CommentaryHow not to lose things like jobs
What do you think Don's saying here?This one’s for all those out there like me, for all you dudes or dudettes just trying to make it as writers.
Really, it’s for anyone aspiring to be anything.
Learn from me, that you may not make my mistakes.
First, a story, then, the lessons.
The Story
Two weeks ago, I got the news: I was being taken off one of my favorite assignments, a bi-monthly feature about a local person or nonprofit organization doing something great in the community. The loss of the job stung, and for obvious reasons, it’s never good to lose future income. I’d been working this gig for about a year, and I’d fallen in love with it. It introduced me to so many wonderful, inspirational people.
Then with a few strokes of the keyboard and the click of the mouse, my editor took it away.
I’m not going to lie, I was pretty indignant. Who does this guy think he is? I thought. I don't fight for things very often these days. I'm really becoming a live-and-let-live type. I like it a lot. Makes life less stressful and more fun. But this, I had to fight for.
Long story short, after an increasingly heated email exchange, we arranged a meeting with his supervisor who, ironically, was the guy who’d approached me a year ago and offered me the gig.
You learn a lot when you’re being cut down to size. I was mad at the editor for taking it away and for defying any attempt on my behalf to reason with him. His reasons for taking it away, to be wholly truthful, made no sense. But that didn’t matter, because I’d done some things that he hadn’t liked.
The specifics aren’t important.
The lessons are.
Lesson 1: Make your boss’s life as easy as possible. Always.
I occasionally push deadlines. This is because I care a too much about my writing. We writers have to face this at some point, I guess: Not everything we right will be amazing. One of my other editors once told me that good writers’ work breaks down like so: 2 percent is the worst stuff anyone could ever read. (Been there.) 96 percent is solid, good and maybe moving and usually pretty sharp. The better a writer you are, the better your “solid” work will be. Then there’s the final 2 percent: The Hemingway-ness. Which, obviously, I haven’t mastered, because I use words like “Hemingway-ness.” You get the point, though. This work makes people weep. It moves people to start revolutions. It changes the world. And etcetera.
This applies to anyone trying to make it as anything. Your best days are rare, but so are your worst days. The days in between should be solid, and the better you get, the more solid you become.
All that to say, make your boss’s life as easy as possible, which in this case means, always meet your deadlines, and if you can, turn the work in early.
I’ve never not done a piece, but I’ve gone an hour or two over deadline before, and I hate it every time. I don’t know why I let myself do that, but I do. Rather, I did. No more.
Here’s why you should be working to make your boss’s life as easy as possible: Because that way, you’re guaranteed not to be making it more difficult than necessary. And here we come to Lesson 2…
Lesson 2: Never assume you’re OK.
One of the major reasons the editor took me off the assignment was because other correspondents were turning things in weeks ahead of time. And they were doing things this way, while I was doing things that way.
As you can probably imagine, I got mad about that, and told Mr. Editor that it was completely unfair for him to judge me on standards I didn’t know existed. (I really should have gone to lawyer school. For real.)
Then the supervising editor shot my argument all to heck. Mr. Editor can do what he wants, Mr. Supervisor said, and he supports him. But it’s probably a good idea to check in sometimes, and ask and see if there’s anything more I can be doing, if there’s anything I can be doing better.
“Don’t be like, super-needy,” Mr. Supervisor said, “but make sure you’re informed.”
This was like a revelation from God. Honestly, never once had that thought crossed my mind. To just ask if I could be doing better. For some reason, I’d just assumed that my editors would tell me. Then I remembered what it was like way back when I was an editor. I didn’t have time to coach my writers. Sure, if I saw something here or there, we’d definitely talk, and I tried to help them get better. But there was only so much I could see, and only so much time I had to spend trying to see those things. If a writer came into my office, however, and asked me to let him or her know how he or she could be getting better, then I could have definitely provided some helpful feedback, and it would have made both our lives more productive.
So was I mad that Mr. Editor took me off that job for unfair reasons? Oh yeah. I’m still not real thrilled about it. But that’s the nature of business, period, and of course I’m not going to hold some grudge—that would be a waste of energy and besides, he’s a good guy.
Fortunately, losing that gig isn’t going to make or break me, and it’s freed me up a bit to pursue other ideas. That’s fun.
But most importantly, it showed me some things about myself, and I learned.
One never can get enough of that.
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