Skip to main content

Fishing for a Dream

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone for eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”  No, no, it's the Au Sable river in Michigan.  . . . It’s time for enlightened self-interest. Place your financial future front and center in your life. I’m not a person looking for a job. I’m a company, a financial entity providing cash flow to enjoy a healthy lifestyle over the next 50 years. Wake-up!

Your eyes flicker and slowly open. The clock on the dresser says 3:45 a.m. In a semi-consciousness state you stumble out of bed. You make your way down the hall to that little room where the world has absolved you of all obligations to communicate with another human being. Privacy.

Well, now that you're up - let’s enjoy a cup of of hot coffee. One sugar and a little milk please Junior. Who am I talking to? Shaking your head, you realize, no one in their right mind is up this early, go back to bed. Right Junior? The cat is sitting next to the refrigerator watching your every move.

But you don't understand . . . I’m awake! My mind has kicked into high gear. Thoughts exploding in bright white flashes. Information overload. Words. Ideas. Stories. Suggestions. Maybe it’s panic. Or is it just the way I fish? Call it habit, call it quirky, call it idiotic - but call it. Promise I won't call or text you on the phone.

 This is my most productive time. Deep down, in some peculiar way, everyone knows their most productive time. That special time of day when your gifts, skills, temperament, and experiences collide to synthesize ideas that've been churning in your brain. Now is the time to put it to paper. Create something from nothing. My dream job. I realize you don't have to look very far to see that writers are a quirky lot . . . “When I come back you can tell me about baseball.” Read Hemingway.

 This all surfaced while studying, What Color is Your Parachute? 2014: A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers. These past few weeks I've spent countless hours reading, writing, and re-writing - a resume! I've discovered there are no rules, really. How do you entice a hiring manager to get you in the door?

 It’s like fly fishing. Find the feeding lane and place the fly delicately upstream to entice the fish. Are you kidding me? All this work just to create a resume? What’s the point? The point, I’m repeatedly told in seminars, webinars, and all the books is this. You need the right combination of flies, key words, that summarizes your skills and accomplishments.

 Ok, I get it. But get this, statistics show “The average time an employer spends reading a resume is about eight seconds.” Yes, you heard correctly - eight seconds.

Ultimately it all comes back to fishing for your dream job. Let’s assume for just 60 seconds, all the tumblers in the universe align. You can picture in your minds eye the job in which you would best shine. Why, because it taps into the best of who you are. The place where your gifts, skills, temperament, and experiences collide. Good luck!

Oh, bye the way, do you know anyone hiring for 5:00 am? If you hear of anything, please let me know. Like The Old Man and the Sea, it’s obvious I need to get back to my fishing expedition. My quest for a fulling life, not just a job. Or maybe, I just need to take a nap and dream.

 Updated January 7, 2019
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most Popular of All Time

The Gopher Problem and the High Powered Solution

Vacationing in Maine this week, just a short drive down the coast from Freeport, it is hard not to think about the outsized impact one frustrated outdoorsman had on the gear we all use today. Bad equipment can ruin a perfectly good day on the water or the trail, but it takes a special kind of vision to turn cold feet into a century-old empire. This is the story of the company we now know as L.L.Bean, but more importantly, it is a masterclass in integrity, learning from failure, and standing behind your work. In 1912, Leon Leonwood Bean faced a persistent problem: returning from expeditions in the Maine woods with cold, wet feet. Instead of complaining, he got creative. He had a local shoemaker stitch waterproof rubber soles onto the flexible leather uppers of a hunting boot. He called it the Maine Hunting Shoe and mailed a flyer promising perfect satisfaction. Then reality arrived. Ninety of his first 100 pairs failed when the rubber separated from the leather. Not an effective product...
Post a Comment
Read more

Beyond Facts-The Deep Dive

✨ In this episode, Beyond Facts: Reimagining School–in the Age of AI . . .   This week's podcast is a bit different; it's another example of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can offer tools to creatively enhance your analytical presentation of information. We took this week's blog and copied it into Gemini with the question, “If a story is to work, it must, on some level, create an illusion of escape and also achieve a goal simultaneously. Does this apply to my blog post that follows?” What's created is not just an analysis of the writing, but an AI-generated discussion produced “On the Fly” - Enjoy! Did you know that the word "school" comes from the ancient Greek word scholē , which originally meant "leisure"? Not a rigid schedule or droning lectures filled with "facts," but free time for thinking and conversation. To the Greeks, learning happened best when life slowed down—when you had room to reflect, to ask questions, and to wrestle ...
4 comments
Read more

On Becoming Real

Some things get better with wear: old shoes, old friendships, and old books. Especially old books. A new volume arrives with crisp corners and a spine that hasn’t yet learned to bend. An old one has been somewhere. It has traveled through time in the hands of people who may no longer be around to tell us what they found inside. The copy of The Velveteen Rabbit (first published in 1922) on my desk is one of those books. My friend Don Hanley gave it to me. This late-1950s Doubleday edition features William Nicholson’s original illustrations and cream paper boards softened by age. Worn corners, a split spine, and colored tabs mark passages worth revisiting. Don didn’t hand me a keepsake. He gave me homework. When we talked about the book recently, he pointed me straight to the nursery conversation between a young rabbit and an old Skin Horse. The rabbit had noticed the mechanical toys around him—the ones with internal gears, bright paint, and stick-out handles that seem terribly impressiv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stamps and Snow

In this episode, Stamps and Snow . . .   You don’t usually walk into the local Post Office expecting a time warp . . . but here we are. All we wanted were stamps for this year's Christmas cards— yes, the old-fashioned paper ones that require licking, sticking, and hoping the Postal Service is feeling ambitious this week. But holiday errands have a talent for slowing you down, almost like the universe whispering, “Relax. You’re not getting out of this line any faster anyway.” So we waited. And while we waited, we talked (Are you surprised?). Because the Post Office is one of the few places where people still look up from their phones long enough to talk . . . Maybe it's because they're holding packages. It’s the modern town square: part civic duty, part free entertainment, part sociology experiment. The discussion began with holiday specials streaming on Netflix, Paramount+, and other services during this time of year. One gentleman who has lived in Vista since 1958 told us,...
3 comments
Read more