Chapter 21
The Mackay Daily
Planner
for the Unemployed
So many people looking for jobs think something
mystical will occur. The gods will either smile down upon them or
not, and there really isn’t much we can do but wait for the phone
to ring.
They act like Melvin, who went to church every
day for years and would kneel down and pray, “Please, God, let me
win the lottery.” Same prayer, every day. He never asked for
anything else. Suddenly, one day, as he knelt praying, there was a
clap of thunder, a bolt of lightning, and Melvin leaped up and
yelled, “God, God, is that you?” A voice came back, “Yes, Melvin.
It’s me.”
“Oh, thank you, God,” says Melvin, “I knew you
would hear my prayers. I knew you were going to let me win the
Powerball Lottery.”
“Melvin, Melvin, do me a favor . . . meet me
halfway. Buy a ticket.”
Moral: You have to make things happen. You can’t
just wait around all day and pray you’re going to get a job.
A friend of mine, a New England recruiter, likes
to ask this question, “Well, what did you do today?” She tells me she
eliminates more prospects on the basis of their answer to this
question than any other in her arsenal.
Think of the ways you can answer.
For example, there’s: “After I dragged myself out
of the sack, I flipped on TiVo for the latest dose of 30 Rock and CSI: Miami. I
think Tina Fey has the best deadpan look in videoland, and I intend
to use it when the employment manager says something thick at my
next interview. Hey, and who can beat David Caruso for cool wearing
a pair of shades? Sunglasses of justice! Wait till I use that
super-dude pose when I stride into an office reception area.
“Then, I shuffled into the kitchen and wolfed
down a couple of MoonPies. No calls on the answering machine. Boy,
that’s a bummer. I wonder if I have it turned on right. So I caught
up on my research. The bush telegraph on the Gigwise site dished up
one outrageous take on Amy Winehouse. Really a hoot.
“I like to keep active, so I grouted some tile in
the bathroom. After that I debated whether I should get my hair cut
today or wait until the unemployment check comes on Thursday.
Tinkered with my résumé. A couple of more rewrites and it should be
a winner. I think I saved the last draft right, or did I? My friend
Waldo had a couple of swell licks in his curriculum vitae, so I
pasted the same paragraphs into mine . . . just for style, of
course.
“My iPhone is so cool,
and you’re going to freak out when you see the picture I took with
it of my big toe painted up to look like Dumbledore. I just posted
it on YouTube. Then I called around for an hour or so until I was
able to bum a ride over to your place. Well, here I am.”
Or, you could answer Ms. Nantucket this
way:
“Pretty routine day, I guess. Between seven and
nine o’clock I jogged, showered, read the Financial Times, and tracked the key business links
on the Drudge Report aggregation, scrolled
through Monster.com for the
embedded software engineering openings, and added some possibles to
my list of prospects for my e-mail roster today. Between nine and
eleven, I worked on my database and met my quota of making five
renewed contacts a day. Between calls, I knocked off a couple of
follow-up and thank-you e-mails on my notebook.
“By then, it was getting near lunchtime, so I
threw some yogurt into a brown bag, met Angie and Paul for a stroll
through the park. We’re all on the job market. The three of us
role-play interview questions for forty-five minutes two days a
week. Then it was back to the laptop for IT-programming trade
journals and a great lecture on TED by the oceanographer Sylvia
Earle. Next I took a read on Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the
New Yorker. I also reviewed the prospect
company’s latest earnings release—stellar!—and was impressed as
well with their new computer literacy initiative in Central
America. And, Ms. Interviewer, here I am.”
We all know which answer you’d never give and the
one you’d like to. The question is, “Which way
do you really spend your time?” And which lifestyle has the
best chance of getting you back to work?
Mackay’s Moral: “How we
spend our days is, of course, how
we spend our lives.”—Annie Dillard
we spend our lives.”—Annie Dillard
Quickie—Million Dollar
Baby!
Hilary Swank has won two Oscars—the first for
Boys Don’t Cry and the second for Million Dollar Baby. She was also canned before her
success blossomed. Following her appearance in sixteen episodes of
Beverly Hills, 90210, she was written out
of the series. Her apparent reaction to the setback was: “If I’m
not good enough for 90210, I’m not good
enough for anything.”
Most young actors would have just retreated into
depression and self-pity. Swank didn’t despair. Instead, she
reportedly trimmed her body fat down to 7 percent. Her perseverance
created the trademark svelte Swank shape. The training not only
landed her the role in Boys Don’t Cry, I’m
sure it also helped convince Clint Eastwood that she had the right
physical tone and tenacity to star as Maggie Fitzgerald in
Million Dollar Baby. For this film, she had
the discipline to train in a gym almost five hours a day and to
bolster her clout with nearly twenty pounds of muscle!
Beverly Hills, 90210 was
not the first time she tasted a setback. Swank grew up
poor—spending part of her childhood in a trailer park. She and her
mother even lived for a time in her mother’s car.
She also savors the power and self-discipline of
competitive sports. Growing up, Swank was a gymnast and a Junior
Olympic swimmer.
It’s hardly a surprise that Hilary Swank was chosen
for the title role in the recent film Amelia about the legendary Amelia Earhart. This
breakthrough aviator had a kindred cockiness about her and once
said, “Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be
done.”
Let Swank’s 90210
experience be an inspiration to you—I don’t care if you’re eighteen
or eighty. Use an intelligent, disciplined, and medically sound
plan to get yourself back into shape after a setback, especially in
your career. The rewards could put your name in lights.