Category: Career Management

Getting Ahead As a Lone Writer

Writers are often the only person in a company who create and maintain documentation. Lone writers who operate without a dedicated budget or specific managerial guidance find it hard to excel in their work. In the 29 February STC webinar, Kai Weber will draw on his years of experience to show lone writers how to make the most of this “benign neglect”:

• Develop your skills—and your career
• Raise your profile with management and colleagues
• Contribute to a corporate communication strategy
• Help your company to turn documentation from a cost center into assets

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Registration for the 2012 Technical Communication Summit is Now Open

Registration for the 2012 Technical Communication Summit is now open. The summit will be held in Rosemont, Illinois, from 20 to 23 May 2012.

The first 100 people who register before 31 December 2011 are eligible for the really early bird rate ($795 US for members). To register or for more information, see the STC website.

The summits, which are the STC’s annual conferences, are the largest gathering of technical communicators in the world. The Lone Writer SIG has had a strong presence at the summits for several years. We will publish more information on SIG events at the 2012 summit closer to the event.

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Calendar Updated for 2012

TheLone Writer SIG website calendar has been updated for 2012. The calendar includes information on conferences, workshops, and other events of interest to lone writers.

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Scrum and the Single Writer

WritesUA features an article by Kathee Kuvinka on working as a lone technical writer in an agile environment. Check it out.

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Pushing Ourselves Out of the Corner: The Reading List

In the December issue of STC’s Intercom magazine, I mentioned in the conclusion of my article that I’d post a suggested reading list. These are books that I think will take you further into the points I discussed, mainly because they’re books I read in the year(s) leading up to me writing that article (in July).

Cohen, Allan R. and Bradford, David L. Influence Without Authority. Wiley. 2005.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam. 2006.

—————. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Bantam. 2007.

Hart, Geoffrey J. S. “Statecraft: Applying the Science of Politics to Office Politics.” Intercom, September/October 2009.

—————. “When Statecraft Fails: Tips on Surviving the Great Game.” Intercom, November 2009.

Patterson, Kerry, et al. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. McGraw-Hill. 2002.

—————. Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Talking about Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior. McGraw-Hill. 2004.

Sutton, Robert I. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Business Plus. 2007.

Dreher, Diane. Your Personal Renaissance: 12 Steps to Finding Your Life’s True Calling. Da Capo Press. 2008.

Lobenstine, Margaret. The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. Broadway. 2006.

Moore, Thomas. A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do. Broadway. 2009.

Carlson, Richard. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work. Hyperion. 1998.

Rosengren, Curt. 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work. Available from http://www.passioncatalyst.com/101ways/.

Kawasaki, Guy. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything. Portfolio Hardcover. 2004.

Slim, Pamela. Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. Portfolio Hardcover. 2009.

If you have any to add, please share them in the Comments section!

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Free Teleclasses In The Upcoming Weeks

A long-time acquaintance of mine, Curt Rosengren, just wrote to tell me that he’s offering a couple of free one-hour teleclasses in the coming two weeks.

• June 24 – How to make hiring YOU a no-brainer!
• July 1 – Get Wild About Work and make passion your competitive advantage

If you’ve not yet heard of Curt, or heard me talk about him, he’s a self-admitted Professional Malcontent turned Passion Catalyst, having pulled himself out of an unfulfilling corporate career and planted himself into a new life path that re-introduced passion, and near-euphoria, into his professional and personal lives. Through his Passion Catalyst coaching business, he’s helped countless others find their own ways out of malcontent. I discovered him through his original blog, Occupational Adventure, and have continued to follow him through his newest blog, the M.A.P. Maker. M.A.P. Maker is a self-required daily read for me, and I continue to trawl his Occupational Adventure archives and share the gems I find with friends and colleagues.

If you find yourself caught in a period of personal or professional frustration, suffocation, or desperation, time with Curt in one of his classes or in one-on-one sessions invariably helps people start reconnecting with their dreams and with themselves.

Whether you attend the teleclasses or not, I encourage you to also check out his books:

• The Occupational Adventure Guide (ebook)
• 101 Ways to Get Wild about Work (paperback or ebook)

If you get the latter book, be careful about bringing it to work as co-workers will quickly develop the habit of helping themselves to your copy.

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Contemplating Natural Talent

While catching up on some reading in my RSS aggregator, I discovered a post that Tom Johnson wrote about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers.” About an hour later, while looking at Seth Godin’s blog feed, I discovered he’d responded to Gladwell’s book back in December.

Reading both of them, and having a strong reaction to both, prompted me to pull “Outliers” out of the middle of my to-read stack and read it. In arguing that natural talent isn’t much more than a myth, Gladwell states that:

  * Your success is greatly determined by where and when you were born.
  * Superstardom is achieved with 10,000 hours of hard work.
  * Where you were born + when you were born + working 10,000 hours (or more) > (is greater than) natural talent.

I know people with natural talent at something who’ve never gone anywhere with it because they lacked ambition and possessed an aversion to (or fear of) hard work. I know people who created extraordinary lives for themselves with their talent. There’s little doubt in my mind that work and experience can help you hone and harness natural talent. But it can’t replace it. Maybe I’ve hung around too many musicians and artists, but I believe there’s an intangible “something” that natural talent brings to the equation that simply cannot be matched by learned skill.

Talent exists at a cellular level. It affects how you experience the world with your five senses. Natural talent frames, from the start, how you see the world and all that’s in it. It frames how you process information for your own understanding, how you interpret what you see, how you transform what you know into something that the world—or some part thereof—can subsequently use. Natural talent overrides many of the objections to pursuing an activity that someone not similarly talented would have to beginning the pursuit. Someone with talent for neurosurgery has no reservations about the years of education, training, expense, and sacrifice that are required to become a surgeon. Someone who is capable of learning to be a surgeon—but who lacks a natural talent for it—would be overwhelmed by the work and not interested in pursuing it.

To say that something can be achieved with hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of hard work, and not so much by natural talent, is an oversimplification of a complex human process that is driven by intelligence, creativity, emotion, psychology, desire, and so on. A person born with a gift for language and communication, even with 10,000 hours of work, will not be nearly as effective in a career in biostatistics as they would be in a career that calls upon their talents. Using his logic, I could have been a successful computer programmer except that I would have been miserable at a personal level, because I would have been doing something that ran counter to the gifts I was born with. I didn’t enjoy my programming courses. I worked hard for the grades I got and felt out of my element. Sure, I could have stuck with it, overcome initial challenges, and made a living at it.

But I didn’t want to.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—that natural talent drives desire, fuels passion, feeds energy, defines goals, maps a course. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look manageable, not insurmountable. It makes challenges look like welcome creative opportunities. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look like a darn fine way to spend a life.

To deny the importance—even the existence—of natural talent is to devalue the singular contributions made by the people through whom ideas and visions and theories came. It is to say that anyone could have done what Albert Einstein did, that anyone could have seen the world in the same way that he did—he simply got there first.

What Gladwell’s book should offer all of us is another opportunity for self-reflection, the kind that Tom Johnson openly engaged in on his blog. An opportunity to recount and document our individual journeys, the crossroads we’ve navigated, the decisions that we regret or revel in. A “how did I get here from there” analysis can make us more comfortable with and accepting of who we are, where we are, the decisions we’ve made, the value we offer, and where we are headed. If it doesn’t lead to greater self-acceptance, it should lead to greater self-awareness. Such analysis can dispel any victim myths we may have been telling ourselves (and, likely, others), where we’ve been too passive, where we’ve clearly been “working in flow” (read: on our path), and what things make our hearts sing or sink. It can illustrate for us whether we need a course correction.

This lifeline/timeline analysis is one that every career and life coach makes you do when you go to them to “sort things out.” In Tom’s case, his analysis proved to be a validation that he is where he wants to be and, maybe, is “supposed” to be. For others, the analysis may lead to an entirely different conclusion about their own lives. In either case, the folks doing this analysis become more conscious of what they’re doing, thereby kicking themselves off auto-pilot. Extending the analysis to look at the activities and decisions of people we respect and admire—without comparing ourselves to them—and being aware of our reactions to them is almost as telling as self-reflection. Does watching a former colleague turn being laid off into a launching pad for their own business or career change stir up envy, or old dreams and goals of your own? Or does it help you reaffirm why you’re content—consciously content—with where you are and what you’re doing?

Like Seth Godin, I may not always agree with Gladwell but I can always count on him to provoke thought, to make me, if not change my beliefs and opinions, reaffirm to myself why I formed them in the first place.

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