Should caring be part of every job description?

by: Brooke Allen

About a decade ago someone in accounting, or personnel, or wherever, asked me for job titles.

I said, “We don’t have job titles in our group.”

She went away.

Soon she was back saying that a new policy required that we have job titles, and that I had to give them some.

I said, “I can’t think of any.”

She said, “Make something up.”

I said, “OK, we’re all Senior Executive Vice Presidents.”

She went away.

She was back the following day saying, “Those titles won’t do. Nobody in your group is a vice president, senior, executive, or otherwise. Besides, we need functional titles.”

“As opposed to bullshit ones?” I asked.

She didn’t laugh but waited around until I came up with some stuff… Group Head (me), Analyst, Programmer, Trader … make that Senior Trader (never mind that we don’t have any junior ones)… I don’t remember and don’t care, although I can now find out if need be by asking everyone in my group for their new business cards.

Since our first day in the mid-1990′s, we have had a daily checklist, similar to what pilots find in airplane cockpits and janitors find on bathroom walls: do this by 8:15, start that computer before this one, run that program, file this report by 5:00, etc. The checklist gets updated as needed and has gone from perhaps 15 items to over 50 in 16 years.

A while ago our organization was restructured to come under a German parent, which meant that now we became subject to new regulators and rules. Auditors from Frankfurt arrived and were very impressed at the length and detail of our check-list, and apparently it got a glowing stamp of approval.

But they were back, and with a frown, said, “We can’t find your job descriptions.”

I said, “That’s because we don’t have any.”

“That won’t do; how can you run a business like that?”

I pointed out that we’d been doing fine for over a decade, but they would have none of it, and demanded something pronto.

I said, “We all do what needs to be done.”

They were not amused. They gave me a sample of what they wanted that looked like a checklist for somebody else. I complained to someone in compliance, and she explained that we must now comply with new German risk rules that require detailed job descriptions, among other things.

So we complied and divided up the checklist, assigning things by who does what. They were satisfied and went away.

However, the German regulators, (who are “principles based,” rather than “rules based” as are the regulators in the USA), our management, and everyone in our group all know that compliance with rules isn’t enough, and faithfully following a task list alone isn’t really doing your job.

We have a mission statement specific to our group which states, “Our goal as a group is to act such that every person associated with our endeavor will feel that at the end of the day they were better for it.”

We have a detailed document itemizing who exactly those people are, and we update it when stakeholders change. We document our principles and values, and update them too, although infrequently, since they seldom change. We have procedure manuals that remind us of how to do things, policy manuals that tell us what and why, and checklists that help us remember when to do things, and document when we forget.

But a job description is not doing its job if it only lists tasks better itemized in a checklist.

In essence, we all have only one job description, and that is “to care.”

All jobs and their descriptions must begin with an understanding of what it means to care, about what, and for whom.

by Steve Amoia for No Shortage of Work

Playing baseball was Joe DiMaggio’s first real job as an adult. He had worked at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco with his father, and sold newspapers as a boy. Neither job held much appeal to him.

Few first jobs in life could have the impact of this one. To be a first generation Italian-American teenager with a job at the ballpark. To watch the first American sports icon, Joe DiMaggio, in a way that few could imagine.

An American Cultural Icon

If you ever played baseball, the mystical Joe DiMaggio was as familiar as the crack of the bat, or the thud of the ball hitting the back of the catcher’s mitt. Just like cold beer, hot dogs, and the seventh inning stretch, Joe DiMaggio was an integral part of American baseball tradition and lore.

Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California, on Nov. 25, 1920, and died March 08, 1999 in Hollywood, Florida. He was the eighth of nine children born to Giuseppe and Rosalia, who were immigrants from the Sicilian island of Isola della Femmina (Women’s Island). His father was a fisherman; however, young Joe did not like the rigors of Fisherman’s Wharf. He preferred to play on the sandlots of North Beach, which was and is an Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. His father thought that Joe was lazy, and hoped that the allure of baseball would soon leave his son. Young Joe was not an avid student, and at the age of 16, he dropped out of Galileo High School,
and worked various laborer jobs for the next few years.

From North Beach to the Bronx

He played semi-professional baseball for the San Francisco Seals, and after hitting in 61 consecutive games, his star rose in the direction of the New York Yankees. He was scouted and later signed by the Bronx Bombers. His career with New York spanned from 1936 to 1951, and included a three year break during World War II. Two of his brothers, Dominic and Vincent, also played professional baseball, respectively. Interestingly, all three played the position of center field.

In an era without television and mass communications, DiMaggio became an American cultural icon. Mostly due to radio broadcasts, magazines and newspapers. To Italian-Americans, and other new immigrants, he represented much more than the perfect swing, the graceful strides, his devotion to Marilyn Monroe, or “The Streak” (he hit safely in 56 straight games in 1941) that would make him immortal. Mr. DiMaggio exemplified that a first generation American could assimilate and become a reference point in the nation’s most popular game of baseball. This sport has the same popularity in the United States as soccer does in the rest of the world.

Rare Childhood Opportunity

My father, Michael Amoia, had a rare opportunity as a child. His family lived near Griffith Stadium, which was at that time the home of the Washington Redskins and Senators. In 1965, the stadium was torn down, and now is the site of the Howard University Hospital. My father was very athletic, and competed in baseball and football for his high school, McKinley Technical. Somehow, and it remains a family mystery, my father obtained a job working for both the Redskins and Senators. My grandfather was not a sportsman, and one can imagine that few adolescents would have been brave enough to walk into the administrative offices of Griffith Stadium to ask for a job.

The ironic facet of this story was that few of his old friends knew about this part of his life. When I mentioned the experience during his eulogy, some of his friends approached me later with seeming disbelief. It was a memory from my father’s life that was very private, but one that always fascinated me.

During his life, he would mention DiMaggio on occasion. I had an older cousin, Robert, who had heard the story in more detail. My father worked in the clubhouse for the Redskins, and was a batboy for the Washington Senators, where his assignment was the visitor’s dugout and clubhouse. He handed Joe DiMaggio his bat on several occasions. My father was able to observe Mr. DiMaggio both on and off the field, and the experience was imbued upon his memory.

Lessons and Memories for a Lifetime

First jobs teach us lessons for a lifetime. In my father’s case, they provided extremely rare memories. He witnessed how a famous athlete conducted himself on and off the baseball diamond. Athletes are not role models nor should be. But my father saw how a quiet, shy man from San Francisco handled intense pressure. He made the effort to remember the name of a young Italian kid called Mike. That alone might have been the most precious memory.

Personal Reflections by Michael Amoia

Dad, what was he like?

“He was a very quiet and private man. In the clubhouse, he didn’t say much, and the other players left him alone. But you knew he was their leader. He had custom-made suits, and always looked sharp. He even looked good in those baggy uniforms they wore back then. He used to drink coffee and smoke Chesterfields between innings, and a few times we had to run out to by him smokes.

You were told by the Senators to treat all the players the same, but with Mr. DiMaggio, it was a different story. After the games, he used to sign balls for me. I sold them outside the stadium for $1. That was a lot of money in those days. That’s how we were paid. We had to ask the players to sign balls or broken bats.”

What made him great?

“Instincts. He always seemed to do the right thing. You never saw him out of position in the outfield. He was quick as a cat. Strong arm. Didn’t miss cutoff men. At bat, you never saw a smoother or quicker swing. Only Ted Williams was a better hitter. He could hit for power and for a high average. He was very graceful for a big man, and ran the bases very well. He played each inning as if it were his last. I never saw him get angry.”

Few of us could have such a childhood memory. It is said that youth is wasted on the young; however, in my father’s case, I would beg to differ. A job that didn’t pay him a salary provided him with a lifetime of memories.

“Do the job in the interview.” Joe DiMaggio did it every day.

Do you have an interesting story about your first job? Please share it with us.

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

— Paul Simon, “Mrs. Robinson.”

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor, and translator from Washington, D.C. He focuses on alternative health, career-related themes, historical figures, Italian and international soccer, and martial arts. He can be contacted at info@sanstefano.com and his writing portfolio can be found at www.sanstefano.com.

How my grandparents thrived during the 1930′s.

by: Brooke Allen

The Great Depression was very good to my Grandparents, and it wasn’t a matter of luck so much as the approach they took to their circumstances. What they did, you can do.

In the mid 1920′s they met on a date in New York City and decided to marry within a week. Granddad Tom was assigned to Havana to start a bureau for the United Press International; he and Anne married in Key West on the way to Cuba.

When he returned near the end of the decade he was handed a 40% pay cut, even though the cost of living was higher in New York City than in Cuba.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in October of 1929, the Stock Market crashed and the economy began a long slide into what became the Great Depression. Granddad survived multiple rounds of layoffs by accepting further pay cuts.

Grandmother Anne realized that they couldn’t afford their current rent, so she found a bank that would rent to them the mansion of a bankrupt stockbroker for less money. To help care for the children, she found a lovely couple at the unemployment office. The wife was a nurse and her husband was a handyman. They exchanged room and board for childcare and yard work.

Then Anne took a job as a receptionist with a developer who was building houses on the farm next to their rented home in White Plains. Soon she was managing four salesmen. She received 25 percent of the salesmen’s commission on every home sold.

Grandmother convinced the developer to build at cost a home for them in exchange for using it as a show model. She became a stellar saleswoman in her own right. Before long, her commissions had completely covered the construction costs, and the home was theirs outright.

Granddad wrote to a friend that the Great Depression had been unbelievably good to them. Before the Crash they had had high hopes, but owning a house ‘free and clear’ in just a few years was inconceivable. Where could they have found a trained nurse and groundskeeper simply by letting them live in a spare bedroom and join them for meals? Freed of the burden of paying bills, the young couple soon saved enough money working odd-jobs to buy a gas station and start their own business. Because most of his coworkers had either been laid off (or quit rather than take a pay cut), Granddad had no competition as senior positions became available. His career took off.

Here are some of the lessons I have learned from my Grandparents:

Grab the bull by the horns. They never tried to deny the facts of a bad situation.

Get lucky by planning for the worst. Because they never expected things to get better, they worked very hard in the present to survive the worst-case future scenario. Invariably things worked out better than expected so their less industrious friends considered them very lucky.

Find the opportunity, not the excuse. I never once heard my grandparents explain why they were unable to do something. Instead, it seemed they were always asking, “What just got better?” In this story, the things that got better included: rents declined, it became easier to advance simply by being loyal, a soft housing market meant the builder would make a deal, and the cost of childcare dropped.

Keep working. In 1993 I returned from a high paying job in Japan to face an economy in terrible recession. I accepted a consulting position that paid about 80% less than what I’d made the prior year, and I am glad that I did because I maintained discipline and I improved my technical skills. It took a few years, but eventually I eclipsed my prior successes, and I owe it to the skills I honed as a consultant.

Adjust your price. During the first year of the Great Depression prices declined by 27%, which meant that you could take a 25% pay cut and have a real raise in purchasing-power terms. But the real question is, What is the price for what you can do? In 1993 there was no market in New York for what I had done in Tokyo in 1992, so I accepted what the market was willing to pay for what I could do.

Learn to be a good salesman. My grandmother learned a lot from Dale Carnegie, and then she sold him a property in White Plains. She knew that done properly, selling is an unselfish act that involves motivating others to do what is in their best interests, not just your own.

Share; don’t do it alone. By sharing her home and food with a struggling young couple, my grandmother was free to take a  job and everyone came out ahead.

Survival is a better strategy than winning. In natural selection, the species that survive are winners, not the ones who hog all the resources to themselves. I will talk more about this in a subsequent piece.

—

Did you learn something from someone who went through the Great Depression?

Post a comment and tell us.

by: Joan Ramirez

So many people talk about what is wrong with teaching today. I am going to tell you what is right. Last year, I completed my student teaching in a wonderful elementary school in New York City with several exceptional special education students in the third grade. One in particular has a stuttering problem and felt uncomfortable every time he had to talk in front of the class. In addition, he has test phobia in math. He tried several times to take a subtraction/addition test and quit after he was only half way through. On the fourth try, I told him that his dream of becoming a policeman will never come true if he can’t do math operations. He thought about it and finished the day. On the fifth try, he started the test, got frustrated, and was ready to quit–partly because he was so upset about his stuttering during response time earlier in the day. I told him to breathe deeply, think positive, and focus. He kept going. When he handed in his paper, he turned to me and said, “I tried harder this time, Mrs. Ramirez. I didn’t quit.”

That made my day. I helped a child to learn. A precious gift.

On another day, I worked with a boy who wears an FM device and is very self-conscious because of same. In addition, he is small in size for his age and self-conscious in gym. When I worked with him on math problems, he told me that he likes to learn but wants to be like everyone else. I told him that each of us has special gifts to offer, and we are all special in our own way. Little by little, I drew him out of his shell. Before long, we were partners on a math team and competed against two other kids. After a while, he picked someone his own age to be his teammate. However, I told him that I would always be there if he needed me. Again, it was great to see a child flourish in learning through positive support.

My third encounter was a recent assignment in a school in New Jersey with a middle grade young girl who told me of her desire to be a songwriter. With limited English, she composed a song that spoke of her feelings on life in middle grade. She also told me that she has composed many other songs. I told her to keep on writing. Before the end of the day, she sang a little of the song to me. As I was about to take the children to their parents, she handed me a card. When I arrived home, I read the message: “Dear Mrs. Ramirez, Thank you for listening to me. You are a patient and great teacher. Someday I hope to sing you my finished work.”  I gave her my email and encouraged her to keep on going.

These are but a few of the wonderful encounters that I have had as a teacher with creative minds yearning to achieve.

In the fall, I hope to have my own class to nurture and encourage and share the successes that I’ve had in my professional life. To teach, as the saying goes, truly does touch and change, for the better, another life.

A book review by Steve Amoia

Carmine Gallo is a respected business journalist by training. He created a company, Gallo Communications, that provides presentation, media training and communication skills advice for some of the world’s most recognized brands. His first book about the iconic CEO of Apple Computer, entitled The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, was a best seller. Gallo’s newest offering, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success, no doubt will achieve similar success. This compelling book is a deep look into a man that figuratively and literally changed millions of lives.

Compelling Introduction Set the Tone

Many of Jobs’ innovation secrets were used by the author in this book. Gallo opened with a provocative quote attributed to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: “We need to create more Jobs.” It was a play on words about the Apple CEO, but one that clearly exemplified one of his key tenets: Master the Message. Speaking of messages, one by Gallo immediately grabs your attention:

“Michelangelo looked at a marble block and saw David. Steve Jobs looked at a computer and saw a tool to unleash human potential.”

Concise, Insightful and Organized Format

Gallo used short, easy-to-digest chapters to outline seven innovation principles of Steve Jobs. All sections followed the same format. First we see Jobs implementing the principle in question at different times in his life. The next chapter illustrates examples from other business professionals. The author provided three “iLessons” after each chapter to reinforce your learning. It is a “Rule of Three” that frequently appears in this book, and is one of Jobs’ key presentation and persuasive tools.

Memorable Quotes

Unlike his product line, Steve Jobs does not maintain a high-visibility. One feature of this book that stood out was the sheer volume of notable quotes by Jobs. The author didn’t interview Jobs; however, he provided numerous examples of direct quotes to enhance the many lessons provided in this book. Here were a few of my favorites:

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” (A principle inherent with Apple Computer’s mission and philosophy.)

“1000 songs in your pocket.” (iPod)

“Hold the Internet in your hand.” (iPad)

“Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” (iPhone)

“What Would Steve Do?”

The above quote is frequently stated or implied in this work by Gallo. This “Steve” read the book, and is glad that he did. It has made me question and enhance design considerations at my international soccer site and online portfolio. This book challenges us to examine better methods to cultivate and present ideas both personally and professionally. The added benefit is that Steve Jobs and Carmine Gallo are there to help us.

My Rating: *****

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He is a contributor to NSoW, and is the founder of World Football Commentaries.

Present Like Steve Jobs

Please note:

No Shortage of Work and the book reviewer were not compensated for this article.

by David Iscoe

It’s pretty much a truism that good workers take their jobs seriously. Employers want people who are invested in the work and care about what they’re doing. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, it’s hard to be at your most productive.

What is less well known, but almost as important, is the need to have a sense of humor about your work. It can help improve relations within the company and with customers, and make employees happier and less stressful – in other words, directly making people more productive workers.

I talked to three professionals in three different industries – health care, air travel, and promotions – about how they combined humor and hard work to be productive, and happy, employees.

JANICE BEITZ

“The best analogy for working in an operating room,” said Dr. Janice Beitz of LaSalle University, “is working on a nuclear submarine.” In both professions, work takes place in a serious environment where any mistake could be deadly. But in order to deal with that stress, employees need a healthy sense of humor.

“Humor makes you resilient,” Beitz said. “You cannot function in health care for any length of time and be a perfectly healthy clinician…without humor.”

Beitz knows it well. A professor of nursing (her doctorate is a PhD), Beitz dealt with her share of life-and-death situations – brain aneurysms that needed to be clipped before they became fatal, emergency bypass surgeries during heart attacks – and handled the stressful schedule of an operating room nurse, one time working twenty-seven consecutive hours. The most effective surgical teams, she said, were those who learned to laugh and joke around with each other.

O.R. humor takes various forms. There’s the universal workplace humor — on the board next to the operating room schedule is a picture of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, with the caption “go ahead, make one more change.” There’s also the “gallows humor” more particular to fields like medicine, where teams often joke to each other to relieve stress after a death, that are ‘things you’d never say to patients’ (New York Times ran a good, brief article on this type of humor http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/to-break-the-crime-scene-tension-jokes/). But perhaps most interesting is how jokes can be used to direct necessary criticism at particular individuals, “to make a point in a very professional, non-nasty way.”

Dr. Beitz spoke highly of most of her colleagues in the medical profession, but also said that at times egos and personalities can disrupt a team. For example, one surgeon, though competent at his job, was “a real crank to work with.” “I had a lot of thoughts about the size of his prostate,” she joked. The surgeon was known for complaining “where are the real nurses? where are the real nurses?” whenever anything went wrong, and one day the nursing staff decided they’d had enough. They planned a unified response, and the next time the doctor broke out his signature line, they responded “with the real surgeons!” The anesthesiologists at the other end of the table started cracking up.

“He kind of turned red, and shut up,” she said. “He never really said that after that.” The event helped relieve the tension the nursing staff felt toward the doctor, and also signalled to him that he needed to change his behavior. And it worked. Someone in the O.R. also put together a “surgeon abuse kit,” with a giant wooden mallet, for when surgeons were getting on peoples’ nerves. Just hearing someone call for it – “I need the surgeon abuse kit” – would let the surgeon know he needed to correct his behavior. Surgeons were also on the other end of the joke. Dr. Beitz recalled a time that her hospital had a persistent shortage of scrub suits for the O.R. staff. They finally had to address the problem when the male head of surgery walked into the operating room wearing an O.R. dress. “They got him scrubs,” she said.

BETTY THESKY

Some employees face pressures from customers as well as co-workers. Betty N. Thesky (pseudonym), who has worked 23 years as a flight attendant, said that “you can make fun of the passengers right to them and it doesn’t make them mad if you’re pleasant and in a good mood.” When she started making fun of passengers, she said, she was “always prepared for a negative reaction.” But she said that it’s much more often that they tell her “this was the best flight I ever had,” even if they’re directly the target of her humor.

Thesky mentioned a passenger who asked her “since when did you start wearing uniforms?” She answered the strange question with a joke, pretending to lament “oh yes, the days of the naked flight attendants are long gone.” The next time she came around, the passenger stopped her and said “you know, your answer to my question was very coy.” “It was the opposite of coy,” she replied. And the customer laughed. “I made fun of him twice on the same flight,” she said, “and he still wasn’t mad at me.”

She said that once she learned to joke with the passengers, she found her job less stressful. While she used to hate when passengers wore noise cancelling headphones, she now enjoys the opportunity to ask whatever she wants, as long as it looks like she’s saying “something to drink?” “I’ll ask ‘do you need a shrink?’ or ‘are your toenails pink?’ and they’ll say ‘Diet Coke.’” Thesky is careful not to make fun of someone with a serious problem, and to keep her tone friendly, not snide or insuting. “It’s all in the delivery,” she said. The better someone is at seeming friendly and natural, the more they can get away with.

Outside of work, Thesky also uses humor to deal with her experiences. In 2005, she started a podcast, called Betty in the Sky With a Suitcase, to talk about the most ridiculous aspects of her job. While she’s never talked to her airline about her podcast, (she declines to say where she works – “airlines don’t like people speaking for them”) she said that the response from other airline workers at all types of jobs – pilots, flight controllers, ground crews, as well as other flight attendants – has been enthusiastic. She frequently features other airline workers as guests (and they have plenty of funny stories of their own), and has parlayed her success into a book.

JESSE ALKIRE

Jesse Alkire would probably agree with Thesky that “it’s all in the delivery” when it comes to making fun of people at work. With a background in improv comedy, Alkire brings his natural humor to his job as a creative strategist at the firm Blue Soda Promo. “I really could probably say whatever,” Alkire said. “I’m able to.” Alkire, who describes himself as “naturally improvisational,” said that he makes fun of other workers on a “half-hourly basis,” but says that “everyone’s gotten used to it. Whatever they say to me will probably get a sarcastic response.”

Alkire was hired without a previous full-time job, and most his most extensive experience in the field of comedy. Tej Shah, director of e-commerce at Blue Soda, wrote that “the uniqueness of his resume and background, as well as his sense of humor,” helped Alkire stand out among the applicants and get an interview. According to Shah, Alkire performed well in a “very formal” interview process, adding that he “managed to lighten the atmosphere with a few quirky comments here and there.”

Shah agreed that Alkire’s humor has been an asset around the office, and observed that he really can get away with a lot. “His humor (thus far) has definitely been accepted at the work place, even when he makes jokes about the executive management team to their face,” Shah wrote, adding that, in tense situations, his humor “tends to diffuse the situation, while still effectively communicating his point of view.”

It helps that Alkire feels comfortable where he works. “I have to gauge people around me,” he said, “see who’s lame.” While he generally feels comfortable joking around wherever he is (“Seeing as how I work behind a computer and a desk, I’m not any imminent danger.”), he has occasionally offended people at his comedy shows with some edgy, risque humor. He said he’s never gotten that reaction at work. “It should be the opposite,” he said, but he isn’t complaining. “Everyone here is very cool with it, it’s a great company.”

Of course, he wasn’t hired as a clown. Alkire backs up his jocular style with a strong work ethic. “I can be a smartass and still give them what they want,” he said, “that’s the story.” Shah agreed. Alkire, whose work ranges from graphic design to social media to overseeing film and video shoots, gets the job done. “I think the major misconception is that someone with a background similar to Jesse’s or with a sense of humor would be a slacker and not be able to get work done,” Shah wrote. “We’ve seen just the opposite. Jesse stays focused and completes tasks, all while being a source of entertainment and lightening the mood.”

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

Beitz, Thesky, and Alkire all deserve credit for using humor to their advantage, and to the advantage of the company, but the companies also played a role. It the case of Thesky, her company benefited from non-involvement. “It’s the least supervised job you can imagine,” she said. But Thesky and her colleagues figured out a humorous, natural way to interact with the customers that kept up spirits on both ends, without any top-down controls.

Beitz worked in a hospital with an active culture of humor, and in a profession that knows the value of humor. Medical studies have repeatedly confirmed the healthy benefits of laughter, and Beitz said the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) has workshops all over the country to help nurses incorporate humor into their jobs. She herself wrote an article for the journal Seminars in Perioperative Nursing, called “Keeping them in stitches: humor in perioperative education.” In a stressful job that takes both its work and its employees seriously, the need for humor is well understood.

Alkire’s case is interesting because his employment seems to be a learning experience for the company itself. Shah wrote that he didn’t initially seek out to hire someone with a background in humor, but that Alkire just happened to reply to the job posting and stand out among the candidates. It worked out well. “We’re very happy to have hired someone with a comedic background,” Shah wrote, “and I truly think this may be a quality that we actively look for in the future.”

by: Adrienne Rodney

Unemployment is rough. Not knowing when the next job will come; stress over paying the bills; judgment from others – it’s an unfortunate circumstance too many of us face.

We are led to believe that searching for a job is your full-time job. Not having an office means having to work extra hard; it is not an excuse to focus on anything else. However, this way of thinking only works for some. Many people take their passions that were once hobbies and turn them into careers.

Journalist Patricia Crisafulli and business consultant Andrea Redmond view unemployment as the perfect time to reflect and refuel. In their book, Comebacks, they recommend those at a rough spot in their careers forego others’ ideas of success and relish in the new opportunities available. It is time to ask yourself, they say, what do you want Act II of your life to look like?

For Becky Blanton, her second act came in 2009 when she won a contest to attend the TED Global Conference, the non-profit conference named for its original emphasis on technology, entertainment and design, where she also spoke on her life as a homeless woman.  Waking each morning to the small comforts of her van, Becky had to fight off the depression that came with homelessness in order to stay focused. As an out-of-work writer, Becky took every writing job she could get her hands on, even when the pay was a mere ten dollars, because it was paid work.

Then she found herself on stage at the TED Conference. She came home (to her van) more energized and determined than before, writing as many articles as she could sell until she could afford an office. “I lived in the van, worked in the office and eventually moved up to more and better paying jobs,” she says. “I have four articles coming out in three national magazines and I’m doing better than ever. The secret is to never, ever, ever give up.”

Jason Black was a technical writer by trade and novelist by avocation when he lost his job.  Already a member of various online critique groups, Black used his time out of work to put more focus on his writing and editing. Many were quick to point out his talents with the red pen, including one person who recommended he try editing professionally.

Black got a business license, created Plot To Punctuation, and marketed his Web site to a writer’s association which led to new clients. Working with the association led to more clients, and now he is booked several months in advance. While this new endeavor is still in the early stages, it gives him the confidence and emotional support he needs.  “Discovering that I have a skill I didn’t know I had, that people in my field are willing to pay for – that was a tremendous boost to my spirits during what would otherwise have been a very difficult time.”

Becky and Jason teach a very good lesson: unemployment does not need to hold you back from following your dreams. If you are unemployed and feel stuck, distracted, depressed or unsure of your future, this is the perfect time to focus on what you love doing and then go out and do it.

For Marlene Baroli-Turati, unemployment meant turning a hobby into a career. Laid off from her Fortune 500 job in 2008, her MBA and years of experience could not help her land a job that afforded her lifestyle. “I found it very difficult to find a suitable job to replace the one I had lost,” she says. “I searched and searched, and nothing. So I made a huge career change.” The career change came when she started her own business, DaSweetZpot, making jams, jellies and other delectable treats.

“I began my business a year ago,” she says, “and I feel very successful as I have been able to replace my lost income. It’s a one woman show, and I am thrilled!” After a rough patch of unemployment, Marlene can finally say that life is sweet.

Book Review: by Steve Amoia

Seth Godin is a best-selling author and well-known public speaker. His latest book, “Linchpin,” reinforces many of the concepts that we promote at NSoW: Being different, creativity, innovation, generosity, personal networking and passion for your work. Mr. Godin teaches us that indispensable people, who he calls linchpins or artists, think “along the edges of boxes, because that’s where things get done.”

Mr. Godin has written an entertaining, compelling and provocative work. He discussed how the workplace has evolved along with how our brain structure creates resistance for 9 to 5 success. I liked how the book was organized into short chapters with many interesting anecdotes from his own life and concise examples from famous and not-so famous people. The author’s perspectives challenge our notions about the structure of work and the factory/office notion that defines modern-day jobs. Mr. Godin stressed that we must change to survive in a world where competition is not only around the corner but across the globe.

Several Thought-Provoking Quotes

One feature that I enjoyed was the amount of wisdom the author shared in easy-to-digest quotes sprinkled throughout the book. Here were a few of my favorites:

“Linchpins make their own maps.”

“We have gone from two teams (management and labor) to a third team. The linchpins. These are people who own their means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us.”

“They (linchpins) bring humanity to work. They don’t leave it at home.”

“Linchpins don’t work in a vacuum. Your personality and attitude are more important than the actual work product.”

“Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heart of being human until recently.”

“Lots of people can lift. That’s not paying off anymore. A few people can sell, almost no one puts in the time to create or invent.”

“Find a company that hires people, not paper.”

“Successful people are successful for a reason: They think about failure differently.”

“The only way to be indispensable is to be different.”

“What the boss really wants is an artist. If he can’t have that, he’ll settle for a cheap drone.”

“If you don’t have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for, those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in resumes.”

“You are not your resume. You are your work.”

The Status-Quo of the American School System

The author raised many interesting points about the American educational system. Namely, that the American school system is fear-based, punishes mistakes, stifles creativity and rewards conformity and test-taking skills. Mr. Godin believed that these factors produce future workers who are afraid to stand out due to fear of reprisal. He had an illuminating quote about this scenario:

“Many successful people got that way despite their advanced schooling not because of it.”

Five Minutes of Brilliance

The author noted that linchpins have a unique quality: They solve problems that others don’t anticipate in small bursts of activity. Mr. Godin used a brilliant example to hammer home this point. He discussed a time when a young Sir Richard Branson (Chairman of Virgin Group) was stranded on a Caribbean island after missing the only flight of the day. Instead of waiting for the airline to solve the problem, young Sir Richard chartered a plane and charged fellow travelers $39 a ticket to finance the entire trip.

Gifts and Reciprocity

Mr. Godin is a firm believer of giving without expectation even if the reciprocity inherent in gift-giving has been a part of humankind since the early tribal societies. He believed that when you focus on your art and helping others by your work, the rest will take care of itself.

“Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient… A loan without interest is a gift.”

This book will make a valuable addition to your business and self-improvement library. Please share it with your employer, colleagues and clients.

My rating: *****

Seth Godin on Social Networking


Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He is a contributor to NSoW and is the founder of the World Football Commentaries blog.

Please note:

No Shortage of Work and the book reviewer were not compensated for this article.

And They’re Coming to Teach You Things You Need to Know
By: Victoria Goldenberg

Could No Shortage of Work (NSoW) have existed 20 years ago? The costs in time, money and labor to gather and direct members and run a publication might not have justified the modest and seemingly unrealistic ends of encouraging people to work for free. But now that the Internet is widely accessible, setting up the NSoW Web site was relatively inexpensive and easy. More important, communities commonly assemble around Web sites without anyone organizing them. The formerly difficult task of finding people and directing them to collaborate on meaningful work now happens organically, as those who share NSoW’s philosophy participate in the community on their own.

NSoW exemplifies the behavioral shift New York University professor Clay Shirky analyzes in his engaging book Here Comes Everybody (2008, Penguin Books). He describes a compelling variety of cases, from charming Livejournal and Meetup groups to flash mob protests against the government in Belarus, to illustrate how ordinary people are taking the reins and using new tools, such as cell phones and blogs, to organize themselves.

Mr. Shirky stresses that technology itself hasn’t changed the world, but the ways people adopted it have. He cites people who took photos of Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade and posted them to the photo-sharing site Flickr under one name, so people could view all the pictures in one place. Prior to 2005, parade attendees hadn’t pooled their photos, but they’ve changed their behavior because of access to a service that makes it simple. At the same time, the photo-takers organized the pictures themselves, without supervision from Flickr or the parade’s sponsors. By coming together, the photographers created a new, valuable resource for the public.

What’s most appealing about Here Comes Everybody is that it resists exaggerating the Internet’s democratizing power and takes a realistic, contextual approach. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that new media and behaviors do not render older institutions useless, (such as newspapers and commercial developers of operating systems), but they do decrease their relative influence. I especially liked the chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” which compared the effects of mass amateurization of journalism to the popularizing of the printing press, noting how it ends professional publications’ monopoly on the news just as the printing press ended scribes’ monopoly on publishing.

I spoke with Mr. Shirky by phone to discuss how No Shortage of Work can challenge people’s assumptions and encourage working for free, rather than not working at all.

“Whenever the digital sharecropper hypothesis comes up—why are all these people working without pay?—the answer is: That’s the wrong question. The idea of working for free assumes there’s this normal case in which you only do something if you get paid, and then there’s this pathological case in which you do things because you like them. That is a legacy of neoclassical economics that assume we’re all self-interested and isolated, rational, maximizing actors. One of the observations I’ve made recently is that one reason these behaviors are so surprising to us is because our previous explanations for human behavior were so lousy. We all do things for free all the time and we don’t even experience them as being for free.

“I think the surprise has been that we’ve believed that intrinsic motivation—things we do because we like them—is inherently limited to the private sphere, basically hearth and home.

“The intrinsic motivation can take place in the public sphere now. We just needed a medium to make that possible. The value of people working, full stop, is basically the value of making yourself happy. It’s a value that’s indivisible to other things.”

He also discussed whether communal learning might decrease the higher education system’s relative importance in the job market:

“Given that the premium of college education offers on the job market is now being leveled out, we’re clearly going to see a rise of lower-cost attempts to deliver the value of a college education.

“We may be in one of those times where people say, ‘demanding a four-year college degree for the training I need for this job doesn’t make sense anymore’. There have certainly been enough observations about the economic disadvantage of four-year education that people are willing to consider it, but it’s not going to be a general social change. Probably some industry will shift away from demanding a four-year degree pro forma to figuring out when it matters and when just having the skills training is enough.”

Shirky described how he learned skills such as computer programming from online communities and how this valuable method of learning can be invisible:

“I think it’s telling about the social piece that we don’t have any middle word between ‘I went to an accredited institution and got formal learning’ and ‘I am self-taught’ to reflect the way a lot of people learn these things which is, ‘I joined a community that knows and cares about the subject I care about, and I learned it there.’

“The language doesn’t yet give us a way to reflect on being communally taught as opposed to institutionally taught.”

No Shortage of Work is a venue for communal education. By participating in it you can learn from the pros, outside of a formal setting, and work to build vital job skills—or just for the joy of it.

by: Adrienne Rodney

You think you got it bad? Try waiting in a mile-long line where a callback is like hitting the jackpot and landing a part is like going to heaven.

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First Lesson: CHANGE THE GAME

Darbi Worley, producer of the Everything Acting Podcast, knows that not every role is right for her. “I look at every project as a jigsaw puzzle missing one piece,” she says. “I am a puzzle piece and I only fit certain puzzles. If I jam myself into the wrong puzzle, both the puzzle and I are going to be really uncomfortable. Better to wait for the right puzzle. It’s out there.”

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Second lesson: RE-FRAME REJECTION

Lidia Ryan says most thespians go on twenty auditions before getting a job – sometimes more, sometimes less. There are too many circumstances to take it personally. “I may lose a part not because I’m not a good actor or they [casting agents] didn’t like me,” she says, “but perhaps because I look too much like one of the actors in the project that are already cast, or they decided to go with…the opposite sex. It’s never a rejection of you; they just decided to go with someone else. If you see it as a rejection of you, well then you will probably just give up.”

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Third Lesson: KEEP GOING

Brooke Lewis, a horror-film actor and producer, knows how hard you have to work to be noticed. “When you get in front of those people you better be prepared and you better be good,” she says. “However, how will these people ever know you exist if you don’t put the work in to get there? If you’re not putting yourself out there in the work sense, then you’re not moving. You’re not getting to the next place.”

Ms. Lewis put herself out there by staying busy. “I can’t tell you how many coffee and dinner meetings I used to take, with anyone and everyone in the industry who I could have some kind of beneficial relationship with – where I could help assist them and they could teach me. I mean, you really have to put the time in.”

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Fourth Lesson: TAKE ACTING LESSONS

Dan Nainan was a senior engineer at Intel touring around the world with cofounder Andy Grove as his “Demo God” doing technical demonstrations on stage. He says, “Although the technical part was easy, the public speaking was terrifying, so I took a comedy class to help with stage fright, and found I had an affinity for comedy.” Now he’s a professional comedian and actor who appeared in a “Get a Mac” commercial for Apple. Learn how actors and comedians deal with their fears and it will surely help your career, and perhaps even lead to a new one.

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Fifth Lesson: DO SOMETHING ELSE

Kai Soremekun, creator of the web series CHICK, says, “When you’re looking for a job and worried about your future you’re already afraid.” She recommends, “Stop watching the news.” and “Get a hobby or project.” She describes a friend who renovates houses, “Often she is so wrapped up in the latest house she’s working on that it almost becomes a hassle to drop what’s she’s doing to go to an audition. But the result is she’s less invested in the outcome of the audition and so books more acting gigs.”

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Kai brings up a very important point. Optimism, helplessness, and depression have been studied for decades by Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his book, Learned Optimism, he describes how worrying about things out of your control (e.g., the economy, most news stories, etc.) will make you feel helpless and depressed. However, being engaged in an activity like a hobby or side business will keep you positive, particularly if it is meaningful and benefits others. Watch Dr. Seligman explain how to live a fulfilling life on this TED Video.