"When you're good, work finds you." --Bruno Lauer
I have been at my current position at work for over a year now. I have learned tremendous amounts about my job itself in that time, and, for the first job in my life, I have learned a lot about myself. The hardest part of my job search prior to this position was knowing the truth of the above words. I had always thought I was a good worker, but now getting into this position where they teach you how to maximize your skills, through encouragement and through setting you up for success, I have found my failures.
I love telling the story that I went into law to get out of finance, but then I got hired in the legal department of a finance company, so I'm still technically in finance. In reality, I did not want to leave the finance world; I wanted to leave my former-employer. I did not need to change careers; I needed to change jobs. I did not know the flaws of where I was before; I know now.
Having worked for a group of supervisors that impress success upon me is a world of difference from where I was in my last position. Although I identified the fact that we were "set up for failure" in my first months of taking the floor at my last department, I did not actualize the scope to which it occurred until I got a better basis for comparison.
Everything in my last job was centered around failure. They called it "opportunities." For every achievement reached, it had to be balanced in our assessments with another opportunity area. Everyone subscribed to this theory, and they fed it into normalcy, defining the culture of the company.
Success went up the ladder; failures went down the ladder. For almost ten years, I was in an entry-level position (just above, actually, but still I was the tenured associate for brand new employees, doing the same job, so for all intents and purposes, mine was an entry-level position). During that time, my focus shifted away from failure to other areas where I could succeed.
Enter the unbelievable world of professional wrestling and its independent circuits. Unbeknownst to me until July 2004, there was a local wrestling promotion in Phoenix. As soon as I found out, I saddled into the seat and attended every single event of their episodic series for the next five years. During that time, my fascination accelerated into obsession, and I partly transcended into the company itself.
I grew up loving pro wrestling, literally. As I matured, my love for the business did as well. Even when I was well outside the key demographics of its target market, I enjoyed its programming on levels where it fit into my life.
I never lived vicariously through the wrestlers themselves. I never wanted to step inside the ring. But I loved the storytelling, the performance art of pro wrestling. If anything, I wanted to write wrestling matches. Once I started contributing to the local wrestling promotion, I had an idea to freelance for my favorite wrestling publication, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, and I had considered sending them articles based on the local wrestlers as samples of my writing skills.
For whatever reasons, I did not take that step, but I did get my articles published on the website of the local wrestling promotion's website. Then I modified a ranking system I had developed for WrestleMania to fit that promotion. For the next many years, that system was used to rank the local wrestlers. It was virtually frivolous information, but it was unique to the business. Pro Wrestling Illustrated had its own ranking system (which still remains a mystery to me) but I figured our local promotion would look more legitimate if it had one, so I gave it one.
From there, I was given the opportunity to help write some of the angles in the local promotion, thereby achieving my wish to write the wrestling storylines. It was not even a matter of asking for it and the wish being granted. True to the Steve Martin's "be so good they cannot ignore you" quote, my ideas were often used simply because they were the best option. Not always. Once I earned more trust, I made my share of missteps, but the fact was that I did not ask to be part of the show. They asked me. Even those aforementioned rankings started appearing in the real Pro Wrestling Illustrated, thus accomplishing my goal to have my work published in PWI. The amazing part was that I never tried to do it. It just happened because I was doing a good job.
While success came naturally to me there, my professional failures came naturally to me at work. Eventually I put two-and-two together, quit my job, and moved on with my life. At the time, I thought I was good enough that work would find me. Unfortunately, it didn't. But I set out to earn another job.
The most telling conversation of my life occurred during my second of three job searches. My girlfriend at the time consoled me, "aren't you expecting too much from yourself? You are starting a new career with no experience, so it should take more time to get hired." I replied, "that is true, but I would sooner try harder than lower my own expectations."
That was a major breaking point at my last job. They reset the statistics upon which our work was gauged, and one of the measures was deeply flawed, so they lowered the levels to compensate for it. That solution never set well with me, especially for a company that paid endless lip service to its own integrity.
Nowadays, I find myself reporting to people I truly look up to. People who are fully capable of doing my job, except they're so good that their work is needed on more important issues, so they have me doing work that they could otherwise do themselves. Of course, because they actually know how to perform my job, they are able to instruct me on how to successfully accomplish that job. (Compare that to my last department where none of our supervisors knew how to do our jobs, and our learning was a matter of "trial and error," again, centered around failure.)
