Big Dreams vs Business 101

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Well, it just happened. I had a conversation with my daughter about work, a conversation I know my father had with me. And I’m sure I’m just as frustrated as he was. In the case of my father and me, I was making an argument for dropping math in grade 13 (yes kids, we had grade 13 in the old days). I was trying to convince my dad that as a big time journalist, I wasn’t going to need math. There was no math beat at the Globe and Mail, and being up on my calculus wasn’t going to help me get, or keep a job. I’d just be so much better off if I could take Italian. Or better yet, a spare. Somehow, I won the argument and calculus got dropped. Sweet victory.

Haley, my delightful, beautiful, and smart teen-aged daughter is about to enter high school. I was there when she popped out, and I can’t believe that fourteen years have passed by and we’re already talking about grade nine. She got her class option selection form last week, so it should have been a wonderful week spent planning her future, right?  Wrong. It’s been yelling, fighting, door slamming, and the occasional crying fit. And that’s just me. She’s been quiet and huffy, but if truth be told, it’s not that much different than normal. She is a teenager after all.

Haley wants to be a marine biologist. That career idea came to her on a visit to Sea World a bunch of years ago, and it was reinforced on a visit to Peggy’s Cove the next year. Then we went dolphin seeking in South Carolina, and most recently, whale watching in California. The kid wants to work with marine life and I’m a proud dad. Haley’s as sure at age 13 that she’s going to be a marine biologist when she grows up as I was at 16 that I was one day going to be the CBC Bureau Chief in Moscow.

In high school, all I could see in my future was me reporting, Live, From Red Square.  We know how that panned out.

So I gave up on math. And science. I worked my ass off, and got into Journalism school. I traded calculus for a spare period, and when I hit university, I even took Russian to help me get that Moscow gig. As it turns out, I despised J-School. I hated it the minute I walked in, and I hated every day of it thereafter. The idea of four years of journalism school made me want to jam knitting needles into my eyes. Russian was a bust, my professor, Gennady Orzornoy, promised me a C if I promised to never take Russian again, and I took him up on that deal with a heartfelt ‘Dah!’  Dasvidaniya Russian and J-School, Bonjour French and Political Science!

I’m not a journalist, and I have haven’t regretted it for one single moment. Had J-school worked out, I’m convinced I wouldn’t have the life I have today. Everything would be different. It might be good, but it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t trade what I have. Besides, newspapers are dying, and as it turns out, I only have a face for radio, and a voice for silent movies.

So imagine, over breakfast, trying to convince a 13 year-old future marine biologist that perhaps a credit or two in business might be a good thing. Without trying to kill her dream, I’m attempting to help her to realize that the world of work doesn’t always turn out the way you think it’s going to when you’re thirteen. This beautiful creature, who should be an amazing realist blend of a glass-half-empty mother and a glass-half-full father is absolutely convinced that there is no place for a business course in her sea-loving future. She’s viewing her future through her Shamu-goggles, where she’s wearing a wet-suit and riding a dolphin.

How many of us are doing today what we thought we’d be doing when we were going into high school?  I doubt that not taking a grade nine credit in business will stand in Haley’s way of a career on Bay Street or Wall Street if that’s what she ultimately decides she wants to do, but I also know it won’t hurt her either. I would love to take a poll to see how people are where they thought they would be…Are they doing the jobs that they thought they’d be doing, and the ones they thought they were preparing for.

I’m not doing anything close to what I thought I’d be doing, and for the record, it doesn’t make me sad one bit. In fact, I’m thrilled. But if I would have been a little more open to the possibility that the journalism gig wasn’t going to pan out, I might have stuck with calculus. And maybe physics. I hear physics conferences are a riot.

 

Click here to see the funniest physics conference ever.

Thank You Linkedin, For Making Me Feel Special.

I recently received an email from Linkedin congratulating me on having one of the top 1% of viewed profiles in 2012 across the entire Linkedin network. Pretty impressive right?  I sure felt special. I also wondered how that was even possible, that I could be in the top 1%. I kind of had a warm feeling come over me, and I started to walk a little taller. Then I read that Linkedin had just broken the 200 million-member milestone and my warm and fuzzy feeling went away. Fast.

Who wouldn't feel special?

My inner math-whiz took over for a minute. If I’m in the top 1% of 200 million, that makes me one of two million other people who got the same email. For about 5 minutes, two million people were just a little prouder. It’s not a very exclusive club. Mensa, for example has 110,000 members across the world. That’s a much more exclusive club. There’s even a club called the Ejection Tie Club. It’s made up of military pilots who have hit the ejection switch in their aircraft and lived to tell about it. 5,607 members world-wide. That’s way more exclusive than Mensa, but then, the initiation is kind of a bitch. They also get matching ties.

Live through this, join the club, get a nifty tie.

 So they truly have some marketing genius at Linkedin (perhaps a member of Mensa) who came up with this idea of acknowledging the membership with these “you’re special” emails. I know they went out the top 1%, top 5%, and top 10% of the membership. If you’re in the top 10%, that puts you into a super-exclusive club of 20 million people. That’s almost two thirds the size of Canada, and roughly the size of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Ireland combined. Congratulations, we’re all special!  It’s a brilliant idea. They created tremendous buzz around the Linkedin community for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve written about it before, but Linkedin has really become a major part of my working day. In my view, it’s made the rolodex completely obsolete. This once private asset of sales and business people who traded on the value of the names in their rolodexes, has now become a public, online measure of their networking prowess and success. For some people, it’s even become a competition to see how fast they can amass contacts. I have a rule that I have to know the person before I’ll reach out to connect. I may have broken that rule once or twenty times on my own quest to break the 500 contacts mark.

Before blackberries and Linkedin, salespeople had Rolodexes, and they were your currency.

I know that today, I won’t even interview someone for a sales or relationship job that doesn’t have an active Linkedin presence. In the old days, you had to hire a salesperson to find out how connected they were…take a big chance that they really knew who they said knew. Today, it takes about three clicks to see if they’re serious, and one more click tells you how connected you are with them and their network. It makes the pre-work so much easier. I don’t interview anybody that I haven’t checked out on Linkedin. I truly don’t care what’s happening on somebody’s Facebook page (even though I appreciate a good picture of a deer mother nursing a bear cub as much as the next guy), but I absolutely care what’s going on with Linkedin.

I know there are lots of people who don’t use Linkedin like me. Some don’t even use it at all. I get that many people have careers for whom networking isn’t nearly as important in their day to day work as it is for other people, so I get their hesitance in jumping onboard the Linkedin train. But for sales and relationship people, I’m boggled by it.

Linkedin tells me what they care about at work, and how they communicate. It gives me a sense of how they work in a changing social media climate. It tells me how they manage their relationships, and it gives me a good sense of how we’re going to gel. All this before we’ve had the first live conversation. I’m sure it’s not really the right way to do it, but a candidate without Linkedin doesn’t make it to my shortlist. I imagine I’ve probably let some good people slide by, but if we’re going to hit it off, it’s going to start with Linkedin. It’s like e-Harmony for business.

It's like online dating...come on baby, woo me with your contacts.