual day job), we’d head over to our friend Jonathan’s house to rehearse for a few hours. From there I’d head into work and do it all over again.
It was tiring, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Burnout was high among the associate producers, and turnover was pretty frequent. As long as I worked hard and showed progress in my ability to quickly turn a script or run the Chyron character generator, sooner or later I’d get promoted to a day shift and would finally be released from my nocturnal work schedule.
In addition to a work ethic, I was also lucky enough to have a mentor. I’ve been blessed to find mentors at virtually every job I’ve had in radio and television. Without their experience, guidance, friendship, and wisdom, I’d likely be flipping burgers somewhere. I never consciously sought a mentor, but I was always eager to learn from veterans willing to teach me.
Officially, Lisa was an assistant producer, like I was, but in reality she was producer-without-portfolio. She was in charge of all the associate producers, and could pinch-hit for virtually all of the show producers if need be. She was smart, savvy, and wickedly funny, with a blend of competence and calm that a newsroom desperately needs and so rarely gets.
As part of her duties in managing the herd of associate producers, she would note which ones of us were in over our heads, who could move onto a producer track, and who wanted a job in front of the camera. If they wanted to be on-air reporters, they’d probably soon be departing for an on-air gig in a much smaller market, where they could get experience in front of the camera. This was not my path. Even when I was twenty-two, I had a face (and a hairline) made for radio. Being a television reporter seemed an impossibly long way from my job on the graveyard shift writing stories, ripping scripts, and running the teleprompter, among other things.
When a position as a health segment producer opened up, however, Lisa encouraged me to apply. She put in a good word for me with the executive director and news director, who were both a little concerned about putting a twenty-two-year-old dude in charge of a segment that is geared heavily toward a female audience. They both trusted Lisa, however, and that was enough to give me a chance. I took it, and for the first time in my life was able to do real reporting. Well, I was able to go out in the field, conduct interviews, work with a videographer, and write up a package for the anchor who hosted our health segments. I didn’t care about the face time, frankly. I was having too much fun with my job.
Getting out into the field instead of working in the newsroom was a game-changing experience, and working with Barry, one of the videographers on staff, provided me with my second mentor. Barry was older than I was, already married with two adorable kids. He was grounded in an industry full of narcissism and unchecked egos, and, like Lisa, was always calm no matter the breaking news. Barry helped me with everything from my interview skills to dealing with some of the frostier personalities in the newsroom. He treated me as his peer, not some know-nothing punk who’d be gone in six months. And I really appreciated that.
My mentors helped give me a crash course on local news gathering, and when I did ultimately make the transition to reporting, albeit on radio and not TV, it was in large part because of the lessons I learned from them. Just because you’re not in class doesn’t mean school’s not in session. The real world has a lot to teach.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
He certainly wouldn’t whine about the job market or his need for self-fulfillment; he’d get on a career ladder and climb it for the most important end of all—supporting his family.
