Erich Stauffer

Tag: Jobs

  • What it’s Like to Lose Your Job

    When you get laid off, you’re in a strange kind of phase where all of a sudden you have a lot of time, but your brain is scattered. Days prior you may have wished you could have some time off. Now that you have it, you wish you could be back at work. The trick is to enjoy this season. Spend time with family that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Watch your kids grow up a little. Teach them something. Learn something new. And yes, do those other things to: apply for jobs, outreach to your network, and check your finances.

    Before I was laid off I was quick to give others advice. I’d send them a blog article (10 Things You Need to Do if You were Fired Yesterday) or recommend they attend a networking group or meetup. What I didn’t realize was a) the effect of pride and b) the strain on mental bandwidth. When things aren’t good, pride doesn’t want to “reach out”. It wants to hide that problem. And when money is not coming in regularly, a higher percentage of the brain is allocated to thought about ‘how to get more money’, burning bandwidth (1,2).

    Even job applications require eliminating a little bit of hubris. Yes, you must fill out all of these boxes regardless of your business acumen or professional experience. Yes, you must convince us to hire you even if you are completely qualified for the job. You have to sell yourself, but as time goes on, the ability to sell yourself gets questioned. Confidence begins to wane. The no’s begin to pile up. You start to second-guess yourself. The bills start getting behind. Your ability to buy basic essentials begins to come into question.

    The Blame Game

    The first person I blamed was myself. “What did I do wrong?” In Christopher Avery’s Responsibility Process™ he says that when a problem occurs, our default response is, “What should we do about it?” The problem is that words like “should” map to “shame” and “blame” in our minds. Instead, Avery says, we can say, “What do I want from this?” Asking yourself what you “want” maps the question to “responsibility” in your brain. Avery defines responsibility as, “Owning your ability and power to create, choose, and attract.”

    What Do I Want?

    Before I was laid off I thought I wanted to be an independent consultant. But after I became an independent consultant by default, I suddenly found myself wanting to be employed. Actually, what I wanted was “income”. And that may be part of the problem. I know from experience that top entrepreneurs (or employees) seek to “add value” as their primary goal. But “adding value” requires “being valuable” and that in-turn requires work. The real question was, “Do I want to do the work required to be valuable in today’s economy?”

    How Much am I Worth?

    Tai Lopez, a serial investor who reads a book a day, says something like, ‘Your bank account is exactly how much you are worth.’ What he means is that those who invest in their skills and work hard, and have good financial principles (like paying yourself first, spending less than you make, and investing) are more likely to have a higher bank account than people who expect things to come without working towards them or making any changes. “The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.” –Charlie Munger

    A Skills Gap

    I’m an IT generalist with some skills in web development, web analytics, project management, and business analysis. The jobs I’ve been applying for have highlighted the need for more specialization (and skills). For example, to be a web developer, knowing HTML and CSS is not enough; I’d have to become proficient in JavaScript and HTML5 as a baseline. Many “web analytics” jobs require knowing Adobe Omniture (now called Adobe Analytics) and many project management jobs require project management certifications.

    Going Forward

    Right now my full-time job is finding a job using my current skillset while still maintaining the client work I have ‘on the side’. I am widening my job search outside of my current geographic region and applying for jobs ‘edge to edge’ on my current breadth of skills. For the last two days I have wrote a personal blog post. This is to keep my brain sharp and to practice writing. This post in particular is helping me figure out what to do next. I think I’ll pick a new skill to learn and start learning it. I have the time.

    Update:

    When I got back from the Storyline conference in November, poetically I assumed that because I lost my last full-time job just after attending the MixWest conference that I would get a new one just after attending Storyline. That didn’t happen. However, I did continue getting more interviews and from those interviews I learned what employers wanted from me. On November 19th I got my first job offer for a position that would start on December 1.

    In the week before I started work I began digitally cleaning house after realizing I was spending mental energy thinking about businesses I didn’t want to run just because I had the domain names. I shut down ‘brands without businesses’: Webories, Managing Actions, Outure, Seektivity, Bold Salsa, Deliver Town, Content Market Fit, AB Insights, Marketype and Watershawl. When you delete an account on Instagram, it’s permanent. No one can get that account back – even me – so I had to be sure. I was. I set the domains to auto-expire, deleted the Twitter accounts, and updated my records.

  • How to Work a Life of Purpose

    What is my purpose in work? How can I find a career I love?

    I have been reading Hacker News for the last six months or so and a few days ago I stumbled upon a Jeff Haden piece called “Do What You Love? Screw That”. I admit, this title intrigued me. I had been a big fan of finding and doing what I loved ever since my dad turned me on to Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute? back in high school. The book came out originally in 1970 and thus entire generations (including mine) have grown up thinking that there is always something better coming along that never does and why people quit their jobs. These are all part of the career myths espoused and made popular by lifestyle designers like Tim Ferriss and his 4-Hour Workweek. I drank the Kool-Aid. Who wouldn’t want to do what they love, follow their passion, and have full control of their working life and income? This is the dream, right?

    The Passion Mindset

    Haden’s article was talking about things I had never heard spoken before: “Telling someone to follow their passion–from an entrepreneur’s point of view–is disastrous,” says Cal Newport. Who’s Cal Newport? “Passion is not something you follow,” he adds. “Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.” This struck a chord with me as it seemed to echo what Mark Cuban said back in March of 2012 in “Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort” where he says, “‘Follow Your Passion’ is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get. Had Cal read Mark Cuban’s blog or had Mark read Cal’s blog? Maybe it was an “adjacent possible” thing.

    The Adjacent Possible

    In Cal Newport’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, of which Haden’s article is about, Cal talks about the “adjacent possible”, which is:

    A term taken from the science writer Steven Johnson, who took it from Stuart Kauffman, that helps explain the origins of innovation. Johnson notes that the next big ides in any field are typically found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The key observation is that you have to get to the cutting edge of a field before its adjacent possible – and the innovations it contains – becomes visible.

    I felt this book was a good example of that for me because I was just about to write something similar. It seems this is possible because Cal and I both have similar reading habits and a desire to find out how to do what we love. This book builds on principals from Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Derek Sivers, Daniel Pink, and Reid Hoffman. I will admit that I was a believer in the “passion mindset” and although I thought I was a hard worker, I tended to avoid the mental strain Cal talks about that’s so important to deliberately practice in order to build career capital (these are two terms Cal introduces). This book really does a good job of turning the passion mindset on it’s head while giving you solid, practical advice about how to get the things you want in a job: control/autonomy. The bad news is that it takes a long time, will hurt, and requires a lot of work.

    The Law of Financial Viability

    Mark Cuban asks, “Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there? Why did you bounce from one to another? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions?” Cal asked Derek Sivers this same question in the book, to which Sivers responded with what Cal calls the law of financial viability, “Do what people are willing to pay for…unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.”

    By Doing, We Understand

    How do you know what college major to pick or what job to go after? How do you know what will make you happy? You don’t, but key lesson here is that any path can make you happy. At Mount Sinai, the Jewish people accepted the Old Testament Torah with the words, “asah shamah” – we will do, then we will understand. Exodus 24:7 says, “Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that the LORD has spoken we will do (asah), and we will be obedient (shamah)!” The Hebrew word asah means to do, accomplish, or observe. Shamah means to hear with understanding or intelligence. Asah Shamah means “by doing, we understand.” When you do good work, passion will follow. You don’t have to understand it before you begin.

    I recently had a kind of enlightenment before reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You:

    1. ME: I want to be great, but I don’t want to do anything that’s hard.or takes too long to accomplish.
    2. SUCCESFUL PEOPLE: Doing great stuff is hard and takes a while to accomplish.

    I feared that my excuses about being raised in America as a white male with two parents and a mother who did my laundry and cooked my meals may not hold water. I knew that there have been times in my life when I have worked hard and seen the rewards of it:

    1. Wanted to start a band, but had no money to buy equipment, no experience, and could not play an instrument. I used my experience as a writer and my leadership skills to recruit and then learned to play guitar by practicing every night after school.
    2. Wanted to get caught up on back-mortgage to keep from losing the house so I got up every morning at 3AM for 10 months straight to raise the money. I went through 2 flat tires, 2 visits to the brake shop, and got stuck in the snow twice, but we kept our home.

    But it kind of stopped there:

    1. Wanted to start a successful business, but instead ended up creating a job for myself that wasn’t that stable. I blame a constant search for self-discovery of ‘who I am’ that could have been avoided if the company was a business, not a person. Companies know who they are and just go.
    2. Wanted to write my own app, but after the online classes got hard or I encountered the first hardware obstacle, I immediately quit. I blamed not having a mentor. I will admit that mentors are nice and have helped me in the past learn guitar (a great uncle), business analysis (managers), and SEO (Pangburn). You can’t always buy a consultant or personal trainer though.

    Or can you? If that is what is stopping me, then why can’t I just pay someone to help me get over that initial hump of learning the initial pathways?

    Deliberate Practice

    In So Good They Can’t Ignore You Cal talks about the value of a mentor/trainer in deliberate practice, which is a term coined by Anders Ericson and defined as “difficult practice required to continue to improve at a task,” typically designed by a teacher, “for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” And this notion of deliberate practice is what takes a person above the performance plateau, which gives you the career capital to spend creating the work you love.

    Before reading the book it crippled me to even think of taking a hard, fast step towards something because I felt no pressure. My back was not against any wall. Although I had no problems ‘stepping out’ when I needed a car (get a loan!), wanted to buy a house (a mortgage!), or go to school (student loans!). Even though these are huge, life-changing, and decade-long commitments they are made in relative moments. It is only when faced with no deadline, with no urgency – that the endless wandering of thought leads to constant consternation. After reading the book I realized this eternal hand-wringing was the negative effect of the passion mindset.

    I was so afraid of choosing the wrong thing and making a mistake that I didn’t do any one thing well. I didn’t take the time to invest in my career capital to become the best I could at my job. Back to my earlier comment about “easy” vs. “hard”: it’s easy to read a book by Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, or Jim Collins, because they are good writers and they aren’t really asking you to think much. The things they point out are pretty easy to implement and so you feel good doing them, but there’s no meat there. I might as well be reading People magazine.

    The Craftsman Mindset

    There is a difference if what I am trying to be is the best writer, manager, leader, business analyst, marketer, or product developer I can be. I don’t read SEO tips because they can sometimes be hard to implement, but also because I don’t really care. I’m not passionate about SEO, people just are willing to pay me to do it (the law of financial viability). I know there is more to do with SEO than what I do, but I reached a performance plateau and felt what I was doing was ‘good enough’. To overcome this, Cal says to develop what he calls “the craftsman mindset”, which is working on developing the “value you are offering the world.” Because the things most people desire in a job (autonomy and control) are so rare, they are intrinsically valuable. And therefore in order to achieve them, you must have something equally as valuable, career capital. One of the ways to achieve career capital is through a craftsman mindset. In this way, you can see that it’s all about a change in how you think about work and how small changes (or Little Bets), can make a big difference.

    Personal Programming

    In the book A New Kind of Science by Stephan Wolfram, he explores how simple rules can lead to complex results. This is how much of the world and our universe works, but it can be applied to our daily lives as well. Call it habit formation or life hacking or whatever, but simple changes to your day to day life can have large, complex changes to your overall life and well being. Our minds control a lot of what we do, but the nice thing about them is that they can be programmed to do what we want. It’s hard to do though, so most people don’t.

    If I were to counsel someone like me I would simply say, “Erich, 95% of what you do is automatic behavior. You’ve got to start to take back that part of your life and start to live in the moment. Listen to the sounds around you. Feel what’s touching your skin. Stop and smell the roses. Now take a deep breath and let it all out. You are going to write a new story for your life. You’re going to live with a purpose. You’re going to ask God for help and you’re going to do one thing consciously today and for the next 21 days that you didn’t do before. If you forget one day, pick up again the next day. It’s going to be hard. That’s how you know it’s working.”

    On Obtaining Wisdom

    There are times when thoughts and ideas learned over years of study begin to coalesce around a central theme. This is where wisdom is born and it only comes with time. Proverbs 4:7 says, “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.” One thing I’ve learned is how fast I can learn.

    Here’s a typical example from my working life: someone has a problem they can’t solve or implement. They bring me in to review, recommend, and implement the change. I normally don’t know anything about the company, product, service, vendor, or technology being used, but I almost always figure it out. I read the manual, I contact the vendor, I ask questions. It hurts my brain. I’m straining, but it’s like deliberate practice. It makes me stronger and I gain career capital.

    Deliberate practice hurts my brain. It’s physically painful for me to learn. I’ve heard that the brain has no feeling of pain so I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but it does hurt, at least for a while. Cal says in his book that the feeling tends to last for about 10 minutes, then subsides. He gets over this pain through a mental exercise of setting a time limit on the study to no more than an hour. This seems to help, but it might not work for you.

    The conditions in which I can learn do seem to be limited, though. I tend to be better under pressure, when there’s a time limit, someone watching me, or the fear of not getting paid. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a home or business and had zero idea on how to fix their issues, but by the time I leave I’ve learned and fixed the problem. The client is happy and I am relieved. What I can’t seem to do is learn the things I want to learn. Why? There is no pressure and the reward is dubious at best. Take programming for example. I’ve tried to learn programming several times over the years. I’ve done some BASIC as a child and some Visual Basic.NET and JavaScript in college, but so far all I have managed to learn is HTML and CSS. I’ve dabbled in Actionscript for Flash animation and Objective-C for iPhone apps, but not made much past “Hello World”. Why?

    The Value of a Mentor

    Beyond lack of pressure there was no real reason, no project, and no goal. But the biggest reason is the I had no mentor. The only reason I learned HTML and CSS is because I had a mentor to teach me and a reason to use it. I would make web pages on shared computers at school and at work to make static Intranet sites. I’d use them to publish newsletters. Eventually I started making web pages for friends and family and eventually started a web design company. NOTE: This is where the similarities to Cal Newport start to get coincidental. We both have an interest in computers and writing, and like Cal we both had bands in high school and started a web design company. We both studied the same topics in this book, but he wrote it first (of which I am thankful).

    I was drawn to web design because its roots are in publishing and I had been publishing my own signs, letters, and news for years before I ever made my first web page. CMS blogging platforms like WordPress kind of take the work out of publishing and tools like Twitter and email make it easy to share your ideas. Everything is just so easy. Everything but learning and doing that is (aka work). At the bank I used to laugh hysterically when my manager would talk about a new position being created, “because somebody has to do the work.”

    What I’ve Learned

    If you’ve read this far then you might be interested in what I’ve learned so that I can share it with you. While I was busy paying the bills providing IT services, web design, and business consulting services to clients and employers, I was seeking out the relationship between work, mind, body, and spirit. I wanted to know how to find purpose in life, how to align that purpose with work, how to do what you love, how to be happy, and how to have an impact on the world. This is what I’ve learned over the last five years:

    I learned from Amway and 30-Day Challenge resources like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich that all things begin with a thought. David Allen’s book Getting Things Done said you can’t manage your time, only your actions. Stephen Covey said to begin with the end in mind. Thoughts guide your actions and intention sets direction. Measure what matters and inspect what you expect. Dave Ramsey says a goal has to be written down and have a deadline (pressure). Mark Cuban says passion comes from effort. Rick Warren says in The Purpose Driven Life to have an attitude of gratitude. Be thankful for what you have and more will be given. Good things beget good things. Those who have much, more will be given. Ask and you shall receive. The world is full of abundance, not scarcity. It’s a big Blue Ocean. Choose your story. Change your thoughts, change your outcome. What you tell yourself matters. Smiling makes you happy. Standing tall makes you feel strong. Your body can influence how you feel just like your words am influence how you think. If you can change your thoughts, you can change your story, and you can change your life. Do the work and you can earn the value needed to have the life you want.

    What’s your Story?

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  • The First Day of the Rest of My Life

    While the title of this post sounds a little dramatic, today I did turn in a resignation letter to my day-time job.  The job was well paying and secure.  I had friends and freedom there, but it wasn’t what I was passionate about and the moment I thought I could get away to do what I was passionate away, I did.  It wasn’t an easy decision though.

    A week ago I asked God how I should be spending my time to create revenue.  I decided to fast for 7 nights, skipping supper each night to pray instead.  By the end of the week, my wife and I both came to the same conclusion.  It was time to leave.  After that, our ideas of how things should go slightly differ.  She wants me to spend some time looking for another job and I want to take care of my current customers and build my own business, but I have a feeling I’ll do a little bit of both.  I’ve already informed a couple of old jobs I had that I would be willing to work for them again when needed.

    My wife is pregnant with our fourth child.  We don’t yet know what the sex is or how many there might be or whether or not we’ll have insurance.  My hope is that the path God led us down includes provisions for all of that and as long as I continue to pray and follow that path.  I have goals and plans to focus on the Indianapolis web design business, Growmotion, and Cost Publishing, my blog network, while doing contract work for an Indianapolis computer repair firm and Watershawl [a web design and SEO company I ran from 2007 to 2012].

    I don’t know what the future holds, but I have just under four weeks left at my current job to start finding out.  I have to figure out how I’m going to structure my day working at home, how much time I’m going to spend with my family playing, teaching, and eating, and how much time I’m going to spend resting and reading.  There are a lot of unknowns, but one thing is for sure, today is the first day of the rest of my life, but then again, every day is.

  • Generation X, Y – Two Letters, Two Jobs

    I’ve noticed a trend in our generation (the subset between Generation X and Y, The MTV Generation): two jobs. Almost everyone I work with and everyone in my family has two jobs. I have two jobs and even my wife has two jobs [Edit: She had two jobs before having kids, now she has one paying job.]. Why is this? Aren’t we supposed to be doing better than our parents? Therein lies the answer, I propose. Our generation expects to live like the generation before it, in the way they’ve grown used to: immediately. Everything is immediate in our generation: Microwave dinners; CDs instead of Tapes (DVDs instead of VHS – learn how to do DVD conversion) mean no waiting for the next song, just skip; and of course, the Internet. All of this leads to wanting to instantly have what we had while living with our parents (Generation Jones – Gen X). To get this we either have to work two jobs or max out our credit (usually both). If you have noticed this trend too, let me know.

    Does it feel like the generations are getting smaller, or at least the names for the generations are getting named more often? A generation is generally defined as 20-30 years as this is the time it takes one person to grow up and have a new family. After Generation X (1961-1981) the names for generations began to take off. First there was Generation Y (1976-1997). In general, Generation Y is the offspring of Generation X, but since Generation X and Generation Y overlap by five years, both my older brother and I are both Generation X and Generation Y and our parents are part of neither generation. So what generation are my parents?

    My parents are Baby Boomers (1946-1964). Generation X, also known as Echo Boomers, Cold War Generation, or Baby Busters, is the offspring of Baby Boomers so by definition my brother and I are from Generation X even though we fall into the potential range of Generation Y. Because our parents were Baby Boomers (the 12th Generation of Americans), we are by default, Generation X (the 13th Generation of Americans). But if I am definitively Generation X, and by definition my children are Generation Y (1976-1997), I had my children seven years too late. So what generation are they and what went wrong?

    They are officially Generation Z (2001-2???). Did we skip a generation? Yes and no. To answer this question, we need to defined sub-generations. These are much more specific and this chart does a great job of explaining it. I am a member of either the Baby Busters (1960-1981) who are defined by experiencing Vietnam War/Cold War or a member of the MTV Generation / Boomerang Generation (1974-1985) defined by the Rise of Mass Media/End of the Cold War. Being that those generations overlap by 4 years, I am going to go with the MTV Generation because culturally, that is what I identify most with. What then, is the sub-generation of my parents?

    Even though my parents could be considered Baby Boomers, they themselves have never identified with that generation and so I think them better fit to be in Generation Jones (1951-1971) and within the sub-generation called Beat Generation. Beats are considered the first modern sub-culture, but my parents were not “Beats”. They are simply the lost generation between Baby Boomers and Generation Xers which probably highlights why I feel lost between Generation X and Generation Y. My children’s generation will probably be more defined due to better tracking with technology such as the Internet and the World Wide Web.

  • IBM is Cool

    IBM is relentless in its pursuit of computing technology. Recently they were able to use a single atom as a transistor by detecting its on and off states with an electron microscope. This is insane, but I’m glad to have a behemoth entity like IBM which can spend the time and money delving into new technology that will take us forward in our pursuit of speed and energy reduction.

    Working at IBM

    I worked at IBM for about 5 days in 2007 where I trained to be a customer service representative at a call center. We were all given IBM Thinkpads and IBM email addresses. The thing I remember the most was how strict the rules were and how you weren’t allowed to type something first in Notepad, you had to type it first into the ticketing system. I left that job to do IT work full time.