An ode to opportunity

I got into an interesting conversation with a few of our Lehigh students, staff, and faculty on Twitter a few days ago about the job market. With graduation so close it obviously is on a lot of their minds and many of them are thinking about an unsettled future with a month to go.

They’ll find jobs, of course. Sounds easy coming from the professor’s view, but I know it’s true. They’re generally bright and engaged, and they’ll find something in their area of interest.

Eventually, that is. By the numbers, it’s almost certain that some of them will find a job that is a perfect fit for their passions, skills, and interests, but not all. This notion of the perfect job right out of college is more myth than reality. For one, the definition of “perfect” changes so much in even five years that your senior-year passions can be almost unrecognizable for the 20something who’s lived a little.

It occurs to me I don’t talk much about my work history to my students. They generally hear the greatest hits, but they don’t usually realize how hard that road to this – this thing I’m doing now – was. It required sacrifice, self-doubt, and a little blind faith.

My first job out of college in 1998 paid $8 per hour. That’s $16,640 per year as a cub sports reporter for The Daily Democrat in Woodland, CA (think 20-minute drive from Sacramento). Now, you may have heard some things about California, but I can confirm one key detail: even pre-housing bubble, it was expensive to live there, and less than $17,000 a year is hardly a livable wage. Adjusted for inflation to 2011 dollars and we’re talking 22,588.80. Pretax.

I was an award-winning reporter in college, and I did stringer work for several big newspapers in Los Angeles to pad my clips. I had decent internships. But when I graduated (mid-winter, don’t ask), the job market was not great. I worried a great deal about it.

The Daily Democrat came calling with a job offer. My parents lived in town, and I could see myself being able to scrape by until my situation improved. So why not wait it out? Had I waited, surely things could have improved, but maybe not. I took what was there in front of me. The sports editor, Gary Traynham, was and is a local legend and trained several sports journalists who went on to big – sometimes huge – things.

I sensed opportunity.

The best part about that job is that I got to learn from a master about what it took to be a professional reporter. The worst part is that at times I was a bit too big for my britches. I took said job offer believing I was better but knowing that it was a good chance to get my foot in the door. Because of this, my attitude wasn’t always right. I took criticism too personally and thought some days that my boss hated me. And this kid who was too good for the job he had made mistakes – lots of them. The job cut me down to size and built me back up.

As it turns out, being one of “Traynham’s guys” meant a lot. I discovered that his former reporters were a type of loose network. I got my next job because I had survived and learned from Gary, because there was built-in respect for that pedigree. Same for the next job after that. Three years into my career, I found myself helping run the sports desk at a major metro newspaper in Los Angeles. I had no business being there and this was at a time when getting to a big paper was still pretty difficult, but it was where opportunity got me. Had I not taken that job at the small paper, I am not sure where I would have been. The network for me was better than whatever short-term salary bump I would have had.

What I realized from my first job is that of all the things I had learned in college, I hadn’t learned how to fail. I did all the right things, including editor in chief of my campus paper, and was so used to being the good writer in the bunch that I never learned how to properly assess my weaknesses. Criticisms were met with panic on my end and I moved to cut short these painful conversations because I just didn’t know how to deal with it. What I realized over time is that I needed these conversations. I had to learn to see my imperfections before I could get better. An editor would take time to help a young reporter, but if I didn’t learn how to see my own problems then it was a short trip to being a 30-year-old underachiever, stuck in the industry and no hope for moving up.

Confidence is such a tricky deal. Too little of it and you’ll wallow in your failures, unable to learn and improve. Too much of it, and you won’t ever be able to spot your own failures – it’s always someone else’s fault, some weakness in the system or other people who caused you to be less than your best. I was overconfident, well on my way to being one of these people who are almost impossible to help.

Generally, I have learned confidence is overrated. Not always, but too often I see confident people tabulating their victories while being lapped by people with more drive but less skill. These are people for whom title or the name on the masthead are everything, the prestige that comes with being associated with a big brand. I worked with a lot of people like this in the newspaper industry, and I can tell you one thing about many of them: when the industry imploded on them, they were lost. The world changes, and all they have is their confidence. There was too much invested getting their self-worth from their associations, and they forgot how to be lifelong learners.

Education is supposed to help you through that. Education is a license to try things and fail and then get back up and try some more because you have training and ideas to test. Education is supposed to help you be agile in a world going through great change, and you aren’t supposed to be caught flat-footed in times like this. You’re supposed to be a lifelong learner, realizing that getting through life means always getting better.

In short, education is supposed to help you see opportunity where others see a low-paying job or a position that isn’t everything you want. Education is supposed to give you the ability to have a clear-eyed analysis and think long-term. Prestige and position mean nothing. Opportunity means everything. Confidence is a slogan.

This is why I left the journalism industry (a whole other story, which you can read here). I was clear-eyed enough about my place in the industry that I knew I was in a fragile spot, so I left to retool. In the process, I fell in love with teaching. I realized that I had to work in journalism for 10 years before learning that my true passion is community stories. I wish I could slap around my 22-year-old self, who thought that covering Major League Baseball was all there was to aspire to in life.

There’s a lesson I hope all my graduating seniors have learned by now, and if you haven’t it’s worth writing this one down: if you want something in life, you don’t choose it once.

If you want something bad enough, you have to choose it over. And over. And over. And over. There are too many small turns off the path, too many chances to take a shortcut or get impatient or give up because things get hard. This applies to so many things in life it’s scary. There’s no such thing as a good person; they are people who make moral choices over and over and over again. I’m about to be a dad, but I’m not deluded into thinking I’m a good one. I prove myself with my repeated choices. Same goes for being a good husband, co-worker, or human being.

And the same goes for your work. The above might not read as very comforting, but I promise you that if you pursue your passions relentlessly then you’ll find a way to work for them. It may be full-time, part-time, or volunteer. But those are choices you have to make. You chase opportunity, you choose it over and over again, and you commit yourself to self-improvement.

So choose wisely, and realize the only thing that matters is opportunity so long as you’re able to eat and have a roof over the head. This guy who is your professor job made less than $17,000 a year in his first job and had to have an eBay business on the side just to make ends meet. But I couldn’t have gotten here without being there.