Advice for the self-employed (January edition)

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

I finished my last job of last year the week of Christmas.  I never have paid consulting work that late in the year.  The preceding months are a blurred pastiche of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never visited before.  Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness.  Be careful what you wish for.

 

Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions moving faster than my world.  I'm back to wanting more than what's on offer.  I'm impatient and paranoid.  Am I being deliberately excluded?  Are potential clients buying my old book instead of hiring the new me? The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints.  I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that last year was my financial high water mark. Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos.  A fortnight is a long time in self-employment.

 

I've been at this Headcount:1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't have guaranteed work lined up for January already.  Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Self-employment means that is that there's no boss to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to outmanoeuvre.  The brutal truth is that only thing you get to change is you.

 

January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits.  This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you.  Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer.  At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to escape.  Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days.  Diet and exercise might be change but not the sort you can really believe in. 

 

Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.

 

My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -

Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.

Not some rambling yearlong project.  You have one of those already: building your business.  Rather that small thing that is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else.  A one-off class.  A lecture. A walk to a place you've never been before.  An afternoon taking photos.  A blog post. Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it.  A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how minor, is not risible.

 

Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them alongside those larger ones that are not. But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on the far side of the smudgy glass.

And don't worry too much about 2012.  My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a handbasket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.

 

Happy New Year.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Getting good at the new thing

Kevin Kelly recently posted a great essay entitled What You Don't Have To Do.  He sets out hierarchy of ascending levels of 'working smart': -

1. Doing what is required
2. Doing more than is required
3. Trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are smart at
4. Making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective or that need to be done at all
5. Do only jobs (that really need to be done) that you are good at doing
6. Doing that work that no one else could do

This is a profoundly elegant understanding of what success looks like.  It's how a good careers have always unfolded: apprentice then journeyman then master.

When I think about those around me in unhappy careers (which is not the same as being in an unhappy workplace) oftentimes there's a disconnect between where someone believes he sits on this ladder and what the employer believes.  You won't be paid a premium to do something only you can do until you prove you can do the things anyone else can do*.   A clear sign that you've gotten this wrong is when your veiled threats about quitting are met with bemusement.  Or relief.  You will only extract a greater cost from your employer if you're operating at Level 6.  The leading lady can shut down production by staying in her trailer.  The extra playing Nervous Inmate #3 cannot.

Having a relatively new career in stand-up comedy to compare with longer ones in pharma consultancy and improv provides me with a natural experiment in this.  As a consultant I'd like to think I operate at Level 5 and occasionally 6; I deliver good work and many clients reckon that only I can do that work.  As a stand-up comic I strive to stay at Level 2 where success on any given night is measured in doing more than simply surviving the show.  But perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow is that even though I'm a 20-year improv veteran (i.e. I started this before consultancy) I'm no more than a solid Level 4.  Whilst I can be relied on to deliver a solid performance, I've never been indispensable to the long-term success of a show.

My proof that this is more than an unusually piquant blend of my standard brew of self-pity and smugness is that whereas I often get unsolicited approaches to do consulting work that is interesting, specialised (and therefore lucrative) in the comedy world I'm just another name on a list.  Without a constant effort keeping my name in front of promoters I don't get gigs.

Nevertheless though hard work and luck I have one aspect of my working life, consulting, where I'm seen as a bit special.   Regardless of what the motivational bloggers say, not everyone has or will ever have that.  The brutal fact is that even sweat and ego-free dedication do not guarantee progression in an adult life.  This is why a late-life career change scares us so: what if we run out of time to actually get good at the new thing?

* Freelancers: replace the phrase 'the employer' with 'the market'.

London. Dawn. An uneasy peace prevails

Got back to London yesterday after three weeks away. Mostly I was catching up with family in Australia in Far North Queensland and western New South Wales but I also managed the best part of a week seeing friends in Sydney and Wellington (NZ). With all the bad behaviour in England this week I found it harder and harder to 'sell' the UK as a sensible place to live when Oz is an option.

I like Great Britain and I love London but the ambient anger we've seen this week isn't going to dissipate until the city / country regains some sense of shared opportunity. I'm still trying to work out where I want to grow old but I'm not sure I'd stay in the UK if I were still young.

35 & unhappy at work?

How long does it take to get good at something? I mean genuinely properly world-class good? Good enough for the world to beat a path to your door. Good enough for you to consistently exceed the expectations of that world when it does.

The answer sort of depends on your chosen field but usually the answer is: -

Longer than you'd like

And certainly longer than every Internet self-help guru who says that whatever your age, all you've got to do is want something badly enough and put enough time aside for your ascent to be automatic. Even if you go buy some shiny Apple products to help you along the way.

Can we be honest? There are few fields of endeavour that you can enter for the first time at 35 years of age and make it to the very top. Even fewer at 40.

The obvious example is anything that requires extreme physical performance; only the deluded expect to become professional athletes after about 25.

But there are barriers even in seemingly non-ageist careers like Law when you do the maths. If you're going to start studying Law at 35 you're about five years away from actually practising and, unless you're truly exceptional, your chances of making partner at a Magic Circle firm are zero. At 40 you won't have the stamina to put in the hours required of an Associate. Of course you may still end up with a job that you love but can you honestly clock up the hours to get genuinely good?

Besides which, does the world really need another lawyer?

I've long envied those contemporaries who just knew what they were going to do in life. It gave them an internal consistency that translates into a massive career advantage. Early on they got called unimaginative and dull but as the years go by their ascents have come to be seen as inexorable.

I am not that person. Never was. I was the clever kid who, when told that he can achieve anything he wanted in life, believes it a little too much. Intoxicated by the possibility of everything led to years of focusing on nothing. Only in the past few years have I reconciled myself to the fact that I will never ascend to the top of any organisation because I've never shown the slightest loyalty to one.

People like me are plagued by the F Scott Fitzgerald observation that 'American lives have no Second Acts'. So plagued that often we never getting around to having a First Act.

So here's my tip: -

If you reach 35 unsuccessful and unhappy then you need to think very hard before cutting all ties with everything that's gone before in order to invent yourself anew. No matter how much you pretend to be a twentysomething just starting out it'll be clear to the world that you're older (but not wiser)

Any choice you make from now until retirement has to be informed by what you've done before, no matter how unsuccessful or unsatisfying it was. A change of direction is okay. As is a change of emphasis or company or country. All of these can be made to fit a narrative. What makes most sense is tracking down the coolest company in the world that does what you do now and taking a paycut to be there. Relocate at your own expense if you have to.

But that Brand New Thing that you've always liked the idea of doing? Well, sooner or later you need to accept that there's a real reason why it remains undone. 35 is about that time.

If my comedy was going to put me on TV it would have done so by now. But I would've had to have been monomaniacal in that pursuit from about 23 onwards and I wasn't. Now I'm 43.

I'm 43 and I'm writing this on a plane to Vienna where I have to make a lunchtime presentation before flying to Stockholm for a dinner with a different client. Neither company is the slightest bit surprised by my workload or my promiscuity. They value me and accept that others value me also. After all, I've been doing this gig (consulting to the health care industry) for fifteen years. I've earned the right to charge what I charge. Every day I set out to re-earn that right.

I acknowledge that I left it pretty damn late in starting my First Act. I also acknowledge that whatever I do next must be an extension on those last fifteen years, an elaboration at best. A complete departure would be a negation of all of that and be like diving back into a poolful of hungry twentysomething sharks.

I have accepted that in every other endeavour I will be no more than an enthusiastic, if perhaps gifted, amateur.

If you want to successfully change your life at 35 try re-reading your resume before burning it.

1,000 fans

Last night's gig involved a six-hour round trip to Lincolnshire on roads that were less trecherous than the British media had warned / wished. Happily I shared the trip with another comic, a newly arrived recruit to the legion of Australian stand-ups based here.

We spent much of the time puzzling over his big challenge: -

What is the quickest means for him to create sufficient demand for his stand-up such that he can provide for his wife and newborn daughter?

His parameters are simple: he sees himself primarily as a storyteller and really isn't interested in TV except to further his live performing. He is a terrific writer and fine comic with a long track record of great shows in Australia. What piqued my interest was his mention of 1000 Fans. This is a new sort of business model ascribed to Kevin Kelly, the logic of which is as follows: -

An artist can make a living from a thousand fans willing to part with a hundred dollars a year

So as well as creating cool stuff we have to usurp the means of distribution (promotion) of our work. The idea also raises something interesting about ambition: -

Is $100,000 p.a. enough?

This is a fascinating question to ask young comics. $100,000 is more money than most comics will ever earn in a year but far less than what they dream of. Like every kid footballer who believes he's the next Christiano Ronaldo, young comics seem to want Russell Brand's life or bust. My new Australian friend is mature enough to see that $100K a year doing the thing he loves as amounts to a successful life. Now all he has to do is find those thousand fans.

Kelly chose his two numbers carefully; 1,0000 is more people than you can possibly know well but not so many that they can't feel that they have a relationship with you, which speaks to the asymmetric (but not didactic) nature of 'fandom'. And $100 a year is neither a throwaway amount nor does imply an obsession.

Cultivating a thousand-strong fanbase means putting the effort into avenues of ongoing two-way dialogues. So setting up your own fan page on Facebook is a wholly illusory step in the right direction. For a stand-up comic the real gain is more likely to come from chatting to the punter who buys you a drink; this is someone showing that they want to give you more, that they want a relationship.

I am a huge fan of The Bugle, the free weekly podcast made by Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (of The Daily Show). I have no idea how many subscribers they have but right now I'm listening to a 'Best Of' episode featuring 20 minutes of fans' unsolicited remixes of old shows. Because the podcast is free its fans have found other ways to create the dialogue.

So Kelly's metric presents a stark question for a live performer: how many of your Facebook 'fans' would pay $20 a show to see you perform five times a year? You're welcome to include family and friends in that number.

A servant of two masters

I've mentioned previously that I sit on the board of a West London charity that has provided numeracy, literacy and IT education to adults in the area for over 25 years. More recently we've started offering Information, Advice & Guidance (IAG) and Jobsearch services. Given our success as providers of job skills it seemed like a natural fit: -

Not only will we get your ready for work, we'll take you to the next step and actually help you find that job

We were (strongly) encouraged to expand in this way by the various funding bodies that pay our bills and for a while we thought we congratulated ourselves on achieving a happy balance between education and IAG. Alas, charitable funding is as much beset by the vagaries of fashion as any sector I've ever encountered and IAG is the flavour of the moment.

The focus-on-the-individual ethos that served us so well as an educational provider since 1983 is far less suited to the throughput-driven IAG sector. Especially as IAG funding comes with a much more rigorous benchmark than we're used to: does the client have a job?

To maintain funding for our educational operation we've been forced to link courses directly to IAG. Whereas previously our IT training was open to anyone who walked through our door, nowadays it must be attached to the job market. So our ability to help, say, a mother who doesn't need paid work but rather just wants the IT skills to email her family in Somalia, has diminished to almost zero.

Our passionate, hardworking staff are servants of two masters. As indicated by sick leave and absenteeism amongst our volunteers, the stress levels are now worryingly high. We'll keep fighting to maintain our ability to serve our real customers, the people who walk through the door but too often this puts us in conflict with those who write the cheques.

I worry for our future.

I am businessman

As I mentioned, Katy and I spent last week with my parents in Provence. We spent six days on a barge eating and drinking our way down the Rhone from Provence to Aigues-Mortes, an experience that was as good as it sounds.

Le Phonecien had eight other guests; a Frenchwoman, two American couples and three Ukrainian men (I know this sounds like a bizarre retake on the Gilligans Island premise). Our three Ukrainian shipmates were friendly, interested and interesting but they had almost no English between them. Not to be bowed by this they were quick to point out that no one else spoke any Ukrainian or Russian whatsoever.

Roman and Andrei declared that they businessmen, meaning that they were self-employed. Naturally I braved the exhausting labyrinth of half-grasped meaning to see what sort of connection could be established between my world and theirs.

I learned that there is still plenty money to be made in post-Soviet Ukraine if you're smart enough (read: brutal enough) to win the battle for ex-government assets like hotels, factories, farms and mines.

Conversely, the idea that I made my living helping companies solve problems was so incomprehensible to them that I came across as basically effeminate. Far more interesting was my father, a farmer in Australia who also had a resort property in Far North Queensland. Here were proper assets. Tangible things. Things worthy of the conversations of men.

I'm just glad I didn't lead with 'theatre producer'.

Risky business

I remember the day I told my mother that I was quitting my job in the marketing department of Coke Australia to work for myself. An inveterate worrier, she despaired that I was throwing away job security to chase a pipe-dream.

That was almost twenty years ago.

Yesterday I was talking to three friends all working in the UK banking sector. They lamented the fact that their current jobs would most likely end after a single meeting with the boss. These days having a spread of consultancy clients around the world and at different stages of the decision cycle looks a lot more secure than waiting around to see if you survive the next round of downsizing.

Interviewing

Andrew Watts is a thoughtful man