There are no second acts in American lives, the tragic ol’ F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation goes. Cut your whining! The new careerists say, for a…
Posts Tagged ‘Work’
Sharon Glassman: What is Work? Finding Your True Career in Life’s Second Act
July 11th, 2009 |
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5 Ways to Make Sure You’re Asking Well
July 6th, 2009 |
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I wrote a post here last week called “Can’t-Miss Marketing: Just Ask” that got a lot of interesting responses. Sure, people said, asking is all well and good, but what does “asking well” actually mean?
It’s an interesting, and important, question to consider. If, as I’ve seen time and time again, good things really come to those who ask, what do they do right? What traits do they have in common that make those people more likely to be successful? And what differentiates the no’s from the yes’s?
In my experience, it really boils down to five things. These are five tips on how to ask well, and how to set yourself up for a lot more positive responses to your questions.
Don’t Overwhelm
This is one of the trickiest parts of this whole prospect, and arguably the hardest part of any kind of sales as well: reminding and prodding people a bit, without putting them off by being too forward.
There’s no cut-and-dry solution to this, unfortunately, but my rule has always been this: I initiate contact. Once. I wait a week – if I don’t hear back, I ping them again. If I don’t hear back after that one, it’s over. This keeps future options open because I haven’t harassed them until they can’t stand me anymore, but makes sure they didn’t just miss me the first time.
Show Mutual Benefit
Often, we tend to focus constantly on what we bring the table: our skills, background, education, etc. What many people ignore, however, is that many people just flat out like helping people. We all love being the one who “gave them a chance when no one would,” especially when it turns into a success story. Don’t be afraid to talk about how what you’re asking for would benefit you, too.
That’s not to say ignore the benefit to the other party – that’s definitely the most important part of all this. But don’t overlook people’s desire to help someone out, and play into their feelings of being good people by helping you out.
Be Direct
If you’re looking for a given job or opportunity, odds are you’re not the only one. And odds are, the person you’re contacting doesn’t have tons of time to spare. So don’t waste it – get to the point. There are right ways and wrong ways to do this, obviously, but don’t dance around an issue. A 13-paragraph email isn’t going to get read nearly as often as a two-paragraph email that says essentially the same thing. They’ll appreciate your effort and consideration of their time.
Be You
In talking to various employers, they’ve all said the same thing: the unique people get noticed. Most people, frankly, do exactly the same thing, in the same format, without any personality or interest; somehow, we’ve come to think of that as “professional.”
That’s terrible. And it doesn’t work. Funny, interesting stuff gets much more attention than the “professional” stuff. So be you, and let your personality affect what you say and do. Everyone can fill out and send a form letter – don’t even try. Know what makes you unique, both your skills and your personality, and run with that.
Ask Not What They Can Do For You
This is a tip I was given when I was first starting to apply for “real world” jobs: when you contact someone, don’t ask anything from them. Don’t say “please get in touch,” or “call me back,” or anything like that. Instead, ask them what you can do – who can you get in touch with? What can you do to get the ball rolling?
Put the onus for action on yourself – the less the other person has to do, the more likely they are to do it. And odds are, they’ll do something to help you out anyway.
From either end of the equation – asker and askee, for lack of a better phrase – what can we do to be better at asking for what we want?
Photo: saikofish
David Pierce is a college student, freelance writer, and lover of all things Web-based. He blogs about the digital world at The 2.0 Life, and can frequently be found on Twitter .
Giving life a shape
July 3rd, 2009 |
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Novel ways of thinking about the digital world are needed, says Bill Thompson, and perhaps the arts can help.
One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.
When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.
But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.
"We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp"
Bill Thompson
Many are making expert use of social media, moving from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook to follow the audiences, but also finding out how Twitter and other services can be used to help them engage and interact with people who may be interested in their art.
Stage craft
The much-loved Pilot Theatre brought in virtual worlds expert Caron Lyon to built them a stage set in Second Life. The team at Hoi Polloi used video diaries, Facebook and Twitter to establish an online following that has supported them as they tour from their Cambridge base as far afield as Australia, offering new audiences a chance to discover their work in all its strangeness while also ensuring that fans – including me – know what they are up to while they are away.
When it comes crossover organisations like Hide&Seek, who recently ran a social gaming festival in London, it is impossible to separate the art from the technology, and their work offers a real inspiration to those who wonder what the arts will look like in a digitised world.
This cross-fertilisation is important in several ways. It obviously makes sense for those committed to experiment and exploration in the arts to embrace new technologies as a way of exploring the creative potential of a new domain of human activity, just as painters explored the radical new technology of oils for for many decades, or sculptors turned from marble and limestone to work with welded iron or novel materials like frozen blood.
But there is something else going on, something deeper and potentially more important, because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.
They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.
The point was made clear to me at Shift Happens, a conference on the ways arts organisations are using new technologies that took place this week at York Theatre Royal.
Over a day and a half the audience, mostly made up of practitioners, was treated to a fascinating selection of arts-based technology, or technology-based arts, from the interactive animations of the always-engaging Sancho Plan through calls to ensure that tech-based arts are environmentally sustainable from Envirodigital and a demonstration of how to subtitle your online video from Internet Subtitling.
It quickly became clear that the network revolution is already happening in the arts even if its success on the political stage is sometimes sadly limited, as we saw this week in Iran.
One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.
Texting times
I wonder, however, if we can take some old stories and use them to explore the new world. Take The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s last play and one of his finest. Set on a remote island where Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, lives with his daughter Miranda and a strange creature called Caliban, the Tempest explores issues of redemption and forgiveness and the use and abuse of power.
Prospero rules his island thanks the the spells in the books he has studied in his exile, commanding the spirit Ariel to torment and manipulate his former enemies, who have been shipwrecked on the island by a tempest created at Prospero’s command.
A modern reading this tale would see Ariel as a representative of the digital realm, created from bits but able to have a real effect on the physical world. We discover during the play that Ariel was locked into a forked tree until released by Prospero, a good analogy for the effort needed to liberate the power of the digital revolution, represented by Prospero’s books of spells.
We can take this further. The witch’s child Caliban believes himself the true inheritor of the island as his mother was banished there before Prospero arrived and fails to realise that Prospero’s books have given him power over the unseen world that far outstrip Caliban’s physical prowess, just as the rulers of analogue distribution fear the world we have conjured from our code.
And when Caliban, wandering the island with shipwrecked sailors Trinculo and Stephano, hears an invisible Ariel playing on a pipe he tells them:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Today the thousand twangling instruments that Ariel and his sprites conjure up are replaced by millions of tweets, status updates, but they still fill the world with sweet sounds, and offer us a vision of a digital world that can be as rich and full of delight as we choose to make it. It’s reassuring to see that some of our best artists are working hard to make that happen.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Can’t-Miss Marketing: Just Ask
June 24th, 2009 |
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In the year since I started blogging, I’ve gotten a bunch of freelance writing gigs and regular jobs writing all over the Web. But, initially, no one offered them to me. I had this blog I was proud of, a super-cool design, and yet the offers didn’t flood in. Crazy, right? Tell me about it.
I finally decided that if I wanted something to happen, I had to go and get it. So I did the simplest thing I could think of: I just asked for it. I wrote to a bunch of different sites, and asked if they needed writers. I pitched a few ideas, used my blog as a resume, and offered my services.
I couldn’t give you an exact number, but the response rate to my emails was extraordinarily low. Let’s just say that if I were a baseball player with that batting average, I wouldn’t be a baseball player much longer. Only a couple of people responded at all, and a few of those turned into the jobs I got initially as a freelance blogger. But my batting average wasn’t high.
And it didn’t matter. For the opportunities that didn’t come my way, all it cost me was a few minutes of my time to send an email. The hour it took to write ten emails, even if it only generated one response, was well worth it just for that one response.
I got my dream job this summer from exactly the same thing: I sent an email. I can’t explain why it worked, or why I got a response instead of the hundred or so other people my boss got applications from. It worked, though, and for one reason: I asked. If I never heard back, so be it; it’s a wasted ten minutes. But I did, and it became a fantastic experience for me.
Simply asking is the most useful marketing tool I’ve ever discovered. You can have a spectacular resume, the most polished skill set, and the perfect passions for a job or opportunity, but if you don’t ask for it, who’s going to know you want it? Asking, handled the right way, leads to nothing but positive results.
If you’re anything like me, you’re afraid of asking for things – especially things you really want. I think the problem is that we so fear getting turned down that we run away, in order to be able to somehow hold out hope that we’re good enough for it. Asking, and getting rejected, would somehow only prove our failure and our ineptness for what we really want.
The reality, though, is that there are a ton of reasons why an opportunity didn’t come along, most of which have nothing to do with you being a failure: there’s timing, restrictions, personality issues, and a whole litany of other reasons why the opportunity’s not right for you at the moment. Maybe your email just got lost, or maybe the person doesn’t like people with your name – whatever it is, not winning mean doesn’t mean you’re a loser. That can be hard to understand, but not getting down because your batting average isn’t perfect is key to success.
The more opportunities you put yourself out for, the more you’ll get. Do you want something, whether it’s a job, a cookie, or something else? Ask for it. Do it in a respectful, productive way, and you’ll get a response in kind – even if it’s no. Don’t let the no’s bog you down, and remember: the second “Yes!” is always easier than the first.
Thanks to simply asking, I’m now writing for ten or so websites I never dreamed would care what I had to say, working for the man with the career I want, and loving every minute of it. All because I asked for it.
What can you ask for? A better job, more responsibility, more fun, more money, something else? What is there to lose?
David Pierce is a college student, freelance writer, and lover of all things Web-based. He blogs about the digital world at The 2.0 Life, and can frequently be found on Twitter .
Pain and Posture: The Basics
June 23rd, 2009 |
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Old “Doc” Plume, the local hardware store owner, who was known for his miraculous cures for arthritis, had a long line of “patients” waiting outside the door when a little old lady, completely bent over, shuffled in slowly, leaning on her cane. When her turn came, she went into the back room of the store and, amazingly, emerged within half an hour, walking completely erect with her head held high. A woman waiting in the line said, “It’s a miracle! You walked in bent in half and now you’re walking erect.  What did Doc do?” She answered, “He gave me a longer cane.”
It’s funny; most of the people with bad posture or pain syndrome I run into want to know a miracle exercise that will cure their dysfunction. Sure, exercise can help and be a big part of a program designed to deal with pain and posture. But more often than not, it is the little things in our everyday lives that could use some adjusting. With that, here is a short list of activities to be mindful of.
Driving: Do you slouch, lean to one side more than the other? Maybe you keep one hand high on the steering wheel and the other low, causing you to shrug one shoulder more than the other. The point: try to shift and change positions often if you spend lots of time in the car. The best position will always be hands at 10 and 2. And holding your back tall and flat against the seat.
Desk: You should know by now that posture at the desk is important. You’re in this position for several hours at a time and it can have BIG repercussions on your health. Get up often and be aware of any favoritism to any particular positions you might find yourself in. Reaching and twisting from a seated position is a big no-no. Try to organize your desk to be more spine friendly by putting often-used folders and materials within arm’s reach.
Sleeping: Our sleep posture is one of the most overlooked aspects of our life. You spend 8 hours (hopefully) a night in either one or various positions that could have a large impact on your posture during the day. Do you pile the pillows high? This leads to excess stretching of the extensors in the neck, possibly contributing to a forward head posture. Do you pull the bed sheets tight over your feet, pulling your toes into a pointed position? This can lead to limited ankle mobility, which then affects your entire body mechanics, from walking to sitting. Do you sleep on your side with one leg bent and across your body? This can lead to an imbalance between your left and right spinal erectors, which then could be contributing to your back pain. This is can be even worse if you’re a woman with generous hips. Paranoid yet? I didn’t even mention how sleeping on your stomach can contribute to an excessive lordodic curve ,which then may lead to extra compressive forces for your lumbar spine to handle. So which is the best position to sleep in? On your side, knees bent, pillow between the knees and your head resting on a single pillow. Or if you prefer, on your back with a pillow under your knees, sheets loose, and again, a single pillow for the head.
The point I’m trying to drive home here is that we need to pay more attention to our bodies when they’re NOT in motion. It’s the little things like these that add up and contribute to a life of constant and nagging pains. Practice a technique known as mindfulness. Every once in awhile turn your attention inwards and ask yourself; have I been in this position for too long? Could I do something to make my current posture or situation more comfortable and back friendly? Before you know it, the pain that once prevented you from doing normal everyday tasks will have disappeared and become a thing of the past.
Jamie Nischan owns and runs a successful fitness coaching business in Stamford CT. Through the use of posture correction and exercise he treats pain often associated with excessive use of computers. More about Jamie can be found at www.thebuffgeek.com.
Informatology Conference
June 23rd, 2009 |
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First session at the Informatology conference is over.
How to Get Promoted
June 22nd, 2009 |
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If you work in a large organization and are ambitious for career progression then here are a number of things that you can do to assist your journey.
1. Do your job well. I know that this is stating the obvious but it is the starting point.  For promotion it is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement that you perform your current duties diligently. Many people think that this is all they need to do and that the rewards, recognition and promotion will follow. Corporate life is not ‘fair’ in this sense. Many people do great work and are passed over. You need to excel in your current role and do much more to climb the ladder.
2. Get noticed. One of the best ways to be promoted is if a senior manager in another department wants you. But this can only happen if they are aware of you. So you have to find ways to get in front of other people, particularly senior people, in a way that displays your good qualities and makes you memorable.
3. Volunteer. If someone is needed to present a proposal on behalf of your department, volunteer. If members are needed for a cross-departmental task force, volunteer. If the social committee want someone to help organize the staff barbecue, volunteer. Take on additional responsibilities both inside and outside your department. This shows that you are willing to get involved and it gets you noticed.
4. Discuss your ambitions with your manager. Make sure that your boss and your boss’s boss know that you are keen to be promoted. You can do this in a quiet professional way. Do not threaten or demand. Have a discussion where you ask the question, ‘What do I have to do to get promoted?’   Develop a plan. Senior managers understand ambition and there is nothing wrong with being ambitious so make sure that they understand your goals.
5. Work well with people. Many people who are technically proficient and excellent at task management do not get promoted because they lack people skills. Be aware of how you are perceived. Ask for feedback. It is not a question of popularity; it is more about communication, trust and dependability.  Try not to make enemies. Find ways to work effectively with other people and you are more likely to be seen as ‘management material’.
6. Contribute ideas. Make positive, constructive suggestions for how things could be done better. Most managers (though not all) welcome this and it will signal that you are someone who can think about bigger issues. It shows that you welcome rather than fear change.
7. If you cannot move up, move across. Look for ways to broaden your experience. It you cannot move up in your area then consider moving across into a different area of the business at the same level so that you can learn new skills and make new contacts.
8. Have a plan. Set yourself goals for advancement and measure progress against them.  If you need to acquire certain skills or experiences then plan to do so. If you are turned down for promotion, ask why. If you cannot meet your plan in your current organization or if you can make no more progress or if you no longer enjoy the work then look elsewhere. There are plenty of opportunities for ambitious people who work hard and are keen to learn.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.
GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit
June 19th, 2009 |
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At the very beginning of David Allen’s recorded lecture, Getting Things Done Fast, he tells his audience that the most important but single most difficult part of becoming more productive is making time every week for a weekly review. Most important because this couple of hours of “time out†once a week is where virtually all the GTD magic happens – it’s where we make sure everything’s out of our heads and in our trusted system, so we can use our brains for doing Good Stuff instead of nagging us about the Good Stuff we should be doing. Most difficult because… well, I have my theories.
First of all, weekly reviews are hard because it is simply difficult, in a practical sense, to take an hour or two off and focus on the bigger picture. This difficulty is compounded by psychological factors – for one thing, most of us feel our moment-to-moment involvement in our work is essential, and if we’re not actually working on work – even busy work – we fear things will fall apart. For another thing, spending a couple hours thinking about our work doesn’t feel like work – it can take some time to get into our heads that this “meta-work†is an important part of our work as a whole.
There are emotional reasons as well. For one thing, I think most of us are just afraid, on some level, of spending that much time with ourselves. What kind of stuff are we going to find out? Self-reflection can be scary! Also, most of us have been raised to see such self-reflection as kind of selfish – who are we to deserve that kind of scrutiny? That leads us not to trust ourselves, which leads to a lack of honesty that undermines the weekly review habit – you can’t build a trusted system without trusting yourself!
For me, there has always been some combination of these factors. My schedule is kind of chaotic – not just because of disorganization but because as an academic part of my job is to respond to whatever my 150 students in any given semester throw at me, and to do so fairly quickly. In my other life as a writer, while I can block out time to work, I am somewhat at the whim of editors, clients, and of course my audiences – who knows what emergency next week will bring?
All that chaos has made it difficult for me to engage myself in a weekly review consistently – every effort has lasted a few weeks then fallen to the wayside as the rest of my life piled up (a sign, perhaps, that I wasn’t doing it very well anyway). On top of that, too much of what I do in weekly reviews gets waylaid later on as I put my plans into practice, which has made it harder and harder to trust myself, which again is bad for my trusted system.
A return to trust
I know all this, so when I started the process of recommitting myself to building a system as close as possible to GTD, I knew I’d have to deal with it.
Fortunately, I have a few things working in my favor, and I think I’ve done a couple things right in laying the groundwork this time around.
While I haven’t always been very good about the weekly review, I have generally been good about keeping my lists up-to-date, and about doing “mini-reviews†– scrolling through my list of projects every few days to see if there’s anything I could be adding as next actions. This is one of the core practices that makes up the weekly review, so I’ve got that part down, and can build on it.
What makes me more hopeful this time around is that I’ve added a list of Areas of Focus to my setup, the idea being that not only do I generate tasks from my list of projects, but I generate projects and tasks from my Areas of Focus list. This should help me keep on track, since a) it’s something I don’t do in my “mini-reviewsâ€, and b) it leads into the “looking forward†part of the weekly review, which is the part that I think scares me (and others) off.
That leaves, of course, the practical concern of scheduling the time in. Fridays are a natural for me, since I rarely work on Fridays – but although I’ve been doing Friday weekly reviews for the last couple weeks, I’m thinking Mondays might be better, since they put me “closer to the action†– I have a better idea of what’s going on around me at the beginning of the week than I do guessing what might be going on at the end of the previous week.
Getting weekly reviews done
As I said at the beginning of this post, weekly reviews are important – rather than being a drain on your available work time, done right the weekly review should add not only to your work time but your confidence and calmness about doing that work. For a sense of what a weekly review should look like, have a look at my Back to Basics post from last year.
More than anything else, though, a weekly review is a point of connection between you and your work. We live in a go-go-go society where work – any work – is expected of each of us, all the time. Americans, especially, work harder than just about anyone – not necessarily more efficiently or on more important things, but longer hours and with fewer breaks. It’s all too easy in all this rush of work for work’s sake to lose track of why we’re doing it and of what it has to do with us as people.
A weekly review is about task management and scheduling, but it’s also about reconnecting with our work in a personal way, evaluating our work in terms of higher-purpose goals and life objectives, aligning the work we do today with the dreams we have of tomorrow. We aren’t afforded many moments like that in life, so it’s important that we create them for ourselves.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Sat Eye Candy: Bernie Worrell
April 18th, 2009 |
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HAPPY FREAKIN’ BIRTHDAY TO THE WIZARD OF WOO!!!
As much (and sometimes more than) George Clinton, Bernie Worrell has been the architect of the Parliament-Funkadelic sound, one of the late 20th century’s most permeating influences, stretching far beyond the corridors of “funk” or “soul” and into music as a whole. Tomorrow, Worrell turns 65 and we want the whole world to sing him a hearty “Happy Birthday.”
His work has touched the Talking Heads, Les Claypool and myriad others (including some REALLY nice work with the Eric McFadden Trio in recent years), and his creativity seems limitless and often unlike any other keyboardist in history. We offer up a tiny smattering of his work in celebration of his birth and encourage y’all to make your funk the P-Funk this weekendÂ…
Let’s jump on an insect and enjoy some quality improvising from Worrell, Warren Haynes, Will Calhoun (Living Colour) and Brett Bass.
While Parliament- Funkadelic is legendary for their sonic Viagra-like jams, it’s Worrell’s arrangements and horn charts that often provide much of the crispness and punch to their trademark sound. To wit, this ditty from Houston in 1976.
Most musicians would be super fortunate to be part of one massively influential band in their lifetime. Bernie Worrell has two, and though never an official member, his role in the Heads in the 1980s was pivotal. Here they are throwing sparks in Germany in 1980.
Bernie has a jester’s wit and a broad sense of play that he brings to the stage. For example, this craziness from back in the day, just one of the broad strokes he helped cook up that had P-Funk filling stadiums in the ’70s.
Worrell’s compositional sense can often be detected most clearly in later period Parliament like this wriggling salute to hitting it from the back, captured in rump-diddly-umptious style in 1981.
Dig this ultra-rare mix of musicians tearing up Creem’s “White Room.” The man keeps heavy company!
A vintage look at the boys at their start. Dig the juxtaposition of show host and this gaggle of super freaks.
No salute to Bernie would be complete without this Widescreen rock epic. This version is tinged with wonderful Pink Floyd patina, proof that Worrell is always listening to what’s happening around him. And then he ingests it for his own sustenanceÂ…and ours.
Things gets weird with this super nutty lineup, which includes Marc Ribot and Arto Lindsey on guitars. Play loud to scrape some paint off the walls.
Let’s boogie off into the weekend with our hands raised high and our spirits to match. Thanks for the music, Mr. Worrell. We think you’re the freakin’ bee’s knees, brother!
And don’t forget, you can eyeball video sweetness 24/7 with JamBase TV.
New Law Commission Site Launched
April 8th, 2009 |
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A client site I have been working on just went live today. It’s a public consultation site for the Law Commission.
They wanted a commentable summary version of their current consultation paper and a general discussion forum. The original consultation paper, “The Admissibility of Expert Evidence in Criminal Proceedings in England and Wales”, runs to 98 [...]