Category: business

Where Did I Disappear To? Week 1 at Upgrow, Inc.

To anyone who doesn’t follow me on social media, it may seem like I’ve just up and abandoned this blog. In truth, what was happening was a very frantic cross-country move, and my first week at a brand-new job at a digital marketing startup in San Francisco, California. It’s a trusim that one can either explore or exploit: that is, one can find new opportunities, or utilize the ones one already has. There is a third option, though: explain. So in all, you can either find new opportunities, utilize the ones you’ve got, or write about what you’ve learned from it all. At present, I’ve done my exploring and am exploiting as best I can, but that doesn’t leave a lot of time to explain.

So from here on out, since I do like documenting stuff, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about what I’m doing at my job, how I’m living in California on a crazy low budget, and as always, general stuff about life, the universe, and everything. Y’know, this blog’s usual content.

Today, I’d like to explain what I’ve been doing in my first week at Upgrow, that marketing startup I mentioned. I’ll talk about my finances in a later post, write about a really interesting guest speaker we had on our weekly Praxis Wednesday call this past week, and maybe I’ll also write about the process of moving cross-country in ten days.

Our office is in a co-working space in downtown San Francisco. The room only has seven desks in it, two of which are presently empty. (One of these will be filled by my Praxis pal Yitzchak, who decided to move on a longer timeline and work remotely in the interim.) This small office means that there’s no complicated structure of meetings that needs to happen: to communicate something company-wide, all we need to do is say it, or post it to the general Slack channel.

The biggest thing I’ve learned this week is how hectic startups can be. Last week—my first week—I took on projects for three of our SEO clients; this week, I’m adding the other three. I’m running as fast as I can just to keep up. As I was just starting Praxis, an alum talked about how starting his apprenticeship felt like drinking from a fire hose. Now that I’m here, I understand the sentiment.

On top of working, I’ve been completing some marketing certifications, reading up on the industry software, and generally making myself a more valuable employee. My direct supervisor is big on trying to make sure that we don’t have to take work home, but I enjoy watching marketing videos as I get ready in the morning. I’ve never much liked the idea of “work-life balance” anyways: if you care enough about either one, you’ll figure out how to fit them in. My mom worked rigorously at multiple startups while pregnant with me; ’nuff said.

The project I’m most proud of from this week is the one I did started on my very first day. One of Upgrow’s founders, Ryder, asked me to take over the LinkedIn marketing for one of our clients, a lock and security company called ASSA ABLOY. I created all the posts for this week for both of their campaigns (which works out to one post per day), and on Friday I made the ones for the next week. Turns out, I don’t even need those till the week after (that is, starting next Monday, 3/25 instead of 3/18), so I’m ahead of schedule.

This week, I’m continuing the projects I’ve already been assigned (they include suggestions for blog categories, keyword research, and local marketing with Google MyBusiness) and adding several new ones, for clients including Seal Software, InfluxData, and Mercer Advisors.

As a final note: after I get settled in this role, I’ll be resuming my study of machine learning and add more PDP updates, but I want to make sure I’m doing well at this new job first.

How I Accidentally Ran a Small Business For Six Months

Every year since I was very young, I’ve volunteered at the Schenley Park Learn-to-Skate program that my skating club runs. Even for the four years I wasn’t skating, if purely because the entire rest of my family did it.

Nearly every year, the program has had an experienced coach take on the role of program director. The program director’s job is to organize just about everything to do with the program, from creating name tags for students and coaches to tracking the finances to organizing everyone physically on the ice sheet during classes, and much more. Fortunately, just as in any business, the director delegates some of these responsibilities, but even so, it’s a very big job.

This year, almost by accident, I was the one to take it on. 

My mother, who organizes how Schenley Park runs as a subsidiary of the Pittsburgh Figure Skating Club (our home club), couldn’t find anyone to be this year’s program director. Since she was swamped with other work, she managed only to delegate the marketing responsibilities. With two days until the first class, we were freaking out: we still didn’t have a program director, and fortunately for the club’s coffers but unfortunately for our sanity, our marketing person had done an astounding job, and we had literally twice our usual number of students signed up. 

Faced with this situation—twice the standard signup numbers, no program director in sight, and two days to deadline—my siblings and I were all given a prompt order to get everything ready. At first, it seemed it might be working, but eventually, between the sheer amount of work, the stress of trying to coordinate multiple people as efficiently as possible, and other miscellaneous factors, it became apparent to me that this wasn’t working.

I evaluated the situation and decided the most reasonable plan would be for me to simply take everything over. I had the most experience with the system overall; and primarily because of my good handwriting, I was always the first choice for the largest task, namely, creating student name tags. Because of the color-coded system we used to group name tags by level, the process went something like this. First, large quantities of colored card-stock had to be precisely cut via guillotine and sorted. Then, the names of all hundred and twenty some-odd students had to be written with Sharpie onto the cards, and the cards had to be put into name badge holders. Finally, the cards had to be put into gallon plastic bags, sorted by level, and organized cohesively into large bins so that the volunteers could hand them out to the students on class day.

For two days, I did nearly nothing else. Not only did I do the name tags, but I also organized the student names and other information into a database, deposited all their checks, acquired cash for the concessions stand, and organized our volunteer instructors. 

Honestly, I’m very happy with how it all turned out. Everything was ready for the first class, my siblings and my mom didn’t have to worry about it, the kids and instructors got organized well, and the rest of the year ran pretty smoothly. On the day of class, since I knew everything about how everything had been organized, I also became kind of the go-to for volunteers with questions.

After a few weeks of this, on the drive home from class, my mom asked me, “So, you kinda seem to be running Schenley this year. Do you want to be program director?”

And I said, “Meh, sure. Seems like I already am.”

The Value of “Just” Showing Up

My siblings are pairs skaters. Every day, they wake up at 5am to skate for three hours. Sometimes, after returning home to do school and work, they return to the ice rink to skate again. Even when they don’t skate twice a day, they frequently do an off-ice workout in the afternoon. They’re devoted. They’re serious.

Still, they’re hardly the best team out there. They are now at the third-highest level, and will stop being competitive before advancing, because they started late. Unlike many skaters, who devote all their time to the sport, my siblings have significant academic commitments which they refuse to sacrifice to spend more time on the ice.

And yet, they get to Nationals. Recently, even, a few internationals. They didn’t expect it, but it happened. How?

They “just” showed up.

Putting in the effort every single day to keep up with the blistering pace of competitive figure skating is hard. The age brackets for the levels work such that if you’re not putting in as much effort as my siblings are, you just plain don’t get to be competitive. Sorry, have a nice day! The requirements for pairs are even harder, because not just one, but two skaters have to be devoted enough to put that much time in. Not only that, both of them need to be good at doing jumps – if you’ve ever watched the Olympics on TV, you know jumping is hard.

My siblings get national and international assignments, because they are one of less than twelve pairs teams at their level in the country. They show up. There’s no “just” about it.

They say it’s not enough to just show up. But is that really true? To “just” show up, you need to have the necessary skills to get in the door, you need to be reliable and consistent, you need to be able to put in the work every day. That’s valuable. That’s important. And those are skills a lot of people don’t have.

When people hunt for jobs, the focus is on the job-specific skills: what programming languages do they know, how proficient are they with Excel, do they have the appropriate certifications, etc. And those are important. But many job-seekers act as if those things are all that matters.

In reality, being reliable and dependable is just as important. There are tons of people who have the job-specific skills, but who aren’t reliable. They get tired, they get bored, they see a shiny object, they would rather be doing something else. They don’t show up. If you “just” show up, you can be better than them.

Show up.

Why to Start Early: An Example from My Youth

When I got my first job at the age of fifteen, I’d already had seven years of volunteer experience. I didn’t know that this was unusual at the time – after all, my siblings and many of my friends had this too. I’ve since realized not only was it unusual, it was awesome.

For some time, my family has been running a learn-to-ice-skate program in Schenley Park, PA. (I’ll be colloquially calling it Schenley from here on out. It’s what we call it in my house.) In many respects, it’s a pretty standard learn-to-skate thing: we’ve got 10 lessons over 10 weeks from December to February, our instructors are volunteers from my skating club, we teach anybody over the age of 3, and we follow the standard United States Figure Skating (USFS) approved curriculum, with minor variation.

The only notable difference is that we have no age prerequisite to be a teacher. Our only prerequisite is skating skill: we require instructors to have passed the pre-preliminary field moves test, which basically just makes sure our instructors are much better skaters than the students they’re teaching.

This means that we regularly have instructors who are as young as 6 or 7. You may think this is a recipe for disaster and chaos, but actually, both our program and the kids get a ton of benefit from this arrangement.

When we take on any new instructor, of any age, we start them teaching “tots” – toddlers <5. We frequently have a large number of tots, who are completely incapable of doing anything as a cohesive group, so having as many instructors as possible teaching tots is important. However, it takes almost zero skill to play with toddlers, and that’s essentially what we’re doing (just on the ice, the goal is to get the kids used to being on skates).

As it turns out, 6 and 7-year-olds are actually brilliant for this. If you pair them up one-to-one, a bunch of young children teaching a bunch of even younger children actually works incredibly well, for a number of reasons.

First of all, children are so much more capable than modern society gives them credit for. If you expect a young kid to be responsible enough to help teach tots to skate, they’ll rise to the challenge. I’ve seen this over and over again, with so many kids. They come to us at the age of 6, 7, 8, hesitant and not knowing what to do, having no experience with being taken seriously, and we say “there’s your group, go and help teach them how to fall properly”. And they do it! Not only do they do it, they do it really well!

In a way, children are better at teaching tots than adults, because they themselves were tots not too long ago, so it’s much easier for them to intuitively understand how best to teach them. Adults have more capacity for complex thought, and we can frequently let that cloud our perception of young childrens’ behavior, attributing much more intent to childrens’ decisions than the children actually had. The children themselves don’t have that problem.

In addition to giving kids responsibility from very early on, volunteering at Schenley lets them improve their own basic skating skills by virtue of teaching them. The best way to learn is, as they say, to teach, and these kids (who are all ice skaters) are teaching ice skating fundamentals.

Still, I think the coolest part of the way we run Schenley comes after someone’s been at it for a while. As a young kid gets more experience with teaching tots (and simultaneously gets older and acquires more skating skill), they can take on larger classes, higher levels, and more responsibility. They go from teaching one toddler to 5, 10, 20 kids; from teaching how to fall down and stand back up to more advanced skills like gliding on one foot, jumping, and skating backward; and from merely showing up and helping teach the lesson to helping organize materials and coordinating with other instructors.

And after having worked with us for years, a 16-year-old can look back and say, with complete and total honesty, that they have ten years of experience working somewhere. At a time when many young adults are just starting their first jobs, a teen having an entire decade of work experience, even as a volunteer, is huge. Since entry-level jobs are an area where soft skills are arguably more important than literally anything else, the kids who’ve worked with us are more prepared than most others.

I don’t just see kids doing this. I was a kid doing this. And honestly, working as a volunteer skating coach for so long was one of the best things I’d done with my childhood. I had the opportunity to do something valuable from a very young age, and I’m immensely grateful.

But it wasn’t anything special about Schenley. Coaching ice skating doesn’t magically create capable children and accomplished young adults. The important part was starting kids at doing something useful (that they could handle, of course) very young, and then progressively giving them more responsibility as they could handle it.

If you have kids, try to find a place like Schenley. Or, even better, make one. Very young kids can do household chores, address envelopes, and organize files. The key is to not give them make-work. The work needs to actually be useful, even in a small way; they will know their work really matters to somebody or not. And as they’re able to do more useful things, let them. Maybe a three-year-old can’t do the dishes, but a ten-year-old certainly can. Lastly, don’t worry if they’re in over their head a little bit. If they can’t really do the thing, as their parent, you’re there to help them out. But on the other hand, you don’t know for sure. Maybe they’ll surprise you. I think fifteen-year-old me surprised my mom by building Speset.

If you run a volunteer organization, seriously consider removing age requirements if a skill requirement is all you need. Young kids are an immensely under-utilized resource in modern society, and you can benefit greatly from utilizing them. And perhaps more importantly, the kids themselves will benefit from it. After all, the next generation is our future, and all that jazz.

See you tomorrow!

The War of Art: Review, Notes, and Doodles

Recently, my pals at Praxis sent me a book called The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. I read it through in an afternoon, because I have exactly zero impulse control when it comes to good books.

It was both brilliant and stupid. There were several pages in a row during which I chanted “yes yes yes yes” aloud. There were also several pages that left me thinking “is that really necessary?” And then there were the rest of the pages, which all pretty much left me going “yeah, alright, that makes a lot of sense.” Overall, it’s a good book.

One of the biggest reasons that I think it’s a good book is because the things I liked and didn’t like have much more to do with me than with the book. My general life philosophy is heavily based on two things: the WYSIWYG rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky lays out on his blog Less Wrong and in his book Rationality: From AI to Zombies; and the cheerful, playful discovery one understands immediately upon reading anything written by Richard Feynman.

Given that, you can pretty much predict the parts of this book that I especially like: they’re the ones about the difference between humanism and fundamentalism (found on pages 34-37 of the print copy). For example: “[The artist’s] faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world. The fundamentalist entertains no such notion. … The truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx.”

You can also predict the parts I kind of dislike: mainly, the assumption in the third section that all things that happen subconsciously are due to some outside force, higher plane, etc. For example: “What Blake means by ‘eternity’ [when he wrote that ‘Eternity is in love with the creations of time’], I think, is the sphere higher than this one, a plane of reality superior to the material dimension in which we dwell. In ‘eternity’, there is no such thing as time (or Blake’s syntax wouldn’t distinguish it from ‘eternity’) and probably no space either. This plane may be inhabited by higher creatures. Or it may be pure consciousness or spirit. But whatever it is, according to Blake, it’s capable of being ‘in love’.”

But the thing is, if you’re a different kind of person than me, you’ll prefer different parts of this book. That’s what marks it as good. Every person can get value from it.

That said, here’s what this book does.

It shatters you into a million pieces, names the pieces, and teaches you how to interact with each one for optimal creative productivity. One piece, the author calls Resistance. Another, the Ego. Still others, the Self, the Unconscious, angels, muses. It’s an extremely intuitive explanation, and when interacting with your own brain, objectivity is less important than subjectivity. Regardless of whether or not you are a mere conduit for creative forces which mostly exist outside of you, thinking that way will help you both be more humble about and distance your ego from your craft.

This book doesn’t tell you what’s true. But it does tell you how to think about yourself and your work. That’s just as valuable.

In case you’re still not convinced to pick this up and read it, here are the opening words of the book, where he describes the primary enemy, not just of artists and creatives, but of people everywhere: Resistance.

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? … Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.”

Now that (I hope) I’ve convinced you to go read this, let me share one more thing with you before I leave off for today.

Some time ago, I read an article about why you should write in books. I can’t find the article, which leads me to believe that I probably read it for the SAT and that’s why it’s so damn obscure, but regardless, I read that article and now I always read with a pencil in hand.

Because I’m an artist, I don’t just write in margins, I draw. If I’ve got a verbal thought, I put a note down; if I’ve got a visual thought, I put a drawing down. Some books don’t have enough white space for my margin doodles to be any good, but the structure of this book means it has a lot of white space, and as such, a lot of margin doodle room!

Alright, that’s it for today. Till tomorrow, ciao!

Don’t Just Be The Best, Be The Nicest: The Importance of Soft Skills

Many people think that the best thing you can do if you want a job is to be better at the job description than anybody else. If it’s a sales job, be an amazing people person. If it’s a tech job, know more about computers than anybody else. And on one hand, this seems obvious. The most important part of a job is the job itself, anything else must be incidental. Right?

Surprisingly, no. Let me show you why.

My mother used to work in a big company with a sales team. And there was one guy in particular on this sales team, let’s call him Leonard.

Leonard was a very energetic and incredibly competent salesperson, who was very good at persuading. He did the mechanics of sales exceptionally well. He wasn’t brilliantly charismatic, but he was really, really good at the simple mechanics of selling. Prospecting, understanding politics within the prospect’s environment, getting in front of the right people at the right time… he was brutally competent.

The problem was, he knew it. To prospects, Leonard was charming. To people above him in the hierarchy, he was at least civil. But to everyone at his level or below him, he treated them like deficient peons. It was obvious he thought that he was so much better than them. He treated the back office and support staff as if they were his personal servants. Nobody inside the company liked him, but they had to be nice to him because he just Kept. Landing. Contracts. Over. And. Over.

The only reason nobody fired him was because he was literally twice as good as every other salesperson, combined. But if he ever slipped up, stopped being so gobstoppingly brilliant, or if the company ever found someone as good, he would absolutely be drop-kicked out the door in an instant.

Why is that? After all, isn’t your competency at the job description supposed to be the most important thing?

We all know instinctively what Leonard did wrong. He was a jackass. And if you’re a jackass, there is very little you can do to redeem yourself except be leaps and bounds better than literally everyone else, because that way the company can’t afford to get rid of you. We all also know instinctively, therefore, that your competency at the job description isn’t the single most important thing.

Still, we probably still think it’s one of the most important. Surely you’d choose someone who can do the job well over someone who can’t, even if the someone who can’t is cheerful, reliable, and hardworking, right?

No, not really. Here’s an example from my own experience in sales.

I’ve written before about my sales job, and the fact that I applied for it, got it, and had it for months despite being severely under-qualified in every notable area. Circa the time that I started the interview process, if you’d asked me what a sales funnel was, I wouldn’t have known. Not only that, I was super socially awkward.

Here’s why none of that mattered, why they hired me anyway, and why they proceeded to not fire me.

During every interview (there were three), I showed up ten minutes before I was supposed to be there. I was cheerful and enthusiastic. I wore my utter lack of sales knowledge on my sleeve, accompanied by a “but I’d love to learn!” and a big grin. As I moved through the interview process, I listened to sales podcasts when I drove. When I had down time, I read sales manuals like You Can’t Teach A Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. I was determined to learn as much as I could before I even got the job. In my third interview, I asked the hiring manager for her suggestions for sales books. She suggested some. I read them.

After I got the job, whenever they taught me something, I would spend all my available down time practicing it. Listening to podcasts on drives turned into reciting my sales pitch. I continued to read sales manuals, now in the context of what I’d learned. And when I was working—aka, when I was walking around knocking on doors; this was a door-to-door kind of a sales job—I asked questions, I watched and learned from the better salespeople I shadowed, and I tried as hard as I could to make working with me easy. Essentially, I made up for my complete lack of charisma with a great attitude. In an environment like sales, where we had on-the-job training, that was the most important thing.

Both of my examples have been about sales so far, and while this has been a coincidence, it does mean that I need to explicitly note something here. While half of the important background for sales (namely, the understanding of how sales itself works) is commonly taught on the job, that’s not the case for a lot of other jobs. So, it’s important to note that unless you meet the bare-minimum prerequisites for the job in question, no amount of attitude will get you the job. Even the most cheerful prospective neurosurgeon won’t get the job unless they’ve got a medical degree.

Still, once you’ve reached that minimum level of competency, soft skills like punctuality, reliability, cheerfulness, willingness to learn, etc. become much more important. Companies frequently hire people (like me) who are objectively worse at the actual job, but who are more pleasant to work with.

All of that said, here are some of the top soft skills which are more important than your competency at the actual job.

  • Enthusiasm. Companies like nothing more than seeing that someone wants to work for them.
  • Willingness to learn. Especially if you’re under-qualified, but honestly in any circumstance, this one is important. This one is extra important if you’re planning on going into tech, just because of how fast the field moves: even if you knew everything there was to know yesterday, something might get invented today that’ll make that old knowledge useless.
  • Ability to take criticism and improve. This one goes hand in hand with the previous one, and is just as crucial.
  • Humility/kindness/otherwise being a nice human being. This one is a bit less important, because sweet people still get fired if they won’t learn and improve (since they’re a drain on the company), but if you’re already pretty good about learning, you’ll want to make sure people like you, too.
  • Working hard. Basically, make the absolute most of your time at the office, and feel free to take the job home, too. There are tons of people who refuse to take their work home (something about “work life balance”, which seems to mean “I’d rather watch TV than achieve my goals”), so you can get ahead of them by doing simple, easy stuff like listening to a podcast on your drive home instead of the radio.
  • Be willing to do the grunt work. Somebody has got to fetch the coffee, make the copies, move the furniture, order more sharpies, and organize the company lunch. If that person is you, then you have made yourself invaluable. If you think you should be “above” that kind of work, and so that person isn’t you, then it’s probably going to end up being the CEO, or the VP of something or another. Nobody is “above” grunt work. Forward Tilt actually has a great episode about this.

Everyone knows that all other things being equal, soft skills are important. If you’re just as competent as the next guy but you’re more fun to work with, you’ll probably get the job. But what most people don’t know is that all other things don’t even have to be equal. Companies hire people all the time who aren’t as competent, but are easier to work with. Obviously competence matters, but once you’re over the minimum competence level, soft skills matter more. Being more competent doesn’t necessarily make you more likely to get a job if you don’t have the soft skills.

How I Was Homeschooled

From a pretty early age, I’ve been homeschooled along with my siblings. But what exactly do I mean when I say that? It can be difficult to get solid information on how homeschooling works, primarily because “homeschooling” is really a big bucket full of many philosophies, reasons, and families.

Most people homeschool because they want or need to school their children differently than how the public school system does it. There are a number of ways this could present itself: there are highly educated professionals who believe they are more capable than a public school teacher to teach their children; there are parents of children with developmental disabilities who believe they will be able to help their children individually better than a public school teacher who has to corral fifty kids each day; and many more.

Across these various reasons, the most common method of organizing the homeschooling process between two parents is to have one parent working, and the other staying home to homeschool the kids. This seems like the sane route: after all, so goes the common wisdom, kids take up a lot of time and require a lot of attention. If the breadwinner has an office job, they’re not going to be home often enough to help the kids; if they work from home, the kids will be bothering them with questions so often that they can’t focus on working.

For most families, this probably is the sane route. But my mother, Stanford graduate, pilot, researcher for NASA, cancer survivor and entrepreneur, would not take “sane” for an answer. Throughout her childrens’ entire homeschooled lives, my mother has been working around 50 hours a week, plus running three small businesses. And this has created a very strange kind of homeschooling, with some very strange and specific benefits and drawbacks.

The obvious drawback is that she’s had a lot less time to spend on homeschooling her children. And at first, when we were just quitting traditional school, and when we were just getting used to the concept of working from home, it was difficult. But rather quickly, it developed into a bunch of neat advantages.

Firstly, since she’s been actively working a career, she factored a ton of career preparation into our homeschooling. Where a lot of homeschool parents are myopically focused on getting their kids prepared for college, my mother was also preparing her children to work. With that in combination with our work for her businesses, we got a very well-rounded and immersive understanding of careers and business.

Second, since several of her jobs have involved hiring entry-level employees, she knows what colleges tend to prepare people for, as well as what they don’t. With that knowledge, she could systematically teach us the things that we would need to know for our future careers that we probably wouldn’t learn otherwise.

One such lesson that I learned very, very early on was the importance of a positive attitude. If you’re willing to learn and you’re cheerful, everyone will be happy with you, even if you aren’t very good at your job. But on the other hand, if you’re an asshole, you have to be leaps and bounds better than everyone else – I’m talking twice as good as everyone else in the office, combined – for people to tolerate you enough to keep you. You don’t learn that in high school or in college: if you show up and you learn the material and you get good grades, literally nobody cares how pleasant you were to be around while you did it.

It wasn’t just the career itself. It was also the apparent drawback of her lack of available time that also turned out to be helpful.

My mother was never available at the drop of a dime. I had to wait for her to be done working, and I frequently had to plan out when I needed to talk to her about something. I got used to sending her emails asking for help with things. More recently, I’ve had mentors that I can contact, I see a lot of the same thing that I got used to growing up. You can’t take for granted unlimited time from a mentor. They’ve got a full-time job, and though they’re happy to help, their time is a limited resource. So it was with my mother growing up.

If you think about it, this is the polar opposite of the public school system model, where the teacher’s job is to teach, and nothing else. People don’t value what is abundantly available, and you can tell that school kids don’t value the time of their teachers. But you can be sure that employees value the time of their mentors, because they know that their mentors have important, unrelated jobs. And so my siblings and I valued our mother’s time, like we would value a mentor’s.

Further, sometimes we just couldn’t reach her. Sometimes she was at the office, on a business trip, or her clients were having time-sensitive issues. And so, sometimes we just had to find an answer from somewhere else. This was another way in which our education was very different from the traditional school system: a school teacher is supposed to have all the answers to all the student’s questions. A student’s first, last, and usually only resource is their teacher. On the other hand, my mother’s semi-frequent absences meant that to answer our questions, we had to do research on our own, or reach out to each other.

The relationship I had with my mother, and the relatively unique type of homeschooling that we all had growing up, was useful in a number of ways for shaping all of us. I’m glad she was crazy enough to do it.

My Mom is My Boss, My Sister is My Coworker: My Experience in Family Businesses

For longer than I’ve been alive, my mother has owned several businesses. She ran these in addition to her full-time job, and after she had my siblings and I, raising kids. (My mom is an impressive person.)

Even if she’d never involved us at all, the simple fact that she knew a lot about the business world and that she ran three businesses from our home meant that we knew a lot about this from earliest childhood. We knew the value of money, the amount of work involved in running a business, the difference between a small business and a startup. The fact that we were homeschooled for most of our lives also helped: instead of sitting in a classroom and learning through a rigid structure, we had casual conversations, asked questions, and generally just talked about business.

But I didn’t just sit around and learn by proximity: I was actively involved in her businesses as soon as I could do something of value. When I was seven, I had better handwriting than my mom, so I addressed envelopes.  By nine or ten, I was filing and organizing paperwork, too. By thirteen, when I was a good enough artist to be selling commissions at conventions and shows, I was also using Illustrator to create graphics, layouts, and logos. By fifteen, on top of my “real job” at a local restaurant, I had enough coding skill to create a website, so I created speset.com.  (I came up with the name, too; I was taking Latin at the time, and so I took words meaning “Life, and…” in order to convey a meaning of “your life and whatever you choose to do with it”.)

Overall, my relationship with my mother growing up was more of a mentor-mentee relationship than a standard parent-child dynamic. And honestly, I think this is better: the standard parent-child dynamic is full of condescension, mistrust (especially through the section of young adulthood we’ve decided to call “teen age”), misunderstanding, hostility, and a number of other things. My relationship with my mother meant I was treated throughout my life, not like a child to be talked down to, but like another adult, albeit an incredibly inexperienced one. I’ve noticed that people become what you believe they will be – in essence, humans are self-fulfilling prophecies – so when you expect that a teenager will be rebellious, they will be; and in the same way, when I was expected to be an adult, I was.

I think some people may accuse my mother of “not giving me a childhood”, but they misunderstand the amount of time these things took, and also how much I enjoyed doing all of them. When I was addressing envelopes, it took maybe two hours a week at absolute most, and I loved being able to do something that was genuinely useful to someone. Little kids are often insecure because they don’t really have anything they’re very good at yet and so they don’t have any way to differentiate themselves, but I skipped that bit, because I was doing real, valuable work.

Designing the Speset website was similar. I really wasn’t very experienced as a programmer at that point, though I did have some non-negligible graphic design experience. For the purpose of building an entire website from scratch, I was out of my depth in a lot of ways. But I just dove right in, spent a few weeks on it, and came out the other end with a website. Speset went from nonexistence to existence as it became a home for a set of books that were previously just floating about in the Amazon aether. And it made a real difference in the books’ audience: at the time of this writing, the mailing list which I integrated into the Speset site has over a hundred subscribers, with absolutely no additional marketing.

Don’t usually get that kind of value from a fifteen-year-old, eh?

My siblings took a similar path that I did. Essentially, they were my coworkers. And just like I was specialized based on what I enjoyed and was good at, so were they. My sister Anastasia has always had a penchant for finances and accounting, and so she’s been a kind of junior accountant for most of her life, doing bank reconciliations, analyzing balance sheets, and creating general ledger accounts. As I did, she took on more responsibilities as she developed more skills and experience. And as I did, she had a ton of fun with it all. I can’t speak to the exact kind of work she’s doing at the moment, because I’m not an accountant, but I know she’s creating value as well because she’s being paid.

At the moment, my mother owns three businesses: Ellis Wyatt, which does roofing, remodeling, and repair; John Galt Properties, which owns a number of rental properties; and CodeX, which is sort of an umbrella company for her consulting plus a few other miscellaneous things that you could either call tiny businesses or side gigs (Speset falls under this umbrella, as well as Navision Depot and several others). I’ve helped in various capacities with all of them: I designed and programmed the websites for both Ellis Wyatt and Speset, and I deliver paperwork for John Galt.

Our family dynamic is different because we work together to get business work done. I ask Ana when she’ll have the tenant statements done, because I want to deliver them on my way to class tomorrow. She replies that she’ll have them done after she finishes her economics homework. Between working together and doing schoolwork, all in the same house, I have an incredibly close relationship with my siblings, as well as with my parents. Our family dynamic is different because we work together, but I think that’s a good different.

My Experiences In Sales

I took this sales job at the beginning of 2018. I worked for an independent sales firm which specialized in doing door-to-door sales for huge companies that didn’t have the time to bother with such a thing themselves.

I decided to take a sales position for a few reasons. Most important of those was that I always knew that I had a major weakness in the area of social skills, and I wanted to improve at it. I figured that the best and most effective way of doing this would be to go somewhere that I was in way over my head. If you’re drowning, you only have two options: die or learn to swim. Knowing that, I walked in the door on my first day.

I’d made it through the interview process, which was as much a test of charisma as it was anything else. My father, for all he had failed dismally to pass it on to me, has always been able to exude massive charisma when necessary. And I knew from the interviews that from a charisma standpoint, I was in an office full of copies of my dad. Every single person could do backflips over the social stage, when I could hardly find the confidence to walk without tripping.

But despite all of this, I was ruthlessly determined. I was going to learn from these people, I was going to absorb this charisma that saturated the air, and I was going to come out of this experience stronger. That was the goal, I thought as I was shown into the main meeting room.

I learned that a conversation with a prospect was broken out into five main sections: the intro or elevator pitch, the questioning, the presentation, the rehash, and the close. On the first day, we learned the intro pitch, which I will probably still be able to recite many years from now. “Hi, how’s it going? So nothing crazy, my name’s Jenya, and I’m dropping by really quickly on behalf of Verizon. [Did I mention our main client was Verizon? It was.] We’ve done a ton of updates around here, helped out a bunch of your neighbors, and I’m just here to see how I can help you too.”

We dissected it based on what they called the “four factors of impulse”, which were as follows: Jones Effect, or the impulse to want what others have; Fear of Loss, or the fear of missing out on an opportunity; Sense of Urgency, or the importance of both the salesperson’s time and the prospect’s; and Indifference, or the necessity for a salesperson to not act like a salesperson, since prospects don’t trust salespeople.

I recited that pitch to myself in the car on the way home. I recited it as I was washing my face and getting ready for bed. I recited intermittently through the entire next day, which I had off. And by the day after, I had it solidly memorized.

Evidently, this was impressive and unusual. We practiced our pitches in the office the next day, and the more experienced salespeople were impressed. In the afternoon I got the opportunity to practice it “in the field”. I’d knock on the prospect’s door, introduce myself and also the person who was mentoring me, and after I finished the pitch, I would pass the proverbial baton to my mentor so they could keep talking with the prospect. That first day, we collectively made a sale, and I got to keep half the proceeds.

I was tentatively optimistic, but I refused to let my determination slip. Hearing “no” over and over wasn’t hard when I wasn’t doing much, but I imagined that when I was controlling the conversation, it would be harder. Still, the fact that a seasoned professional still got a ton of “no”s gave me some very useful perspective.

The next day, I learned the questions: a complicated decision tree based on what the prospect’s answers were. After “how many TVs do you have” was “do you use DVR”; if they said “no”, you moved on, but if they said “yes”, there were a number of so-called “deeper questions” that you had to ask about it. There was no such thing as a learning curve here: we still had only one day to learn this, but it was fifty times as complex as the pitch.

I took exceedingly prolific notes and stuck the notebook I’d taken them on into a bag. Every piece of paper, every chart and graph and magazine article that I was given, I stuck into that bag. It was my sales bag, and every time I needed anything, I could get it from there. When I got home every day, around 10pm (our shifts were 10am-8pm, and I had over an hour commute each way), I would review everything in my bag in detail. For this reason, I never had to be told anything twice.

I deep-dove into this so much partially just because that’s what I do, but also because I knew I had to make up for my lack of natural sociability. Growing up, I had been reprimanded a number of times for using the wrong tone, saying the wrong thing, or otherwise not intuitively knowing what to do in a social situation. I had absolutely no social sense, and so during this job, I asked a number of what they probably thought of as incredibly strange questions. How far away from the door should I stand? Where should I put my hands? How often should I make eye contact? What tone should I use during what segment of the conversation? All these sorts of ridiculously specific questions that they had probably never thought about, since they don’t think about what tone they use, they just use it.

But I asked these stupid questions, and I got better. I may not be able to intuit what to do in a social situation, but I can sure as heck analyze it to death and memorize every minute difference. So, just like my pitch, I analyzed the conversations. I analyzed my tone, eye contact, gestures, body language. I analyzed those things for the prospect, too. When I didn’t know something, I didn’t think about how dumb it was to not know it, I just asked. And I took liberal notes. Then in the mornings and evenings and during any other time when I wasn’t doing schoolwork (because remember I was in college too), I reviewed my notes. Use a low tone when stating facts. Avoid crossing your arms. Put one foot one step above the other when on a staircase. Take two steps away from the door after you knock. Use eye contact for emphasis when you’re talking, and during the whole time the prospect is talking.

After a few months, though, I noticed that I was stagnating. My peers were making sales on their own, but I wasn’t. I had learned everything I could, and I didn’t know what else I could do. I got frustrated. Not the kind of momentary frustration, the kind that spikes up when you spill a drink; this was a long, drawn-out frustration that seeped into my mind over the course of these stagnant weeks, when I was walking six miles up and down peoples’ doorsteps, knocking on a hundred and fifty doors, working a twelve-hour day, and coming home long after it had gotten dark with nothing to show for it all.

To make it worse, around this point, my greatest mentor quit. He had been the greatest help to me overall: he gave detailed explanations of what to do in each specific situation, he knew like a good coach exactly what I was doing wrong and how to fix it, and he communicated clearly. Not only that, he was a delight to have around, and he was consistently one of the people in the office who made the best numbers.

Even after all of this it was hard for me to get up the nerve to quit. I had known from the get-go that I wasn’t suited for a long-term career in sales, but I didn’t want to be one of those people who just quit when the going got rough. It took a long conversation with my mother about priorities for me to see past this. I went into this with the goal of improving my social skills, and I had succeeded. Yes, it would have been nice to make more sales, but at the end of the day, this wasn’t what I wanted to do professionally. I didn’t need to be frustrated with my lack of success in something I’d only gone into in the first place because I knew I would be awful at it. So soon after, I handed in my resignation.

The lessons I learned from this tough period follow me to this day. Through this process I learned what it’s like to be literally the worst person in a group at something. Growing up, I’d never had that opportunity, since I was always in the top 1% of everything (I’m one of those weirdos that thrived naturally in the school system). It was hard to be the worst, but it was also useful: I could learn from literally everyone.

I learned grit and determination. The experience created for me a crazy high benchmark that I can always compare future stressful events against. No matter what I go through, I can think, “this is easier than taking multiple extremely difficult classes, none of which I find fun or satisfying, on top of having a full-time job that I suck abysmally at; as such, I can get through this.”

I learned how to be cheerful no matter what. Growing up a performer, I thought I knew how to be cheerful in the extremes of misery: after all, I went out in -10º weather, in the snow and freezing rain, in a skimpy leotard, skated around a sheet of ice at 30+ mph for five or six minutes at a stretch, and had to make it all look easy.

Sales made that look like a walk in the park. I walked around neighborhoods in the snow and freezing rain, not for six minutes, but for six hours. I walked up and down many flights of stairs in the grueling heat, too; something I never had to do as a figure skater. And when I got to peoples’ doors, I couldn’t grimace in the slightest. Unlike in skating, where the audience sees you from fifty feet away and won’t notice a tiny crease in your brow, your prospect will see you from two feet away. They will notice.

I also learned how to take “no” for an answer, and in fact to take it in stride. Just because of how the numbers play out, even the best salesperson in the world won’t be able to get a “yes” from every single prospect. There will be people who, say, work for Comcast and get their internet for free. There will be people who slam the door in your face. And you just have to deal with that, don’t let it shake you, and move right along. Next to their name on your list, write “110” and put a diagonal line between the 1s.

But most importantly, I learned how to sell. I learned the details of how the sales funnel works. I learned how to direct a conversation. I learned the difference between a legitimate “no” and a “no” that comes only from a fear of change. I learned how to make smalltalk (a surprisingly huge part of sales!). I learned to speak and persuade off-the-cuff.

Sales would have been an awful career choice for me, but taking a sales job anyway was one of the most useful experiences of my life.

How to Be the Best in the World

There’s a common thing repeated by people trying to tell people to diversify their skillsets: that being the best at one specific thing is functionally impossible. Take this bit from Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

  1. Become the best at one specific thing.
  2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

Adams’s point about the second strategy is golden. It’s excellent advice with a personal example, and many people would do well to apply it. However, I would contest with him on the first point.

There are two types of examples people cite when they try to make the point that being the best in the world at one thing is impossible: fields that have very specific, unchangeable rulesets, and fields that are very broad. Adams references playing in the NBA and making a platinum album: these are examples of the first type.

Now, I’m not trying to say that Adams isn’t absolutely correct about both of these examples; he is. The problem is that neither of them actually apply to the majority of the people in the work world.

For a field that has specific, unchangeable rulesets, such as just about any sport, there is only one way to succeed in these fields: be in the top fraction of a fraction of a percent. As such, not only does success require the kind of absolute, relentless focus that means pursuit of it takes over your entire life, it also requires a non-negligible amount of birth lottery: no matter how hard you try, you can’t play in the NBA if you’re 5’3″. And yet, I have never seen or heard of a job that has such steadfast rules as a sport: the work world is much more malleable.

Now let’s look at the other type of example: exceedingly broad fields. Adams doesn’t give such an example, but it’s easy to find one: being the best writer in the world, being the best programmer, etc. Now, at first glance, these seem like they apply to the work world, and they also seem like they confirm the “you can’t be the best at one thing” wisdom. Except they don’t. Because these examples are all far too broad.

Setting out to be the best writer in the world would, yes, be inconceivably difficult, and likely impossible. But this isn’t because you particularly need to combine your writing skill with some other skill in order to succeed: it’s because you need to niche down. You may not be able to be the best writer in the world, but I’m sure you can become the go-to guy for famous people who want books ghostwritten for them. You may not be able to be the best programmer, but you can become something like a guy my mother knows.

My mother works in Navision (abbreviated Nav), a type of ERP software owned by Microsoft. Essentially, Nav is a UI that makes SQL easy for accountants to use. However, as with any UI with a complicated back-end, sometimes the back-end does something funky. And as with any time a program does something funky, there is a niche for a programmer who can fix it.

In this case, the man who occupies that niche is Ahmed Amini. Everybody who does Nav programming knows who he is, and if you have a strange SQL problem, he’s always your go-to. Over fifteen years while my mother has worked with Nav, he has been recommended or mentioned countless times. He didn’t diversify his skillset. He just became the Nav SQL guy.

I’ll give another example. I know a cardiac surgeon by the name of Dave Garber, and he specializes in a very specific procedure (I don’t recall the name) by which an artery in the thigh is transplanted and used to fix something with the heart. This is now nearly everything he does, because he is the best at it. He didn’t diversify his skillset either. He just became the surgeon for this procedure.

How did this happen? The first step is to find something you seem good at within your field, that most people aren’t. Next, specialize in it. Seek it out. Try to do more of the thing that you’re good at. Over time, other people in your field will realize that you are very good at the thing, and they’ll start recommending you as the go-to.

Once you’re here, you’re golden, because it creates a virtuous cycle: you’re good at the thing, so you do good work, so people see the good work and recommend you, so you do more of the thing, and you get the opportunity to get even better, so you do even better work, and so on.

This is how you become the best at a field. Pick a niche you’re good at, specialize in it, and then let the word-of-mouth about your excellent work take it from there. No skill diversification needed.

Why does this matter? Well, because it’s true. I’m a big believer in truth. I like it when people have accurate beliefs about what’s possible and what’s not. If “become the best at a thing” has been moved from your mental “not possible” bucket to your “possible” bucket, this post has done its job.

Skillset-diversifying is still an excellent option. It may be the best option for you. But if that’s the case, it’s still the best option if it’s not the only one out there. And if it’s not the best option, know that you do have others.