The Career Clinic

Maureen Anderson

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814410523
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

The secret to life is doing the work we are meant to do. As the longtime host of a radio show devoted to helping people find work they love, Maureen Anderson has often invited listeners in to hear firsthand accounts of people who not only relish their work, but live without regret. The Career Clinic is filled with intimate, revealing, and inspiring stories of career transitions that led to fulfillment, meaning, and peace...and offers suggestions for how others can make them too. Readers will find plenty of practical guidance on how to make the leap from the 9-to-5 doldrums to a love affair with their career. From a fashion designer who became a psychotherapist, to a husband and wife who followed their dream to open a bookstore, to a secretary who became the famous editor of a legendary magazine, the book offers warmhearted advice and encouragement. Readers will learn how to find their place in the world, have fun, and say, "Yes!" to what truly makes them happy.

SEVEN

Have Fun!

People keep asking me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Man, the pressure to find a good career starts early.

So when I’m surfing the Internet, I go to The Career Clinic website.

I get daily career advice . . . and links to other career-related sites, too.

Then I go to Barney Online, ’cause I’m not ready to grow up that fast.

—Katie Anderson, The Career Clinic

There’s only one problem with that little jingle, recorded by my daughter when she was five. It wasn’t true. “That’s what you do in advertising,” I teased her. “You lie.” That remark made her very unhappy. She’s a stickler for the truth. So I changed the subject. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. She fumbled around. At first it was a glassblower. Then a singer. No! A professional tennis player. She paused. “I know!” she said. “A clothing designer.” More thought. Another pause. And then, “I’m not ready to decide. When it’s time to pick a job, I’ll just do whatever sounds like the most fun.”

My stickler for the truth, I thought, stumbled on the only truth that’s been a reliable compass for me. Have fun. That’s it.

I love my work, but I really love being a mom. I thought I was setting a great example for Katie. Marshall Goldsmith knew I could do better.

Marshall is the executive coach you met in the last chapter. Katie came with me to a conference where we shared a table with Marshall at lunch. He had a question for me about guilt. “I am 100 percent motivated by guilt,” I blurted out, too surprised by the question to answer it more . . . slowly.

“Is that the example you want to give Katie?” he asked. “Do you want her to feel guilty when she’s doing nothing wrong? Do you want her to knock herself out, then beat herself up for not doing more?” Of course not. “Well, then . . .” The room got very quiet as I reached for a Kleenex. “Don’t worry,” Marshall said. “Everyone cries when I do this.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said, not letting up. “Pretend you’re ninety-five years old. What advice would that woman have for you?” I thought about it. “Give yourself credit for what you’re pulling off,” I finally said. “So do that,” he suggested. “Now. And often.”

Katie and I marked this lesson when we got home. “What do you think it means?” I asked her. “It means,” she said with confidence, “when I want to play on the computer, you can go do your own thing and not worry about me. It was my idea.” We grinned at each other.

Katie was old enough to appreciate what a thrill it was for me to get a literary agent. I called her at school the day it happened. “Mommy!” she practically screamed later, when she dropped her backpack on the playground and raced toward me for a hug. Maybe she knew what a gift I’d given her, by going after my own dreams. She won’t feel guilty for growing up and leaving a giant hole in my life. She’ll leave a giant hole all right, but she knows I’ll go back to more of what I loved doing before “mom” got added to my resume.

In the meantime, I do my best to set a good example. I tell her the truth, and we have fun.

Rex Walker

COWBOY

My life is straight out of City Slickers.

I could have done anything I wanted. I graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in petroleum geology and worked for Mobil Oil, but all I ever wanted to be was a cowboy. Instead of fighting that, I gave in. I gave in early, and I have never looked back.

I first got the itch at eleven, working on a dude ranch. I became friends with the owner and spent summers in Colorado working for him. I’ve been working with horses ever since.

Now I own Sombrero Ranches, which is based in Boulder. Our principal business is made up of tourists who come to Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona. We have the concession in the Rocky Mountain National Park, where we furnish horses on guided tours from two hours to all day. I also own businesses in Mexico, where I rent homes to American tourists. Not many people want to ride horses in the snow in Colorado, so I spend my winters in Mexico. On the ranch, we usually start our days about seven o’clock with a breakfast ride. We take people out and ride them way back up in the hills for an hour and fifteen minutes. Once we get up there, we feed them sausage and eggs and pancakes, all they can eat—then bring them back. That’s how I start each morning. On the ride I can get my thoughts together for the rest of the day, which is inevitably very hectic but also very enjoyable. People continue to come and ride throughout the day, and occasionally I’ll go on some of those as well, but usually there are a lot of other things that come up that need my attention.

We’re the largest horse company in the world. We have 1,800 head and employ 150 people on different ranches around the country. My whole family is involved, my kids, their spouses, everybody. It takes every one of us a lot of time to make it work right because we really want it to be a good experience when someone comes and rents a horse.

I love to see the transformation in people when they learn there’s more entertainment out there than the latest Nintendo game. It’s funny. Some people ride for an hour and think they’re going to die because they’re so stiff and sore afterward. Most people in this country have never ridden a horse. They don’t realize how many muscles you use. They say the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.

It’s certainly been good for me. Fifty years into it, I can’t imagine another life.

Regrets? You have to be kidding.

Dave Barry

TAKING MY HUMOR SERIOUSLY

I didn’t really think about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was not a career-oriented kid. I was the class clown, sure, but there were a lot of class clowns. And I always used humor in my relationships with my classmates and my family. I just didn’t set out to be a humor writer. I liked to write, and if you had asked me to describe the ideal job, it probably would have been this one. But I didn’t think a job like this actually existed and so I really didn’t orient myself that way.

I started out working for newspapers. After that I taught effective-writing seminars. I kept writing columns, though, and the columns caught on. Enough papers ran them that eventually the Miami Herald offered me a job, and that’s how it all happened.

When I got to the Herald, I thought, oh, this is cool, I can actually do this for a living. I know it’s what I’m happiest doing, and I can’t imagine having a job where I had to do something actually useful or productive—like go to a real office and build things, or anything like that.

I don’t have any trouble finding material. That’s what writing is. It’s not really writing as much as thinking about what it is you’re trying to say. But I’m used to that. It’s what I’ve done for so long now. Although I periodically announce that I can’t do it anymore because I suck at it.

Does it feel like I’m always at work, in that everything is fodder? No. I don’t think that way. I really don’t. I probably would if I had to write more often. But if anything, I have too many things to write about, so it’s not like I’m going around desperately thinking, gee, I have to have a funny experience now. To the extent that happens, it’s likely to be that something bad happens. Like my car breaks down or my computer doesn’t work. And at the time, the last thing I’m thinking is, this is funny. I’m thinking, Jesus, my computer broke. It’s only later, when I’ve dealt with it, that I’ll think, oh, maybe I can write about that. But I almost never say to myself, in my day-to-day life, “Oh, fodder.”

I would just as soon not, in fact. I don’t think you would be really living if you were going around viewing it as fodder. I have read columnists who seem to make everything that happens to them like a sitcom, and I don’t believe them. I know they’re going to a lot of effort to make life funnier than it actually is. It rings kind of dishonestly to me when I see somebody writing, every week, about his or her kids or his or her life. I think, no, your life really isn’t that funny. Come on. You’re lying.

And just in case you’re thinking about Dave’s World, that TV show supposedly based on my life, they ran out of plots that came from my columns pretty quickly. I watched it maybe half the time, but it was a little bit creepy for me to have a guy with my name having these wacky experiences I never had.

I love what I do. The work is the same. It’s always hard and it’s always scary and it’s intimidating. But it’s also always thrilling when you finish. It’s a very satisfying thing to create something and send it out.

I love writing, but I have no illusions about the significance of my work. This is not false modesty. It’s really easy to overemphasize the importance of what I do. The easiest way for me to remind myself is to think of my hero, Robert Benchley. He was a great humor essayist in the first half of the twentieth century, and I love his work. He isn’t alive anymore, but he was terrific in his time. But if you say his name to an audience today, the sixty-year-olds and up will nod their heads, and nobody else will have a clue who he is. I make people laugh, and that’s a good thing to do. It’s much the same as what the comics do, what Dilbert does. But as far as long-term significance, I don’t think there is much.

I am proud, though, that I have been reliable and consistent for a long time—which is to say, I took my humor seriously. I produced it regularly and kept it fairly consistent so that if you liked it, you’d keep liking it. Although fans come and go. But generally, I have been a fairly consistent humor writer for a bunch of years. It’s more like pride in craft than anything. And again, this will sound like false modesty but it’s real modesty: I don’t think of myself as being, in any way, on a par with really good writers, literary writers. I think what I do is difficult, and a lot of people who are great writers couldn’t do it. But I don’t confuse that with great literary skill or long-term social significance or anything like that. I don’t even aspire to that, to be honest.

I think other writers who try to write humor know that what I do is difficult. And there are a lot of people who try and fail. Because it looks like it would be a great thing to be doing. Which it is. It’s just that it’s not as easy as it looks. And that’s what I’m proud of. That I do something that’s not easy, and I’ve done it for a long time. More than anything else, that’s what I’m proud of.

As I get older, I’m more and more aware that time is finite. And I’ve become more sensitive, in recent years, to not giving all of my time to what I used to think of as being incredibly important. Like my career. It’s not as important as my daughter or my son, my wife, my family. It’s not as important as my friends. And now I find myself saying no to things that some people—or even I, twenty-five years ago—would have considered stark raving insane to say no to. It’s just realizing that success is a means to an end, but it is not an end. The end is some kind of happiness and contentment.

Maybe when you’re young, success by itself is enough. Oh wow, I’m making it. But I think if you still feel that way when you’re my age, you’re an idiot. You haven’t learned anything. If you still think it’s more important to be famous or rich or wildly popular with the public than it is to have good friends, or to be able to enjoy yourself just being alone, then you’re not catching on. You’re going to die unhappy. That’s my guess.

There are so many things I love about my life. I have a wonderful family. I’m in a rock band of authors who are my friends. And the fact that I can do those things, that I have time for my family and time for my friends, I attribute to the fact that I’ve done okay at the profession I picked.

If you’re looking for career advice from me, here’s the cliché I’d go with: If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll be a lot happier. That goes without saying, I guess. But you’re also more likely to succeed at it. Because you’ll take it more seriously, you’ll work harder at it, and you’ll stick with it longer. I find that to be true. Although again, I didn’t consciously live that way. I was doing other things that I didn’t like as much, because I assumed that’s what I had to do to stay alive. And there probably is some truth to that, because I wouldn’t have been able to start right out as a humor writer. But as long as I kept writing humor when I could and kept that as part of my life, I kept the option open. It made all the difference. In the end that became my life.

My advice is, never forget what you want to do. I know a lot of people hear that message, but they don’t do it. Especially kids. The generation of kids in college now, to judge from my son’s friends, believes that they have to decide right away how to make a living, and right away take the right courses, and right away get on that career track or they’ll fail. And I think that they’ll be much less happy than if they risked a little more failure, had a little less security, early on, when you don’t need it as much anyway, and experiment a little more with what they might really want to do.

Roxanne Ward

CALL OF THE WILD

I was raised on a farm and learned to hog call when I was about seven. I entered contests and always won. It seemed as natural as beauty pageants were for other girls. I was fascinated by little pigs. I watched my mom care for the piglets, and one of my favorite things to do was get down inside the pen and play with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One. No Regrets
• Two. Talk to Yourself
• Three. Stop
• Four. Ask for Directions When You Get Lost
• Five. Accept Free Samples
• Six. Say Yes
• Seven. Have Fun!
• Eight Try Something New When You Stop Having Fun
• A Parting Gift
• Acknowledgments
• Index