Authors: Jon Acuff
My wife had given birth to our first daughter, L.E., in Brigham and Women’s, a hospital right near Fenway Park. As I was returning to the room with ice chips (the only real value I was able to provide in those first twenty-four hours), I noticed something out the window. I walked over to the edge of the waiting room and couldn’t believe what I saw.
Eight stories down from where I was standing was a billboard for a Toyota minivan. What surprised me about it was how it was positioned. You couldn’t see it from the street. If you were driving through Boston, you couldn’t read the billboard or really even tell what it was for. The angle from the street was horrible, but some advertising genius didn’t care about the street. They cared about the waiting room I was in right that second.
The billboard was tilted perfectly to grab my attention. The billboard was aimed right at that window, a window where new dads and new moms and new grandparents were sitting. People who suddenly had a deep need for a minivan. People who had entered a new season of life and were suddenly very interested in a vehicle they may have ignored before they entered the hospital.
That is what context does. It takes an idea and places it in the exact moment you need it. And it’s so powerful that it can even turn an ad into content.
For instance, when I worked at AutoTrader.com, a fantastic company, our most popular page was our search feature. When someone would search for a car, we would show them an ad. If you were looking for a used Honda Civic and we showed you a promotion for a home mortgage, that was an ad. That was out of context.
If, however, you were looking for a new car because you were moving to a new house and were going to have a longer commute, that same promotion would no longer be an ad. It would be content, something helpful we provided you at the moment you needed it.
To jump back to our store metaphor, context is what you put by the registers. Target doesn’t stock televisions by the register because they’d be out of context. No one while checking out has ever said, “Oh, good, I meant to pick up a 42-inch television, and there’s one right here by the register!” Instead, Target puts small items there: batteries, ChapStick, things you forgot to get in the store but are likely to buy at the last minute. They put their products (content) in the right place (context).
Where will you share your content?
Where are people looking for your content?
Are they in a season of life in which your content would help them?
10. Start slow and small.
The guy who created Pocket-Sized Stories isn’t writing anymore, which is a shame, because his site was great. What happened? I’m not sure, but he may have fallen prey to the problem that wrecks a lot of people online. Production. The hardest part of social media is keeping the content going. Lots of people start with goals that are too ambitious. They say, “I’ll blog every day!” Then by week three, after twenty-one posts, they’re exhausted and give up. Pace your social media the right way by starting slow. If you blog, commit to two posts a week for three months. That’s only twenty-four posts in ninety days, which is very doable. And it’s always better to add content for your readers than it is to take it away. Readers love when you say, “I’ve been blogging two days a week, but have loved doing it, so I’m going to increase it to three days a week.” They get frustrated when you say, “I’ve been blogging six days a week but can’t do it anymore and have to cut back to two days a week.”
Don’t set out to conquer the world one tweet at a time only to quit on day three when you realize it’s a really big world.
Appendix B: 10 Things to Do If You’re Unemployed
Appendix B
10 Things to Do If You’re Unemployed
I lost my job
about an hour after I got married.
This is an exaggeration, but it does reflect what my in-laws probably thought about the whole situation.
I moved their Georgian daughter to Boston for my job after our wedding and then promptly lost it. Those were not fun months.
And a lot of people are in the same place right now. Whether you lost your job or graduated from college into an economy that doesn’t feel friendly, there are ten things you need to do right now.
1. Remind yourself what you lost.
You didn’t lose your identity; you lost your job. Fear and doubt always try to flip that around, to make you think you lost who you are when you lost a job or didn’t get one right out of college. Nonsense. You didn’t lose your identity; you lost a job title. You lost a seat in a building. You can still be a great dad, a great wife, a great friend, and a million other people right now. Don’t listen to fear and doubt in this moment.
2. Be honest about the calendar.
The second lie fear will tell you in this moment is that this is forever. It’s not a week or a month or even a year you’ll be out of work; this is the rest of your life. You will never find another job again. Nobody hires 50-year-olds or 20-year-olds. You will be unemployed for the next three decades. Not true. This is a season, and though it always feels longer than we want, it will come to a conclusion. I promise.
3.
Flip the numbers.
I honestly believe this is the best time in the history of mankind to find a new job. Twenty years ago you couldn’t go online and research entire industries in a matter of minutes. You couldn’t apply to 100 jobs in a single day or find quick-hit freelance gigs on Craigslist. But when you watch the news and follow the national unemployment rate like a stock price. it can get discouraging. So next time you hear the unemployment numbers, I want you to flip them. A 22-year-old college senior taught me this. I told him I’d heard the unemployment rate was high for college graduates. He smiled and told me, “Sure, the unemployment rate is high. But even if it’s 20 percent, that just means you have to be in the top 80 percent. You can’t be a B-minus?” Flip the numbers.
4. Think about your circles.
Being unemployed is about properly managing three different circles: Geography, Industry, and Commitment. The longer you are unemployed, the more deliberate you have to be about expanding these circles. For example, in the first month or two you may just look for a new job in your city. During the second and third months, you may expand your search to other cities in your state. If you experience prolonged unemployment, you may need to expand your search to other states, even other time zones. Same goes with the industry you search in and the commitment you want (full-time, part-time, or hourly). Want to potentially speed up your job search? Expand the circles quickly.
5. Finding a job is your new job.
Don’t ever think of yourself as jobless. The minute you get laid off or graduate without a job lined up, you get a new job. It’s called “finding a job.” That is your forty-hour-a-week, full-time job. Enlist a friend who will hold you accountable and help you track the results of your “work.” Come up with job performance metrics like “resumes sent,” “jobs applied for,” etc. I don’t have hard numbers on how many people actually put in this level of effort to find a new job, but survey the friends you know who are unemployed. Chances are, approximately zero are treating finding a new job as their job.
6. Get a stopgap job.
This is 100 percent easier to write in a book than it is to actually do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. You may need to get a stopgap job, some sort of part-time employment that heads off monsters like “getting the power turned off,” “having your car repo’d,” or “moving back in with your parents.” This is an ego-aside, I-never-thought-I’d-work-here-but-difficult-times-call-for-difficult-measures kind of job. For instance, the day I wrote this section of the book, I saw a bakery hiring someone to bake bread from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. That’s not easy. That’s not fun. But that’s a great stopgap job. And don’t for a second buy the lie, “If I take on a part-time job, I won’t be able to go out for interviews or look for a full-time job.” That’s ridiculous. What job interview are you forced to cancel at 4:00 a.m. because you’re making bread?
7.
Stay in job shape.
Having a job is like running a marathon. And the first thing most people do when they lose theirs is get as fat as possible. We stop getting up early. We give up our schedules. We terminate any sense of structure in our lives and then we occasionally sprint for a job interview, completely confused that we didn’t nail it. When you don’t have a job, you have to stay in job shape. That was one of my wife’s few requirements when I lost my job. She had to be up at 6:30 a.m. for her job, and so did I. So every weekday morning I was showered and dressed, ready for the day to begin. Otherwise, I would have stayed up the night before watching reruns of
Seinfeld
and eating queso in bulk, then sleeping in. Don’t get out of job shape just because you don’t have a job.
8.
Get plugged into a community.
As we discussed earlier in this book, fear fears community. Fear always tries to isolate you and put you on an island. That will happen when you lose your job. As fast as you can, and as much as it fits the way you like to engage with people, try to get plugged into a community of people who are looking for new jobs. The economy has created thousands of these. You could go to a community center, a church, your library, or online to find a group that will encourage, challenge, and help you during your season of job searching. Don’t go it alone.
9.
Start a blog.
Or an Instagram feed or Twitter account or Facebook page or whatever technology is hot at the time you’re reading this book. Why? Because every job seeker is going to tell the interviewer, “I’m passionate about this industry!” Then the interviewer is going to say, “Really, how so?” Then the job seeker is going to say, “Ways, a lot of different ways. There are so many I can barely just pick one.” But you? You’re going to say, “Well, I have a blog where I write about the industry. I’m also plugged into the online communities of industry experts. You may like to follow my Twitter account, where I curate the top articles about this industry.” You’ve got tools right now to impress an interviewer that no one ever had before. Use them.
10.
Put results at the top.
This one is incredibly tactical, but it works. At the top of resumes, most people put “goals” or “objectives.” They then type out paragraphs that say things like, “I want to work in a people-based environment where I can use my skills to progress the business in innovative ways.” Goals at the top of resumes are useless. Why? Everyone can say the exact same things. Everyone on the planet can write fluffy words about what they’re going to do. That doesn’t separate you from the crowd.
One time the owner of one of the best ad agencies in the country chewed me out for using empty words like goals when I applied at his company.
He said that every candidate he interviewed told him over and over again how creative or goal-oriented they were. He didn’t care about that. He cared about what I’d actually accomplished.
I rewrote my resume that week. Instead of goals or objectives, I started each resume with a short paragraph titled “Results.” In less than 100 words, I summarized what I felt I had accomplished that may be relevant to a certain job.
And something weird happened. Recruiters and HR departments started asking me about the results. In some cases, they barely looked at the rest of my resume and would just say, “What was it like to work at Home Depot?” No one had ever asked me about any of the meaningless sentences I had put in my “goals” paragraph.
Maybe it will be easy to write your accomplishments or results paragraph. But even if it’s not, I promise that you’ve done something interesting and important in your career. If you worked at a job for a year or two, I’m just talking about creating one interesting sentence from that whole experience. One year of work, one sentence. Anyone—and I repeat, anyone—can do that.
Even if you’re a recent college grad just joining a new industry, you’ve got a sentence or two you could put in that paragraph that may generate questions, interest, and maybe even a job interview. You’ve got four years of college from which to pull a few sentences.
The good news is that regardless of why you find yourself without a job, there are some very tactical things you can do to remedy that. The great news is that we’re all 20. We all have the chance to start over and be awesome again.
Just because you’re unemployed doesn’t mean you have to be average.
Notes
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Glenn Ruffenach, “Eyeing an Encore Career? Expect a Bumpy Transition,”
Smart Money
, July 2, 2012, http://www.smartmoney.com/retirement/planning/eyeing-an-encore-career-expect-a-bumpy-transition-1339526090060/.
2. Boris Cerni and Zachary Tracer, “AIG Chief Sees Retirement Age as High as 80 after Crisis,”
Bloomberg
, June 4, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-03/aig-chief-sees-retirement-age-as-high-as-80-after-crisis.html.
3. “Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android,” Pebble Technology, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android.
Chapter 2
1. Adam Horowitz and the editors of
Business 2.0
,
The Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products, Ruinous Deals, Clueless Bosses and Other Signs of Unintelligent Life in the Workplace
, comps. Mark Athitakis and Mark Lasswell (New York: Portfolio, 2004), 146.
2. Kathryn Stockett, “Kathryn Stockett’s ‘The Help’ Turned Down 60 Times Before Becoming a Best Seller,”
More
, May 7, 2011, http://www.more.com/kathryn-stockett-help-best-seller.
3. Jim Collins,
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t
(New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 85.
4. John Mayer, “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967,” on
Born and Raised
, Columbia, 2012, CD.
Chapter 3
1. Stephen R. Covey, “Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind,”
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit2.php.
2. Malcolm Gladwell,
Outliers: The Story of Success
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 38.
3. Matthew Syed,
Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
(New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 57.
4. Deirdre Donahue, “Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Success’ Defines ‘Outlier’ Achievement,”
USA Today
, November 18, 2008, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-17-gladwell-success_N.htm.
5. Grant Oyston, “Success?”
Visible Children
(blog), March 9, 2012, http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18992455677/success.
6. Grant Oyston, “What was my intent?”
Visible Children
(blog), March 7, 2012, http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18917304254/what-was-my-intent.
7. Ramona Emerson, “Comedians on Technology: Louis C.K., Mitch Hedberg, Bill Murray and Others Rant About Tech,”
Huffington Post
, February 20, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/20/comedians-on-technology_n_1108931.html.
8. Steven Pressfield,
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
(New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002), 12.
Chapter 4
1. Charles Duhigg,
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
(New York: Random House, 2012), 135–37.
2. Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes, and Catherine McCarthy,
The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working
:
The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance
(New York: Free Press, 2010), 33–35.
3. Susie Steiner, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying,”
The Guardian
, February 1, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying.
4. Josh Linkner, “The Dirty Little Secret of Overnight Successes,”
Fast Company
, April 2, 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1826976/the-dirty-little-secret-of-overnight-successes.
Chapter 5
1. Robert T. Gonzalez, “Ten gemstones that are rarer than diamond,” io9, April 16, 2012, http://io9.com/5902212/ten-gemstones-that-are-rarer-than-diamond.
2. Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,”
Washington Post
, April 8, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html.
3. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman,
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 50.
4. Bill Watterson,
The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
, (Kansas City: Universal Press Syndicate, 1995), 11.
Chapter 6
1. Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter,
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 9.
2. Brian Hiatt, “The Neurotic Zen of Larry David,”
Rolling Stone
, August 4, 2011, 81.
3. Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg,
NUTS! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success
(New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 269–70.
Chapter 7
1. Nancy Hass, “Love Me, Hate Me, Just Don’t Ignore Me,”
GQ
, February 2012, 52.
2. Andy Warhol,
The Stockholm Catalog
, Pontus Hulten, Kasper Konig, and Olle Granath, eds. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968).
3. John shared this idea at North Point Community Church. He shares more brilliant ideas on his blog, www.jdubspubs.com.
4. Sydney Lupkin, “Can Facebook Ruin Your Marriage?” ABC News, May 24, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-relationship-status/story?id=16406245#.UClhiZi4LzI.
5. Anne B. Fisher, “Are You Afraid of Success?”
Fortune
,
July 8, 1996, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/07/08/214330/.
6. Buck Brannaman,
Buck
. Directed by Cindy Meehl (IFC Films, 2011).
Chapter 8
1. Derek Sivers, “Obvious to you. Amazing to others,” (YouTube video) April 19, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GCm-u_vlaQ&feature=player_embedded.
2. Jim Collins, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer”
(excerpt), November 2005, http://www.jimcollins.com/books/g2g-ss.html.
3. Andy Bull, “David Rudisha breaks world record to win Olympic 800m gold for Kenya,”
Guardian
, August 9, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/09/david-rudisha-world-record-olympic-800m?newsfeed=true.
4. Mike Rosenbaum, “800 Meter Men’s Olympic Medalists,” About.com Track & Field, http://trackandfield.about.com/od/middledistance/qt/olym800men.htm.
5. Andy Bull, “David Rudisha breaks world record to win Olympic 800m gold for Kenya,”
Guardian
, August 9, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/09/david-rudisha-world-record-olympic-800m?newsfeed=true.
6. Steven Pressfield,
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
(New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002), 166.
7. Erick Calonius,
Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 194–95.
Appendix A
1. Amir Efrati, “The Mounting Minuses at Google+,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204653604577249341403742390.html.
2.
Pocket-Sized Stories
(blog), http://pocketsizedstories.tumblr.com/.