Escape From Pianosa

I agree with Jackie. Meetings with agendas and objectives suck.

I’m very thankful that my current work situation doesn’t involve endless meetings. It does involve a lot of creative collaboration and ad hoc discussions, but nothing of the “sit in the conference room with 15 other people and watch PowerPoint” variety.

When I worked for the government I sometimes spent hours a day in long, boring, and mostly pointless meetings where two people would take up 90% of the conversation while everyone else sat around trying to stave off sleep. Some days I would be in meetings for four hours out of the day.

I used to think of a girl I had a class with in college. On the first day of class she told the professor that she was narcoleptic, so hey if I fall asleep, it’s just my condition. She never fell asleep in class and I don’t know if she was really narcoleptic but it seemed like a brilliant ploy at the time. And I would sit there at the one-hour mark of some status meeting thinking oh God why didn’t I use that narcolepsy bit when I started working here.

So why not unmeetings? Just send off an email and say “hey, a few of us are going to talk about the marketing strategy for the client at 10am. Stop by if you have something you’d like to share.”

Being in a high-paying but miserable job is a nasty combination. Really really nasty. It’s easy to leave a bad job that pays poorly. What do you have to lose? Worst-case scenario, you’re back in another miserable job.

But being in a miserable job that pays well; that’s really tough. Because every day your mind is wondering why you are here, in this boring office, surrounded by people you can’t stand, doing meaningless work. Why would you, logical you, subject yourself to such torture? Because the money’s good, your mind thinks..it must be. It must be amazing and magical if you’re willing to sacrifice your happiness for it, right?

So you become obsessed with the money and start to place irrational value on it.  And it gets really hard to leave because your mind’s convinced that the pain is worth it. And you start looking around for something new, and oh doesn’t that look interesting!

But you’re entry level and you’re not going to make as much. And what if the new job is even worse? What if you’re just as miserable, except now you’re only making half of what you made before. Wouldn’t that make me look like a big idiot?

Yeah, it’s a vicious cycle. So be careful what job you take for the money. Unless of course it’s “fuck you” money. You should probably take the fuck you money.

Thank you Nora, you said some very nice things about me. My run as a freelancer (which included a lot of real estate and some dabbling in writing among other things) has come to an end, at least for the foreseeable future. My first job is at a small online marketing firm in Baltimore and I’ll be working on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is something I enjoy immensely–although I didn’t really realize it until about a month ago.

I’d fallen into the habit of taking my friends’ websites and finding a dozen or so things that they could be doing better. Like, hey you need to have a blog so you can interact with your customers and you need to be building links to your site and you need to improve your layout so it’s more user friendly, and all sorts of other ideas for building up traffic–things that I’ve learned and implemented with my various web properties over the last few years. Well lo and behold, you can get paid to do that! It’s a natural fit for me.

My other job is more of an internship with a nonprofit in the DC area, where I’ll be working part-time for the next few months. That allows me to pursue one of my other passions in life, which is spreading the message of freedom; a brand evangelist for liberty if you will.

And don’t worry Nora, I plan to keep my entrepreneurial approach to life and work.

This is an idea I hear a lot from people that until recently, I took for granted. “Writers are in high demand” or “it’s so hard to find people who can write well.” Anecdotally, this rings true for me, but when I went looking for jobs as a writer, I found that the market wasn’t so hot. Go to Craigslist and you’ll find that many of the listings for writers don’t pay anything. Most writing jobs have starting salaries in the 30 to 35k range, if you can find one.

And so I think that writing is an excellent skill to have, but in the job market it’s more valuable as a secondary skill. A good manager is very valuable, and a good manager with excellent writing skills is marginally better. Same for engineers or software developers or any other profession. But from my limited experience on the job hunt, I don’t think writers per se are in high demand.

When I shifted my job search from writing to marketing/web/technology, I really started getting interviews, call-backs, and interest.

Seth Godin is like this never-ending generator of cool ideas and insights. Every time I read something that he writes, I can feel the connections forming in my brain…

My philosophy then, and my philosophy now, is that learning the first 80% of something new takes 20% of the effort. My goal in college was not to become an expert on phenomenology or civil engineering; my goal was to understand the framework of as many disciplines as I could.

That’s me. I love learning the first 80% of something. It’s a personality trait that serves me well. I try lots of new things because they fascinate me and I find myself knowing a little bit about a lot of things. And the more ideas or subjects or philosophies or careers that you sample, the more likely you are to find one that you really love. Then you can spend the effort of learning the last 20%.

So much in life is simple luck. Finding your passion is the same. When I read about people who always knew what they wanted to be, I think yeah, that’s because so many people start that way. How many people, at age 12, decide they want to be actors or dancers or firefighters? Lots. So when people end up in those professions, it’s not uncommon for them to have started down that path at an early age.

What you don’t hear about is all the people who started out dreaming of becoming an actor, only to discover later that what really excites (or pays) them is accounting or software or engineering. People overestimate their ability to predict what they will enjoy. To overcome that bias, you have to lean towards experimentation.

Chris doesn’t have a blog, but you can still find him on the internets, saying goodbye to his white coat. Last night he asked me to bring back some of my old blog posts from back in the day, you know, the one about the blind lady you worked with. Oh yeah, here it is:

I returned from lunch this afternoon to discover that not one, but two residents of aisle C were sound asleep. I’d like to protect their identities, so let’s just call our first subject “the blind Asian woman.” Apparently she doesn’t have much work to do because she literally sleeps half the day. How does this happen? What kind of manager tolerates this? Seems to me, if you’re blind, you better go out of your way to justify your space on the payroll. Otherwise people might start wondering…

It gets worse though. The other sleeping co-worker is the guy whose job is, get this, to help the blind lady! She’s a programmer and she has trouble seeing the screen. So he goes into her cube–ostensibly–to help her with her program. Usually they just fight:

“Why you touching my screen!”
“I’m looking for an email I deleted!”
“No touch my screen!”
“Listen blind Asian woman, I need to find an email that I deleted, ok?”
“It’s not there!”
“How do you know? You can’t see the screen!”

How long does this take? How much time does he spend ‘helping’ her? Maybe 30 minutes a day. Wanna know what he’s doing now? Let me go check. Big fucking surprise! He’s passed out in his chair with a book in his hands! I love the government. Nap time.