David Herz for the Work You Love

I have a colleague who backstabbed me and ratted me out on a work issue that included us both. Henceforward How do I deal with him in a civil Manner?

You stop using these loaded words for one. He did something you didn't expect. He related information that you would rather he not have related. Or he told an untruth. And you turned it into something. You acknowledge what happened, tell him what didn't work and ask him how things occurred from his side.

Also, if he “ratted you out,” it sounds like you were engaged in activity not consistent with what is expected of you at your job. You can't be ratted out for doing what you were expected to do. That's just relating fact. So you step up and take responsibility for not being completely responsible about doing your job, and you create a new promise, and live into it.

I'm 38 and single. If my job is making me feel like I'm wasting my life away, I only have $12,000 saved, what should I do?

For some people twelve thousand sounds like a fortune. I say it's time for an adventure. Get rid of as much of your stuff as you can, get free of leases and other commitments, then buy a one way ticket anywhere, and then figure it out. Land somewhere you've never been, give yourself a ridiculously small budget, and figure it out. If you're inclined write about it. You might want to read My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Humble Quest to Improve Himself by Living as a Woman, Becoming George Washington, Telling No Lies, and Other Radical Tests. You might also want to start writing down ten ideas a day, a la James Altucher Confidential - Ideas for a World Out of Balance.

Or you might try something radical like bringing excellence and passion to your job. If you don't like it anyway, why not come up with ten ideas a day about how it could be made better, and then go to your boss and present the top ones at the end of the week. If your job really is a waste, come up with ten things you could do that would actually be worth your time and the company's money.

The thing is you could go out on an adventure or take exactly what you have and make an adventure out of that.

And do the The Landmark Forum, an amazing investment in creating the life that suits you.

Another question off Quora:

I am 16 years old and have an EXTREME fear of being unexceptional. I have had panic attacks on multiple occasions triggered simply by the thought of leading an average life, (i.e. a 9–5 job, salary under 4–500k). It is at the point where I can't even bring myself to get a normal job for fear that I will get stuck in it. When I think about not being completely perfect, I get nauseous like someone punched me in the stomach, lose my appetite, my blood pressure rises to about 170/120, I hyperventilate, and start crying.

You will never be completely perfect. Anyone who thinks he is has already lost the game. Or you can say that you are perfect as you are, complete with being imperfect.

I think what's missing here is rigorous activity. Take a job, any job. Scoop ice cream. Bring excellence to your job. You'll come to realize there is an art to making the perfect scoop. Then you'll see there are a thousand ways you could do the job better, and you'll start doing those, and you'll notice how complex the world is, and you'll realize you can never be perfect.

Or take up a sport. Do you think you could hit a hole in one with every swing of a golf club? That would be perfect. No professional golfer has ever shot an 18.

The problem is that you think of imperfect as something being wrong. It's not. It's an opportunity to look at how the world could be better, and how you can take your game up a notch.

But you want to make it a game, not a have to. If you choose to bring excellence to everything you do, even if it's digging ditches, it will be anything but an average life.

Sometimes, I am just blown away by who people are. I share with you here a letter from a fellow member of the Kappa Alpha Society (not the Order, of recent ill repute):

A++os Herz,
I hope your summer has been going brilliantly. I have finished my internship in India working with drones and am back in the USA. I am proud to say I learned a lot and am very excited to see what my field holds for me in the future. I am now trying to figure out what my immediate plan is post graduation. I am debating between a master's, a job, or having my own startup. I eventually would like to have my own startup, a drone services firm, but I understand the amount of work that it takes. I am a passionate and actionable person, so I think this is a viable option for me soon.

I am very interested in University of Pennsylvania's Masters of Urban Spatial Analysis, and was wondering if you had any advice for me to have a leg up in this admissions process.
As for jobs, the firms you shared with me are both very exciting, and to work with either of them would be a very good fit for me. I also wanted to know if you had any contacts at . . . ?

These are my ideas, and any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks,

A++ S++

I think you are missing something huge here, and that is that you are a gift to these companies. Your energy, your desire, your interest, your love for this field are apparent.

Most companies are desperate for qualified people. They advertise a position (they hate to do that), and hundreds of people apply that think they can do anything that is within a hundred miles of the work. The company reluctantly sifts through resumes to find the few that will take the least training to be acceptable for their purposes, and will have to waste time training, and then be left wondering if this person is going to split when the thing he really wants comes along.

And now you come along, and give them the chance to avoid all this initial pain. You are the Gift. You have to get that.

As to the startup, it is a tough road to travel, but can have great upsides as well. But here's the thing, you can bring a startup mentality to your job (I've heard it called Entreployee and Intrapreneur), and create unlimited pathways to growth within a job.

The other benefit of having a job is making your mistakes on someone else's dime, and having colleagues who can support you. A mentor is a fine thing to have, and you might be better able to find and interact with one when you work for someone else.

As I think about it, you might even want to choose your job based on the mentor-ship and community that will be available. This is the community that will be yours for the rest of your career; so you might as well start with the best. They say that a big chunk of Silicon Valley came out of the startup that was PayPal.

That said, a master's might also make sense. But again, why do it on your own dime? Why not find a job in the Philly area doing the work you love, and have your employer sponsor your master's. I don't know how viable this is, but it could be a good fit if you can balance the demands of the two. You could do your research in an area with direct applicability to your work. But even to this, you could bring the Intrapreneur mindset. Get on a project with your adviser that will feed into the network I suggest below. Then take it with you.

What's clear, to me at least, is that you should not wait for job openings to apply to the companies that interest you. You should get clear on your unique value proposition, and let them know you are available. You should also talk to as many people in these companies as you can, after you've done as much research as you can, and get their pain points, and what you could do to alleviate them.

If you do it right, you could even make a business of being the connector in your industry as you start to go deep in these companies. For instance, as you are talking to one and get his pain, you might be talking to another and get his solution. Then you start the Spatial Analysis newsletter to share ideas. You get on their radar every two weeks with another interesting article (it doesn't have to be one you wrote), you let them know you are there to field their questions and find answers, and you become the go to guy in the field. You bring on a few other experts to contribute, and soon you are the Huffington Post of Spatial Analysis, bringing in the planning people, the equipment people, the software people, the other disciplines that integrate with yours.

It's just an idea. Right now, it looks like you are coming from a conversation of scarcity, when there is an abundance of possibility around you. I've written about it elsewhere, and it's not my idea anyway, but your path forward would be well served if you become an idea machine. See my friend James Altucher for more on this. And you don't have to buy his stuff to get a ton of value. I particularly love his weekly podcast.

So I don't know folks at . . . . The fact that I know anyone close to this industry is a fluke, but hey, there are a lot of flukes out there, and if you just reach out a little more, you'll probably find you are connected in many more ways than you could imagine.

And if you are ready to go to work on this now, I invite you to:

Schedule Your Conversation Now

Written in response to a question on Ivy Ties asked by a young lady graduating with a business/operations management degree.

First, you are young. You have the ability to pivot on a dime. Don't worry about how someone else says your prior coursework is going to affect your future.

This is a bad question to ask though. What you should be doing is taking an inventory of your life. What themes show up, what skills do you like using? What have you done that you got so caught up in that you lost track of time? Those are the kinds of things that should give you direction. Not what some other bozo says is good right now.

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