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I'm entering my 30th year hosting Work with Marty Nemko on an NPR station in San Francisco and for my fund drive show this Thursday at 7 PM Pacific, I will offer the pieces of advice that my listeners, readers, and career and personal coaching clients have found of greatest value. I thought you might find them of value, too, so I offer you an advance look here.
I am honored that a number of them were included on the Inspirational Quotations website. That site has pages for the likes of Einstein, Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. . . and me?!
Choosing a career
Status is the enemy of contentment. So many people seek status that good high-status jobs are hard to land. And if you get one, you may soon discover that status provides little lasting pleasure but imposes much opportunity cost: what you could have been doing had you focused more on what you’re good at and enjoy.
Consider under-the-radar careers. It's easier to land a good job in an under-the-radar career. There are many such less well-known careers that many people find rewarding; for example, optometrist, program evaluator, neon sign maker, and forensic accountant.
Give not necessarily to the neediest but to those likely to benefit most. As every battlefield medic knows, it’s usually wisest to allocate resources not necessarily to the weakest but to those with the most potential to benefit.
Use your current life activities to pick a career: How do you spend your discretionary time? What do you love to talk or read about?
Career training
Learn from Google. You’ll likely learn more of enduring value from an hour of wise Googling than from any course.
It-Worked-for-Me-It’ll-Work-for-You books are often not helpful because typical readers are less intelligent and/or less driven than are how-to-book authors.
Self-study plus tutoring is an underrated way to learn. Usually better than a course is self-study plus a tutor to get you past trouble spots.
Ever more people will be deciding that getting that degree isn't the best use of time and money. The proliferation of degree-holders combined with degrees' ballooning cost means that more people would be wise to forgo State U let alone Private U in favor of You U: some combination of self-study, mentorship, professional conferences, and short courses, such as those on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Udacity, or university extensions.
Especially think twice before pursuing an art, music, film, or theatre degree. While I respect people who are willing to risk poverty to be an artist, the cost-benefit of arts colleges is dubious.
Landing a job
Career changers, rely on your network. Your best chance of landing a job in which you have little or no experience is to tap someone who knows and likes you. A stranger offering a good job would usually prefer someone with experience.
Career changers, write a white paper. You boost chances of landing a job for which you have no experience by writing a white paper that demonstrates your current knowledge in the field to which you aspire. Append that to your applications.
Post-job-interview thank-you notes should say more than thank you. Remind the interviewers of things that seemed to impress them in the interview, take a second shot at a question you flubbed, and perhaps suggest an idea that would impress them.
Accomplishing
Talking too much is a career killer. Keep all utterances to less than 45 seconds and, in dialogue, speak 30 to 50 percent of the time.
Keep a memo pad with you. When you're, for example, sitting in traffic, think of ideas. Write them down. Implement them. Or take notes or make voice memos on your phone.
School success inadequately predicts life success. School can give a false sense of confidence or of loserhood.
Yup, baby steps. When overwhelmed, after doing any needed planning, try to stay in the moment and just put one foot in front of the other.
Accomplishment can fuel motivation more than recreation often does. Successful, productive people fuel themselves mainly with their work and accomplishment. Less successful people try, often unsuccessfully, to recharge via recreation.
When facing a dreaded task, ask yourself, "What's my next one-second task?" It feels good to get even a tiny task done, make progress, and maybe learn something. A few one-second tasks may be enough to get you rolling: as they say, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion.
Don't discount individualism. Today, teamwork is deified. But don’t forget the pluses of individualism: results tend to be bolder, not subject to groups' tendency to agree only to lowest-common-denominator ideas, the person doing that activity is more motivated knowing it's all on him or her, there are fewer communication problems because only one person is involved, and a lot of time is saved because only one person is doing the task.
Is s/he a workaholic or heroic? It’s often inaccurate, not to mention rude, to pathologize hard workers as workaholics. Heroic is often more accurate.
Dealing with people
Value honesty over flattery. How feeble are we that we may be swayed more by dubious flattery than by valid suggestions?
Don’t practice one-size-fits-all management. Just as different plants need different watering and sunlight, so do people. For example, some need more supervision, others less.
Don't overvalue physical appearance. Why do so many people prefer a silly, manipulative, games-playing, selfish, and attractive person over an ugly, intense, honest, kind person?
Try counseling-out rather than terminating a weak employee. Before initiating formal termination procedures, try counseling-out a weak employee, even helping them find a better-suited job. That can avoid stressful, time-consuming, expensive employee lawsuits.
Find hope. Where ethically possible, give others hope. Without it, a person suffers unnecessarily and unreasonably gives up, at work or even on life.
Beware the forced smile. If someone smiles at you with pursed lips, they’re generally forcing the smile–usually because they’re shy or don’t like you.
Is s/he good or just nice? Some people are nice as a way to compensate for not being good.
Just because you can prove someone wrong, doesn’t mean you should.
Weigh the cost-benefit of criticizing or suggesting. There are costs and benefits each time you criticize or suggest. Only sometimes is that worth the price. Make the choice consciously.
The life well-led
Be in the moment. Far more of life’s pleasures are in the process than in the outcome. So, be in the moment.
Alas, the desire to be right usually trumps the desire for truth.
Make the opposing argument. This is particularly important in these polarized times. Make the best case you can for a position you disagree with. You’ll be a wiser, more nuanced person and perhaps more open-minded.
Focus more on contribution than on happiness. The key to a well-led life is maximizing your contribution. Happiness, less central, is most likely found in simple pleasures.
In aging, balance grace with striving. Senescence is inevitable. The best we can do is to balance gracious acceptance of that with, as Dylan Thomas famously wrote, raging against the dying light.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
