Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (19 page)

Most people blunder their way into their careers—they see an opportunity open up, maybe they’ve got nothing better going on, maybe they need some money, or maybe they figure this job is good enough for now.

Rather than let yourself accept that fate, you should create a plan to get the perfect job. However—and I want to be very clear on this—you don’t have to land your dream job in order to use the other secrets in this book.

Quite the contrary. If you
do
land a dream job, some of the secrets (like those about coping with difficult bosses and coworkers) are likely to be, if not totally unnecessary, at least less important than to somebody struggling with a less-than-ideal job.

There are six steps to finding a dream job:

At various parties, conferences, and get-togethers, I’ve asked hundreds of people, “If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be?” Almost every time the answer is something like: “Uhhh… I don’t know…”

It should seem pretty obvious that if you don’t have a clear idea
of what constitutes your dream job, the likelihood of getting it is exactly nil, because even if by some insane chance you get offered that dream job, you won’t recognize it.

The first step toward getting a dream job is knowing what that job would be. Here’s a hint: in most cases your dream job will be connected with whatever truly interests you and makes you happy.

Just about every “how to succeed” book suggests that you find a role model. Unfortunately, many people use role models in a way that guarantees failure: they imitate the
strategies
that the role models used to get to where they are.

The problem with this approach is that what worked twenty years ago won’t work today.

For example, if you wanted to be a film director, you might try to break into the film business the way Steven Spielberg did it: by hanging around a film studio as an unpaid intern.

There’s only one problem with this… no, two. First, everybody else is trying to do the same thing, because they’ve all heard the same story about Spielberg. Second, and more important, today’s film studios are run differently from those of the 1970s. More security and less access.

What’s valuable about role models is not the strategies they pursued, but the thought processes that led them to those strategies. It’s those ways of thinking, channeled through today’s realities, that will create the approach you’ll need to land your dream job.

Spielberg, for example, had an almost megalomaniacal belief in his ability to make good films, and a complete imperviousness to the opinions of others about his talent. (He was rejected from film school twice.)

Anyone whose dream job is that of film director would definitely need to think that way, but the strategy necessary to create that career today would more likely involve posting Internet fan films than a studio internship.

You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. If you’re going to pursue your dream job—and absolutely succeed at achieving it—you
may
need to sacrifice other things, such as having a family, or eating regularly.

I emphasize the word
may
because that sacrifice is not always required. Plenty of people have their dream jobs and still manage to spend time with their families, pursue hobbies, and so forth. (I’m one of them.)

While you might not be called on to make huge sacrifices to achieve your dream job, you must be
willing
to do so.

Hopefully you’ll be able to get to where you want to be without having to give up the other things you value. However, if you’re not willing to give them up, you’ll never reach your goal, because you won’t take the necessary risks.

No matter what your dream job might be, you’re not going to get it unless you learn how to sell. I’m not saying you need to be a professional salesperson. However, if you can’t sell, you can’t sell yourself or your ideas.

For example, suppose your dream job is being a high-tech CEO. You may have the most innovative idea since automatic bread-slicing, but if you can’t sell that idea, you won’t attract investors, customers, or talented employees.

Knowing how to sell yourself gives you the edge. Consider this: a mediocre performer who knows how to sell
always
beats an exceptional performer who doesn’t. And an exceptional performer who also knows how to sell is virtually unbeatable.

Finding a great job always involves selling yourself and your skills. And being successful at any career means constantly selling the value
of the services you’re providing. For example, Picasso was a brilliant artist, but he was equally brilliant at self-promotion.

Every “success formula” starts with (1) knowing where you are today, (2) knowing where you want to be, and (3) building a plan to get from here to there. Now you need a plan. Create one.

That plan may involve meeting new people, doing new things, learning new things… the specifics of the plan are going to vary according to who you are, where you are, and where you want to get.

Even if you’ve been serious about Step 2 of this method and trained yourself to think like your role models, your plan won’t be perfect, and chances are, it’s not going to work… at least not all of it.

However, you can’t let that keep you from taking action. In fact, you want to take as much action as possible so you learn as quickly as possible which parts of your plan are going to work and which need adjustment.

The sad truth is that even when people have plans, they don’t take enough action. Tentative steps simply aren’t good. Where the normal person would do a couple of actions to make the plan real, you should do twenty. Or thirty.

For example, I recently met two men whose dream job was to write science fiction for a living. Both were equally talented, but one sent his manuscript to a single small publisher and waited for six months. The other sent his manuscript to a dozen small presses and a dozen agents.

Guess which of these two writers is now a published author.

Taking massive action makes it impossible to fool yourself into thinking that the reason you didn’t get your dream job is that you didn’t try hard enough. Massive action forces you to reevaluate your plan if you don’t get where you want to be.

In other words, your results allow you to go back and build another, more refined, plan based on your hard-won experience. Now that you’re armed with valuable knowledge of what didn’t work, your new plan will be far more likely to succeed.

If you truly believe, in your gut, that your dream job is right for you, and truly believe that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get that job, you’ll find a way to get it. It’s truly that simple.

You may also find that your dream evolves and changes as you learn. You might even land your dream job and then decide that it’s not really what you expected or really want to do.

So even though you need to be focused, it never hurts to explore more than one area of interest, if only to diversify your skills.

For example, at one time my dream job was that of playing rock and roll professionally. I have absolutely no interest in that career path now, but my pursuit of that goal in my young adulthood taught me valuable lessons about stage presence, how to sell services, and how to build a team that can play well together. Each of those skills has stood me in good stead at some point in my career.