Category Archives: Careers

Joseph Epstein, in his book Ambition, which I will review tomorrow, writes:

There is a fantasy commonly held by many who have been given a liberal arts education but who lack either the talent or the opportunity to practice any of these arts. It runs something like this: Very well. I will spend the first fifteen or twenty years of my life striving in the canyons of Wall or La Salle streets, or in the law courts, or in the long halls of corporations, and during this time, through concentrated exertions, I will pile up enough money to free myself forever from such grubby pursuits, and devote the remainder of my days to the Higher Things: literature, philosophy, music, beautiful pictures. Alas, it is a fantasy seldom achieved.

Seldom achieved indeed: it’s hard to ever pile up enough money to free oneself entirely, it’s hard to get off the treadmill of a familiar activity, it’s hard to rekindle the Higher Thing passion that burned within long long ago.

Most people who have artistic interests aren’t talented enough to pursue them professionally full-time. So they do banking, consulting, law, medicine, business, and say to themselves, “Someday, once I’m set for life, I’ll do photography full-time.”

This is usually a wise economic call. I don’t look down on the hard headed photography enthusiast who decides to go into consulting since it’s a surer economic bet. I don’t automatically embrace the wannabe actress who blindly “follows her passion,” moves to Los Angeles, spends 10 years waiting tables, and wakes up at age 30 with zero real prospects.

As my friend Penelope Trunk put it in her post titled How to build a career as an artist, the starving artist routine is bullshit. Her points #4 and 5 are “you do not need to quit your day job” and “you are not a better artist if you can do it full time.”

Instead, you should try to find real jobs that allow you to put your artistic talent to use as much as possible, and also set aside time nights and weekends to paint, or write, or whatever.

What’s neat about the internet and blogging is it’s easier than ever to have an outlet to post your creative output and build a following that someday might even support your work full-time.

Bottom Line: If you have a passion for philosophy, literature, music, or photography, but can’t pursue these activities professionally full-time, find a day job for which you draw upon these passions as much as possible. And set aside Saturday mornings for them, too. That faraway day where you will be freed from money concerns and can sit on mountaintops writing romantic fiction will likely never come. But that doesn’t mean you have to drop it altogether.

The best blog posts have a voice: you feel like you're reading a real human being, warts and all, not the hyper-objective "voice from nowhere" behind most mainstream media.

Jeremy Blachman, author of the hysterical novel Anonymous Lawyer, has a great post up today in this tradition: it's honest, vulnerable, and feels like a conversation. Jeremy's living in LA trying to sell TV scripts but is having doubts about whether he's in the right career. And he's coming to terms with the fact that other people in his industry don't seem very fulfilled, either. I recommend it for anyone feeling self-doubt of their own vis-a-vis their career.

He touches on one specific career question familiar to any wannabe writer. Do you write full-time or keep it a side thing? Jeremy writes:

Most important, Jeremy uses his blog to ask for help:

I hung out with Jeremy last year in Los Angeles and endorse him highly.

Michael Lewis, another one of those writers who I follow and will read no matter what the topic is, has a great column up at Bloomberg.com called A Wall Street Job Can’t Match a Calling In Life. It is his reply to a nervous young employee of a Wall Street bank asking for career advice. In it, Lewis distinguishes between a job and a calling and says that each entails different costs and benefits:

The distinction is artificial but worth drawing. A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it — often to the detriment of your life outside of it.     There’s no shame in either. Each has costs and benefits. There is no reason to make a fetish of your career. There are activities other than work in which to find meaning and pleasure and even a sense of self-importance — you just need to learn how to look.     Reading between the lines of your letter I sense that some of your anxiety is caused by your desire for the benefits of each — job and calling — without the costs. Perhaps that is what led you to Wall Street in the first place, and why your mind now turns to Hollywood.

What Wall Street did so well, for so long, was to give people jobs that they could pass off to themselves as well as others as callings. Such was their exalted social and financial status: Wall Street jobs made people feel special without actually having to be special. You never really had to explain why you were doing it — even if you should have. But really, the same rule that applies to properly functioning financial markets applies to other markets: There’s a direct relationship between risk and reward. A fantastically rewarding career usually requires you to take fantastic risks. To get your seat at the table on Wall Street you may have passed through a fine filter, but you took no real risk. You were just being paid, briefly, as if you had.

So which is it: job or calling? You can answer the question directly, or allow time to answer it for you. Either way, I think you’d be happier if you stopped thinking of what the world had to offer you, and started thinking a bit more about what you had to offer the world. Real excitement isn’t just in whatever you happen to be doing, but in what you bring to it.

Tomorrow, I will blog about why I think so many young people have a hard time finding a calling or even a job that makes them happy.

(thanks Maria for sending me this article)

On the Drunkasaurusrex blog, the author writes about how his higher education broadened his horizons, sparked intellectual curiosities, and basically did all the things that it’s supposed to do. But then (cue horror music) he took a paralegal job after graduating. What happened?

I was very much on that path until I settled into a well-paying paralegal job right out of college that required long hours and very little critical thinking. My first assignment was to put 75,000 printed out emails in chronological order and remove the duplicates. It took four months and a piece of my spirit. A year later, I was charged with assembling the Plaintiffs and Defendants trial exhibits from a previous case into binders for review. Each side had 2500 exhibits. By this time I’d earned enough leeway in my position to make certain executive decisions. It was up to me, and me alone, to determine which set would go in blue binders and which set would go in black binders. The Defendants exhibits would go in the black binders, I decided, because the Defendants were bad and black is the bad guy color. This project took two months to complete and culminated in a knockdown, drag out scream fest in my manager’s office during my review when she told me the main reason I wasn’t getting a full raise was because the exhibit binder project took longer than it should have. Shit like this went on for close to four years.

Why oh why do class after class of smart college graduates put themselves through this misery in their early go-go years? It will all be worth it, right? 80 hour-work weeks in NY doing i-banking will be worth it, right?  Right? Hello?

Seth Godin, as he reviews applications for his college-student summer internship, says:

I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

He goes on to comment on the dismal self-marketing skills of college students looking for a job. I agree with his larger idea here — anytime I look through resumes or try to hire someone, I’ve shocked at how poorly people present themselves.

But this doesn’t mean you should hang up the resume. Seth concludes with:

Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for… those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever.

Agreed, but how many college kids are looking for a world-class job, a job people kill for? Most students or recent grads are just looking for a job. Opening an interview with, "I don’t have a resume, because I’m an A+ kind of guy" isn’t going to work out too well.

Have a good resume, but also have a personal web site with a custom domain (seriously – do you have your own domain and web site?), have a blog, do something remarkable. Follow the rules and change the rules — at once.

So I agree that true all-stars don’t send out resumes to find a job. Those people work within a trusted network of contacts, and there’s a body of public information about their work that’s more useful than a resume can ever be. Yet most college students are not all-stars and shouldn’t, in their quest to be remarkable, just ignore all existing hiring conventions.