Raised by a Career Counselor, I can never un-learn these lessons
Every week I get bagels with a group of friends from University. And every week while we’re ordering, I’ll invariably shirk my friends and start chatting up the staff of the establishment. I learned growing up that it was easy to acquaint myself with those around me and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized why. The answer was that my mother was a career counselor and throughout my entire childhood I learned at her feet how to connect with almost anyone and find something about them I could relate to. It is truly my super power and something I am grateful for every day.
While I use this superpower to befriend the local bagel folks and occasionally get a medium coffee upgraded to a large, I have also leveraged my superpower to network with people. This can look like trying to find a job for myself, but more often than not I find myself in situations where I am offering up some of the other (more specialized) things I learned from my mother to others. I have always been a huge advocate of helping people out — I know I wouldn’t be where I am without the support of others. But time and again when I connect with people about their career paths — whether it be as a coach, as a product manager, or just as a stranger who struck up a conversation at the supermarket — these are the lessons on which I base my professional advice.
“They payin’ me Mama — I should be payin’ them” — Frank Ocean
First and foremost, the biggest thing I try to tell people is that you should be doing something that you love. Before trying to comb my network and see if I can make some sort of connection, I’ll ask people when I talk to them: If you didn’t have this job, would this be something you’d be interested in doing during your free time?
If the answer is yes, then you’re probably on to something.
Especially during the pandemic, I find myself thinking about work and working at all hours of the day, night and weekend. I don’t just do this because there’s nothing better to do, but also because sometimes I’ll have a dream about a problem at work and think of the answer at 5 am on a Saturday. I like my job enough that it’s not something I put down and pick up around the weekend. There is no “loosening of the belt” because I’m always wearing sweatpants (figuratively and literally).
Money isn’t everything
When I was in college, thanks to my superpower I was able to land an internship at IBM in Poughkeepsie as an Electrical Engineer. During that summer I worked on both exciting technical problems and also got a brief foray into what would be my eventual career as a product manager where I designed and built a database management tool for a technician team. I accepted a return offer, but after going back to New York City for my senior year I ended up calling my manager and rebutting my offer. I apologized profusely for misleading her and thanked her for everything that I learned that summer.
So what changed from the end of the summer to fall?
The answer is that I realized location was a lot more important to me than I had thought. This was my first real job ever and while I was excited about the big paycheck and low cost of living in Poughkeepsie, I didn’t realize that there were things I was missing all summer. I had family in New York City and also it was New York City! The energy was something I really loved and the thought of leaving it killed me.
In hindsight I have oftentimes cursed myself for not sticking at IBM and “toughing out a couple of years.” But at the end of the day it wasn’t just about money or career prospects. There are so many factors that go into your job that you shouldn’t make your decision on only one or two.
You are your best advocate
No one is going to advocate for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. And you can’t feel like you’re stepping on anyone’s toes or think what others are going to think about you. Because at the end of the day it’s your life. You have to close the book on it and have to live with the salary, the location, the everything.
This also extends to career development. I learned early on that just because I had strengths, it didn’t mean the people around me would help me develop them or my weaknesses. This is because learning isn’t something you can rely on someone else for.
There’s going to be skills that you don’t have or opportunities that you want to pursue. If you aren’t able to speak up for yourself it will be hard to develop to your full potential.
Every interaction is an opportunity
There’s a reason why I talk to every stranger I can whether it be the people in line at a supermarket or those behind the counter at the bagel store. Because you never know what could happen. Usually the kindness doesn’t amount to much more than the occasional extra punch on a coffee card or free scoop at an ice cream store, but it is your responsibility to put a foot forward enough that if someone were to see you, someone were to meet you, they would have a positive reaction.
Because it’s not just about the people you meet. It’s the people that they’ve met and the people those people have met. At the end of the day that’s how you can be most successful. And it may sound corny, but being in the mindset that everything is an opportunity makes it a lot easier to recognize one when it comes along.
Eitan Rothman is a Product Manager at Macy’s Inc. Eitan works part time at Columbia University as a Heavyweight Rowing Coach and enjoys playing video games while working on his own coding projects.
