Category — passion

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Marc Andreessen has a recent article on How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. If you are interested in maximizing the chances of getting that job interview, it is a good idea to read about what people like Marc look for in a candidate during a hiring process.

For Marc, it comes down to three main things: drive, curiosity and ethics. Drive and curiosity are closely related; they seem to be the direct consequence of passion.

Marc writes that you can see drive in a candidate’s background (read “resume”):

For the background part, I like to see what someone has done.

Not been involved in, or been part of, or watched happen, or was hanging around when it happened.

I look for something you’ve done, either in a job or (often better yet) outside of a job.

The business you started and ran in high school.

The nonprofit you started and ran in college.

If you’re a programmer: the open source project to which you’ve made major contributions.

Something.

If you can’t find anything — if a candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives, showed up for the right classes and the right tests and the right career opportunities without achieving something distinct and notable, relative to their starting point — then they probably aren’t driven.

And you’re not going to change them.

Motivating people who are fundamentally unmotivated is not easy.

Surprisingly enough, this drive part is missing from the vast majority of the new grad resumes that I review. I don’t know what is the reason for that. What I do know is that the few resumes that show evidence that the candidate has ‘done’ do stand out. And get at least a phone call.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Via a post on Zen Habits I find 10 Essential Steps To Get To The Top Of Your Field. The article recommends the obvious: learn, learn, learn, practice, practice, practice.

But the essential step to “getting to the top of your field” is none of the things that the article lists in boldface. The essential step to “getting to the top of your field” is a much more difficult one: choosing a line of work that you genuinely enjoy, something that you are truly passionate about.

If you really enjoy what you do, you will naturally tend to practice more (because you will enjoy the process of practicing), you will naturally tend to seek more learning opportunities (because you will enjoy understanding every day a bit more about the field) and you will naturally seek contact with like-minded people that you can exchange ideas with (and get feedback from).

If you feel like you have to talk yourself into practicing and improving in your field, then consider that maybe this is not the right field for you. Maybe you’ve lost interest and now you should redirect your career elsewhere. Maybe you are simply a happy person satisfied with their career.

Remember that, after all, what will make you happy at your job is not “being at the top of your field”, but truly enjoying what you do. Everything else will follow.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Everybody is reading today Turning Blogging From Hobby to Career. What seems most interesting to me is not so much the advice about updating your blog often and so on, but this bit:

So what does it take to turn blogging into a full-time living? Basically it takes a whole lot of hard work, knowledge and passion about the topic you’re blogging about, patience, and some ‘being in the right place at the right time’ luck.

If you are trying to build a career in any area, this is all you need: hard work, knowledge, passion, some patience and a bit of luck. This will get you there, eventually. And no, there are no shortcuts (see the patience bit).

Go read Seth Godin’s excellent Just one post note.

Seth is right: you have at least one post in you. And not just a blog post: I bet you also have at least one contribution to make in many other fields. So just go and implement it. Why not?

Found | Read, one of the GigaNET blogs, is running an article titled Passion spotting, which echoes one of the main points in my recent Stop “fine-tuning” your resume post: in a job candidate, evidence of passion is much more important than any hyped keywords in a resume.

Passion will tell me most of what I need to know about a person’s dedication and drive. In developing a great startup team, these two elements are the most important. Talent and abilities can be developed. The former are what foil, or leverage, the latter.

Not exactly groundbreaking news, but always worth reminding yourself.

In his post on the The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles, Chris Anderson writes:

Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we’re underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We’ve got spare cycles and they’re finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you’ve tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history.

[...]

Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles.

If Anderson is right, then we could measure how bored or not we are at our jobs (and/or at home, too) by measuring our online activity.

The thing is, Anderson is wrong.

Anderson is equating up activities for which the motivators are very different. Open source is not powered by “bored” programmers that don’t know what to do with their spare time, but by passionate contributors that very often make an effort to find time in their lives for open source. Same holds for the most devoted Flickr users, the most constant bloggers and the most popular YouTube creators.

Yes, the bored office worker that aimlessly browses YouTube or MySpace is indeed just burning spare cycles, but the pointless browsing/digging/etc is not the force that drives these communities.

Lately I’ve been reading the del.icio.us popular items RSS feed. A recurring theme in the feed are blog posts talking about ways to “improve” your resume.

The last such post, Let’s Fine Tune Your Resume, provides the ultimate example: a post pointing to other posts about “improving” your resume. Yes, a meta-resume-tuning post! The job-seeker’s dream! No wonder people complain they can’t get their “dream job”: they are spending all their time reading blogs packed with resume-tweaking wisdom!

If I wanted to hire somebody for a job (and this holds for any job), I would look for the following main qualities:

• Cares about the field/job/task. Is passionate about it.
• Has at least the minimum skill level needed for the job, and can prove it. And, by the way, being a Sun certified programmer or having an university degree only proves that you spent a fair amount of time (and money!) to get this piece of paper; it does not in any way prove that you learned anything in the process, let alone that you can actually Do Stuff.
• Is “culturally compatible” with the environment they would be working work in. “Culturally compatible”, in this context, means that the candidate shares the work style and values of the company/team.

Do you think you can convince me of your deep passion for this job by adding some clever keywords to your resume? Or that you’ll trick me into thinking you have outstanding skills by improving the look & feel of said resume? Maybe you are really convinced making your resume “accomplishments-driven, not responsibilities-driven” will really help me see what kind of work culture you are comfortable with?

Here is what I think: not only all this “fine tuning” won’t help, but it might actually irritate your potential employer. There is nothing I hate more in a resume than a whiff of not-quite-honest.

When I review a resume, I want to see indications of the qualities listed above. For example:

• Indication of passion: A candidate for an engineering position has through the years held individual contributor positions in different companies; maybe they rejected possible promotions to management roles, because they like being hands on. In their spare time, the candidate enjoys inventing and building things. Maybe they blog about their passion, too (and have consistently done so for a while).
• Indication of sufficient skill: The candidate has experience in the field; maybe some formal education in it, and can give concrete examples of jobs/tasks in which said skills were successfully applied. They’ve done work for fun/pro-bono/etc to either improve their skills or to prove them. (“For fun” or voluntary work can also be an indication of passion; see previous point.)
• Indication of value/work-style compatibility (this is probably the hardest one to identify in a resume): The candidate has consistently worked in environments with similar work culture. The resume uses a style that seems in line with the potential employer’s style. The resume does not contain keywords or phrases that indicate that the candidate belongs in a very different work environment. For example, the sentence “I am a firm believer in empowering your company by leveraging my Web 2.0 skills in order to, moving forward, maximize the ROI you bring to your customers” would automatically disqualify you for an engineering position (in my eyes, not necessarily in those of my employer, etc).

And no, I am not saying that you shouldn’t try to have a well-presented resume, or that you shouldn’t use the darned spell-checker before you mail it. And I am in no way saying it is better if you don’t bother converting the thing to PDF and just send them that nasty MS Word file, either. These are just the basic things that will prevent the reader from clawing their eyes out when they see it, no more, no less.

If you want your resume to really stand out, stop wasting time reading “fine tuning” blog posts, and get on with finding and cultivating your passion(s), improving your skills and learning what kind of worker you really are. It will show through in your resume. Really.

The Online Photographer: Feet Are Optional:

What these straight-A kids wanted was for me to set the terms of their success for them. They wanted me to set up the hoop so they could jump through it for me. They wanted to be told how they could be certain of success. It was what they encountered everywhere else. But what I wanted was for them to set up their own hoop, or, better yet, look askance at the hoop and go, “Nah, not today,” and wander off somewhere and see what they could find. The fact is, you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed as an artist. That’s why the kids who were used to failing weren’t fazed by my classes: they weren’t threatened by the idea of falling flat on their faces 90% of the time. The good students definitely were.

I would go further: you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed. Not just as an artist.