Young and Employed » success http://youngandemployed.com Perspectives on business from young marketing and public relations professionals Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:56:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 The Fun Theory http://youngandemployed.com/2009/11/03/the-fun-theory/ http://youngandemployed.com/2009/11/03/the-fun-theory/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:01:29 +0000 Francisco http://youngandemployed.com/?p=254 Question-surveyMy Friend Hisham posted a video of The Fun Theory (sponsored by Volkswagen ), and call me extra sensitive, whinny or plain girly, but I teared up looking at what some brains a lot of creativity and experience can accomplish. Maybe it was the music, the great ideas behind it, or maybe I’m PMS (I’m a guy!), but on the other hand it may be my inner creative, smart and experienced professional feeling jealous of these marketing geniuses behind the videos.
I paid my dues, went to college, grad school, work hard, and keep on learning as much as I can every day, yet knowing that I’m doing better than most is no consolation for me; I want more. I want to feel useful 24/7, I want a challenge, a team, a job well done, and someone to notice it.
I want to think that most of us feel the same way. This professional society where we go to school and learn ONE and only ONE thing prevents us from reaching our potential, yet the comfort of it makes it almost impossible to leave. One thing I learned when I was working for a company named after me, is that when there is no one else to do the job, you will learn how to do it. One day I was making a website, the next a white paper, and before the end of the week I was programming a GUI; heck I also learned how to make the best Egg, Ham and Cheese sandwich in the world; because there was no one else to do it.
Do we all need to go to such extreme measures in order to feel competent, challenged and successful? Shouldn’t this attitude be prized somehow by our employers? I guess the fact that I didn’t get laid-off when 30% of the company did back at the beginning of 2009, means they notice some of that attitude in me; but how long would that last?
I need and want more, more out of myself, but I also have the psychological burden of wanting someone to notice (and pay me for it). What can I do, if every project accepted does not present a challenge for me, and the ones that would are too scary for management to approve?
I ask the more experienced readers; what would you do?

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]]> http://youngandemployed.com/2009/11/03/the-fun-theory/feed/ 2 Get rid of the safety-net http://youngandemployed.com/2009/06/24/get-rid-of-the-safety-net/ http://youngandemployed.com/2009/06/24/get-rid-of-the-safety-net/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:17:27 +0000 Francisco http://youngandemployed.com/?p=34 I thought of starting this blog with a list of commonly known sayings about career choices, but I’m going right into business; I will start advising you to go into business… NOW!  Some years ago my brother took me to lunch and presented me the idea of starting our own business; he said: “There is no money, you will work longer hours, half the time you will have no idea of what you are doing, and you may cry from time to time.”  That was his best selling spiel, and as smart as I claim to be, I accepted… – Anes & Rincon LLC, doing business as Actions & Results Consulting, was born that day.

You may think that a start-up telecommunications consulting company has no room for a Marketing guy that won’t be doing a lot of marketing, but that’s where the professional-thinking process is flawed.  Not because my grad-school education  is in marketing (yes I’m bragging), makes me only useful for marketing; something I didn’t know at the time.  Making the long story short, you will never know what you are REALLY capable of, until you get rid of the safety-net.  I had no manager, no lawyers to get me out of trouble, no one to tell me if I was late or not, no HR defending my “rights”, no rights, and I ate Ham and Cheese Sandwiches every day for more than a year; but I learned that Marketing is just the tip of my own iceberg.

I learned that I am capable of programming in languages reserved for the best of engineers, that I can do the taxes for 3 people and one company, that I can write technical manuals of software worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, in short, I learned that I can do pretty much whatever I want.  When you start your own company you gain perspective into what we call corporate America and how useless most of us are, how a successful company can be run by a couple of talented and dedicated people, and how useless most employees are.  That’s why I have decided to continue my search for my professional limit again.

I will recommend you to go on and find that talent that makes you special, that hobby you have, or that thing you enjoy the most, I promise you that there is a market for it, and though not everyone will succeed, you will all learn from your failure (or failures if that is the case), but one thing college doesn’t teach us, is to reach our own limits.  I haven’t reached mine yet, but sure have gone way farther than I ever thought in the past, so has the company we started a while ago.  Some unpaid advertising would be to suggest you to visit www.ActionsResults.com, but I would never do that.

It’s our human nature of survival what makes us succeed beyond our own expectations when the safety-net is no longer there.

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