The Regret-Free Encore Career

February 14, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Sometimes regret is what you feel when it’s too late to do much about it—your deathbed, most commonly. But we also feel regret when there’s plenty of time left. All that stands in the way is our reluctance to recover the opportunities that are still out there, waiting for us.

The voice of regret over the road not taken most often has the whine of excuse about it. I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I’m over-extended. I’m too tired. I need to be better prepared. I can’t do this alone. I have too many obligations. My family won’t be on-board. What will other people think?

What if I fail?

By the time the excuses begin, the flirting with the new and unfamiliar has usually passed. You’ve pulled yourself back into the comfortable territory where you started. Your heart rate is back to normal, what you feared is now safely behind you. The only residue that remains is regret around what might have been. What if I had pushed a little farther, taken the chance, grabbed the brass ring when it appeared, trusted my instincts, trusted myself?

I spoke to an accomplished group of senior managers this week. In their fifties and sixties mostly, all were in or between Big Jobs. Some of them were also caught between seeing themselves doing those Big Jobs and, well, just sitting at home not doing them.

These are pretty stark alternatives. The good news is that there’s a way to get to the productive work all of us still need to do, and it doesn’t involve trapping yourself between this kind of all or nothing.

Limiting your future to a corner office is unrealistic if there simply aren’t enough corner offices to either barricade yourself in or catapult yourself back into. Your chances may simply be better elsewhere.

Moreover, if you’re not in that corner office today, maybe there’s a good reason that you’re not, a reason that involves your temperament, your skills, or your inability to read the handwriting on the wall. So why not step back and make a plan for your future work now that squarely confronts your deficits, acknowledges the value of your native talents, and aligns your next job with the best vision that you have of yourself?

Honestly confronting your deficits could mean honing existing skills or mastering new ones. But as often as not it’s learning to be more adaptable to changing circumstances. That is, a lot more resilient than you are today.

If you’re too rigid, you may simply need to become more adaptable. Stated differently, if your Boomer Balloon is filled with too much stale air, it may be time to let some of the stale air out and some fresh air in.

The best way to do so is by throwing yourself into circumstances where you’re not comfortable, where the particular improvements you need to find can only come—one dogged attempt at a time—with failure as your teacher. That’s the path to resilience. The question is really a pretty simple one: Are you tough enough to know when you need to toughen up?

On the other hand, time spent on deficit reduction should never mask what fueled your accomplishment in the first place. Identify the skills that have always given you the most pride when you’ve exercised them, and build your future on the highly transferable talents that have always set you apart. It’s a waste of time being bitter that strangers in the job market aren’t valuing these talents enough, but you’d be a fool to undervalue them yourself.

Finally, while you’re busy being honest with yourself, also consider investing some of the optimism you’ve been mustering as the candidate for the next Big Job around those things you always wished you had done, but were never brave enough or wise enough to have done before.

The land of your regrets is where you think about the grreat job that got away, the kind of work that quickens your heart beat and makes your palms sweat when you think about it, like helping to solve a real world problem, or meeting real needs for different products or better services than anyone else is providing.

There are challenges out there with your name on them. With focus and tenacity, you can figure out a way to not only make a living by confronting them, but also to live more fully and to find a better balance of effort and fulfillment than you have ever enjoyed before.

It’s the time in our lives when age, experience and self-confidence can also be good teachers, when we let them.

The irony, of course, is that once you build yourself a regret-free encore career, you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever spent your time putting all your eggs in the basket of that next Big Job.

Amaz-ing Introductions

February 3, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

You already know you never get a second chance to make a first impression—so there’s no better time than now to start taking advantage of every opportunity.

Within seconds of meeting someone, you’re sized up and put in convenient categories, so while that’s happening, why not nudge your new acquaintance’s thinking and feeling in the directions where you want them to go. (I’ve talked about the art of introducing yourself once or twice before.) As with everything you set out to accomplish, you need to be clear about what you’re after and how to move your ball down the field in a user friendly way. As with everything, practice improves performance.

Initial impressions tee up the next stages of engagement, when new people fill in the blanks that interest them about you. When you establish rapport and mutual interest, the returns are continued attention, affiliation, support, and collaboration.

Unlike a face-to-face encounter, first impressions are usually two-dimensional when you’re applying for a job. It’s submitting an introductory letter or resume. Or if you just want to announce your availability, it’s a flyer or on-line posting. As with real time encounters, you’re aiming to establish common ground while creating positive expectations about things not already known about you and what you have to offer. In other words, you want to make your two-dimensional introduction as three-dimensional as possible.

So I loved Phillipe Dubost’s recent job posting for the position of Web Product Manager.

Dubost provides all the key information about his years of experience, proudest accomplishments and his customers’ positive experiences. But what sets his job posting apart is his playful adaptation of the standard Amazon sales page to sell himself. It’s complete with “star ratings,” “product description,” his “frequently bought together” items, the announcement that there’s “only one left in stock—order soon.” and, even one of those “Add to Cart” buttons. You should check it out. (Many thanks to Loretta James for sharing!)

Dubost has attracted a lot of attention with his job posting (more than a million views to date), but it’s what it tells us about his ingenuity and playfulness, the things he knows about social engagement, that will land him the job.

Your introduction doesn’t need to be as distinctive as his. But it does need to pack as many of the positives about you as possible into it, and Dubost’s does that. If you have a personality and a sense of humor, figure out your own way to get them across too.

Maybe it’s a picture of you as a child doing some of the same things you’re doing now—and want to keep on doing. Maybe it’s a quote from somebody that captures a side of you better than your own words can. Maybe it’s . . . .

I’m profiling Dubost’s Amaz-ing Introduction to jump start you thinking about whole new ways to put yourself out there when you want to yield something amazing in return.

(When Phillippe finds the job he’s looking for, I promise to let you know. Or you can follow him yourself on Twitter @pdubost. In the meantime, welcome to his cheering section!)

Crowd-Sourcing Your Job Freedom

January 13, 2013 By David Griesing 4 Comments

Oftentimes, it’s the talented, motivated and grounded people who struggle the most getting to the work they should be doing. It’s like the burden of their gifts weighs them down, placing an unhealthy gravity on the decision to strike out and make a change for the better.

But beyond the over-complicated knots we tie ourselves in are the practical barriers that confound us. One of them is not having the financial freedom to do the kind of work that we need to be doing right now.

In this regard, there’s good news for everyone who has an entrepreneur inside of them, struggling to get out. Your pitifully small bank account is no longer a roadblock to your success as long as you have a good idea and an equally good story to tell. For the first time ever, millions of strangers are funding small business ideas that never had the chance to get off the ground before. All you have to do is sell them on your dream.

With crowd-funding, it’s the small amounts, quite literally “the seed funding,” that can not only get you off the proverbial dime, but also a cheering section of people who truly believe in you. Where once you needed a rich uncle or well-healed friend, the “kindness of strangers” now provides a way for you to get in the game. (I last wrote about crowd-funding in July.)

You always wanted to ____ (fill in the blank). You’ve never understood why somebody hadn’t figured out how to ___, so you’ve figured it out. Tell the crowd about your idea. Tell them how much cash you need to realize it. Tell them how they’ll get to share in your success. Convince them that you deserve their vote of confidence and they just might give it to you.

Historically, because tiny businesses rarely attracted outside financing, they just as rarely got off the ground. Today, a whole new class of entrepreneurs has a chance to strut their stuff. Spreading like some positive contagion, crowds are nurturing brave little start-ups everywhere there is access to a funding network. Years from now, when some of our leading companies can trace their origins to networks like Kickstarter, I think we’ll recognize that the true democratization of innovation began in our time.

What this gives you is an opportunity that simply wasn’t available five years ago. But you still have to believe in what you’re setting out to do, and get that cheering section to buy-in too. Indeed, it’s your ability to inspire (on the one hand) and the desire of total strangers to be inspired (on the other) that makes this bargain work.

In the world of crowd-funding, the desire to be part of an appealing stranger’s quest to succeed is nearly universal. She talks about how she’ll change the world. You learn about how he’ll make our lives better, easier, smarter. They share their stories with us, and we in turn see some of ourselves (and our hopes) in them. We like & admire them & look forward to sharing in their success. The ticket for the adventure is modest given the upsides, so we buy it.

For investors, it helps too that you’re not the only one who’s buying. It may be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of others who are similarly inspired. With crowd-funding, you find out early and often how many others are getting on-board with you. The infectious rush of fellow believers is essential to the dynamic.

But what’s really unique (and special) here is that the entrepreneur’s energy & inspiration and the investors’ psychic & financial support are joining together for the sake of economic productivity. We’re building a business here after all.

Maybe it’s your business.

Take More Control of Your Next Job Search

October 2, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To get many jobs today, you have to fit a pre-determined mold—if only you can figure out how to pour yourself into it.

It’s no longer: submit your resume, have an interview, establish personal chemistry, get the job. These steps are simply irrelevant for many positions today, particularly those you apply for on-line. Instead, it’s far more likely that you’ll provide information about yourself via some personality testing, and that the employer’s algorithm will decide whether you get the job.

No surprise. It’s answer will almost always be “no.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible to participate in a meaningful way in this kind of process.

How can you determine beforehand whether you have more or less of what an employer is looking for? Do you answer their personality questions truthfully or try to give them the answer you think they’re after? When you don’t make their cut, how do you find out “why you didn’t” so that you can make a better pitch and present yourself in a better light the next time?

In this brave new world, applying for any job on-line is increasingly a “shot in the dark.” When you don’t know their rules, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to succeed at their game.

Well maybe it’s time to start making the job search more about your game.

These posts are about taking control of your working life by, among other things, helping you find the job that’s right for you. The goal is work that empowers you when you’re doing it, and helps you to make the kind of difference in the world that you want to make.

As a result, these posts won’t help you to get better at pouring yourself into some job computer’s pre-determined mold. But the increasingly common ways that jobs are being filled today do suggest something that everyone in the job market can do to take more control over where their careers are going.

My advice is to learn more about who you are, and what you’re best at, by giving yourself your own personality test. They are tools for self-discovery as well as for filling many jobs today.

There are plenty of tests out there. They’re easy to find and relatively inexpensive to take. And while an expert will always be able to tease out more nuance from your test results than you’ll be able to, there is still plenty that you can learn from them about “how you like to operate” and “where you might find your best fit” in the working world.

It may not be where you’ve been looking for jobs at all.

To get a better sense of the direction that’s right for you, there are tried and true assessments you can take on your own. Examples are the Myers-Briggs (to help you identify career choices that are compatible with how you make decisions, draw conclusions, arrive at judgments and relate to others) and the Strong Interest Inventory (how your personal interests compare with the interests of people in particular careers). Determining your “preferences” will sometimes confirm what you already know, but could also surprise you. Talking to others about what they like and don’t like about their work can provide some additional ways of thinking about your test results.

And that’s the point: to think about your results with an open mind, and start to put together a career path that’s right for you. For example: how have your “preferences” already contributed to your success? And how do the successes you have under your belt qualify you for what you really want to do next?

Let your head and your heart ruminate on what you discover. Sleep on it, dream about it. Do some research about possible jobs that are out there. Make some notes. Test your conclusions with friends and family. Dream about it some more. But most of all, take what you’re discovering about yourself and your unique value in the marketplace seriously.

Then you’ll be ready to start looking for jobs where they’re playing “your game” with “your kind of rules.” It’s about taking control of your working life.

Let the Crowds Fund Your Work

July 5, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We all want to do work that matters. But, as often as not, you won’t find that kind of work in the want ads. It’s rarely work that somebody else gives you to do. As often as not, you need to give yourself the kind of work that will change the world.

Early on in my forthcoming book WorkLifeReward: Following Your Values to Fulfilling Work is the line:

If you want the world to be a better place, you need to help it become that better place.

The main way to do so, of course, is through the work you do. So if you don’t think the work you’re doing—that is, your selling whatever it is that you’re selling today—is making the world into the kind of better place you want it to be, maybe it’s time to think about working at something that will make that kind of difference.

These posts are about encouraging you to think differently about your work. They aim to raise what I call “value awareness,” so you have a clearer view of the color and texture of the better world you’d like to encourage with your efforts. Sometimes they aim to help you become the most effective spokesperson you can be while striving to achieve your goals. And sometimes the discussion here is about ways to make the productive work you want to do easier.

This post is about one of those booster rockets. Something has gotten a lot easier.

Creating a business model for a better world, where you and your co-conspirators are doing work that matters, takes energy, creativity, vision, tenacity, luck. And it takes money that either you provide, or that people investing in your vision of a better world put in your hands.

In the good old days the money came almost exclusively from your own bank account or from friends and family. (It was the era when those who already had money were usually the ones making more of it.) On top of that, only a tiny percentage of new ideas—whether promising to change the world or not—managed to find venture capital. So if you or a rich uncle weren’t providing the cash, even your brilliance, best intentions and limitless energy were often not enough to overcome the funding constraints all new companies that produce work need in order to survive.

But there’s some good news. It’s a brand new day!

Today, crowdfunding websites give you the ability to make a direct appeal to individuals or groups who may be interested in supporting what you’re doing—because your kind of work is work that matters to them too.

You tell your story. You identify your goal. The crowd decides whether to invest in it. Usually harvested in small dollar amounts, it is hundreds, even thousands of small investments funneled through the crowdfunding site that can put the financial fuel in a new company’s tank.

As an entrepreneur, you promise to give your investors a tangible return on their investment. It could be a letter from a grateful child your company has helped, a picture of the tree planted “because you invested,” or, if you are producing a brave new product or service, periodic updates on solutions to problems no one had gotten around to tackling before.

You get the idea.

For providing the conduit between you and your new investors, crowdfunding websites like MicroVentures, peerbackers, and IndieGoGo are generally paid a small percentage of what you collect—sometimes as little as 5%, when you hit your fundraising target.

LINE UP YOUR INVESTORS photo/John Cooper

What’s news this week (according to the Wall Street Journal) is that crowdfunding has its first “poster child.”

The Cinderella story is about how a little company called Pebble Technology developed a “smart” wristwatch that can display apps and connect to your smart phone to notify you about incoming tweets and Facebook updates. But 26-year old Eric Migicovsky was almost out of money, living and working with his only employee in a rented condo, and ready to call it quits.

He took his case for financing the manufacture of his smart watch to crowdfunding site Kickstarter, looking for $100,000. The ROI: everyone investing $115 would get one of his watches.

In its first 28 hours on Kickstarter, Pebble raised more than a million dollars. By mid-May, it had taken in a total of $10.27 million from 68,929 people! Now Eric’s problems involve things like working with a manufacturing facility in China to produce all those watches. But it also looks a lot like his work dream has become a reality.

Everybody needs to make a living.

What sometimes seems like the impossibility of getting both a paycheck and fulfillment from your work makes many of us reluctant to leave our paychecks for work that gives us the opportunity to make a living and to truly live.

Crowdfunding is reducing that risk.