Stories are the equipment of living.
Kenneth Burke – Historian
I started out of high school doing manual work. My first job was as an Ordinary Seaman in the Merchant Marine. I worked on rust bucket ships on and off for 5 years. This manual work was very hard and frankly not suited to my style, abilities, temperament, and life direction. Freighters now are on the way to be fully automated. In other words, no people on board.
Work Lesson Earned: These were my first big work lessons: Put food on the table. Try different things and different jobs. Find what you love to do. Develop an aptitude to do it well. Make sure that someone is willing to pay for it.
I then got a liberal arts degree in political science. Great! But, what was I going to do with a degree that pointed me to politics. Me – a libertarian. Go figure!
Work Lesson Earned: Have a vocation and an avocation. Your vocation is your portable meal ticket and your avocation is what you love to do but doesn’t necessarily pay the rent or put food on the table. And, if you can blend your avocation with your vocation, you’ve been blessed.
Since I needed a vocation I migrated into oil/gas engineering in my mid-twenties. I became a licensed mechanical engineer. Great decision! Had loads of fun as an engineer designing and building things: oil terminals, high-pressure pipelines, and process facilities. Until the oil bust. Then, I couldn’t get a job for my life. This was another huge lesson.
Work Lesson Earned: Things change so be prepared, be agile, and be resilient. I stayed in engineering but reengineered my career horizontally. I became proficient in mechanical engineering, manufacturing, quality, supply management, software, cyber security, supply management, risk management, artificial intelligence, and industrial engineering. I even started writing books on these subjects. These geeky tomes were full of multi-syllabic words that were the identifying trademarks of engineering professionals. I learned I had the ability to glue words together.
Work Lesson Earned: Messages about inherent abilities come from unexpected quarters. So, listen carefully.
During this period of my portable career, I worked for a number of ‘my way or the highway’ bosses. This management style clanged with me. So I left big business to work as an entrepreneur for which I was totally unprepared. I had been trained, nurtured, promoted, and reinforced for geek abilities. During this state, I mostly had safe corporate homes, where I could homestead.
Work Lesson Earned: Degeek. Well, what do I mean? Entrepreneurship requires new business, life, and work skills. Technical abilities whether accounting, law, or engineering get a job done, but don’t necessarily support entrepreneurship in terms of running a business, making payroll, or shaking the money tree (making a profit). I had to learn how to sell and schmooze – in others words I had to grow horizontally again and become a people-person.
How far should you go to degeek. Do what fits and make it work for you. I now build apps. I do AI. I architect business models. I disrupt verticals. However, I’m a neo – Luddite. I have an iPhone 3. I’m not on Facebook. I only use LinkedIn.
I’ve written about thirty or so books and designed/deployed lots of products. Some bombed. Some floated. And, one or two actually earned out. I’ve founded a number of businesses including 800Compete.com, WorkingIt.com, WorkingIt.TV, QualityPlusEngineering.com, Greg’s Outrageous Fortune Cookie Company, a publishing business, and loads of others. Some failed. Some did OK. Few did great.
Work Lesson Earned: The essence of Working It is captured in these Work Lessons Earned. Fail fast. Learn. Do, do, and do again. Learn from your mistakes then do things differently until you discover your own true magic. This is especially try in COVID time. This book is my story. Your work story needs to take shape and be told in COVID time. So, pay heed. Understand today’s unconventional and counter-intuitive work rules. Then, hack these rules so they work for you. Define what work success means to you. Have fun. Do good. Treat people fairly. This is my vision of Working It: Disruption Rules. What’s yours going to be?