Level 0: apply with resume to jobs board
Level 1: apply with skills profile to open roles
Level 2: make job hunt a social campaign
Level 3: send tailored pitch direct to hiring manager

Level 5: create value for company so they create a role for you when they weren’t even hiring

Some of my best co-workers over the years have ended up where they are via a level 5 approach to career opportunities. But how do you create a job for yourself where one doesn’t exist?

When companies post an open role that’s their way of advertising they need a solution to a problem they’ve been able to package up and define neatly enough to call it a role and put a price range on it in terms of expected value. In most cases, it’s all a pretty rough approximation. But the problems someone at a company has managed to define, package, and price are far from the only problems they’re facing and trying to solve every day, let alone all the opportunity to create more value they’d get to if they had the time, plus those they haven’t even thought of yet.

That’s where you come in. It doesn’t usually work if you come in from day one thinking about what you can get out of them – a job, money, etc. To create your own role, it works best if you truly respect and value the company, product, and mission. Ideally you are a customer. You can immerse yourself in their product, marketing content, hopefully get to know people who work there in a normal non-creepy way, and learn everything you can.

Then start doing stuff for them! If you make a really awesome project, be a great promoter, offer to solve a problem for free, or generally do something unasked that makes their life easier and better and makes them and the company look good, you’ll have some social capital to work with. Find something you do really well and some way it can be beneficial to them. (Be aware, however, that some of the fluffier stuff can be a tax on them as much as a help. For example, constant unsolicited email intros to your “network” for open ended convos with fans or fellow travelers who do not have a clear value prop.)

Use the initial value you create to get a meeting – buy them lunch or coffee – or email exchange to ask them some more open questions about their growth plans, pain points, etc. Be generous with ideas and actions to help.

Then put together a proposal. Create a role for yourself and a detailed 90-day plan of what you would do and the tangible outcomes you expect it to create. Offer to do it for cheap or free if you want, or put your desired price on it. Tell them if after 90 days both parties aren’t happy, no problem.

This is a long play. But even when it doesn’t pan out, you actually gain a ton of value just by doing it and it enhances your career value and opens other opportunities more than sending out apps.

Get creative. Be bold. Experiment. Have fun!

The next super secret private Inner Game of Startups newsletter went out today to paid subscribers.

$5/month to join this exclusive club with all the cool kids and get the weekly lowdown on all the stuff I’m going through as we build this company.

Preview of today’s edition: https://isaacmorehouse.substack.com/p/weird-start-weird-middle-great-ending

I’m a bad waiter.

No, not food service. Just waiting. On anything.

I’m probably in the borderline world-class range when it comes to taking action and getting things done when the ball is in my court. But I am easily bottom quintile when it comes to how I handle the ball not being in my court. I’m a fish out of water, grumpy, impatient, and impetuous.

This can mean big stuff, like waiting on big legal or financial things over long periods, or tiny stuff, like waiting 5 minutes for someone to call me at a scheduled time. I get a little crazy.

Most of the time, I end up doing something to try to push the action. Most of the time, it doesn’t do any good and sometimes it does harm. I have a hard time letting it sit.

I am getting better though! Or at least less bad. I’m learning to let the balls out of my court alone and go work on something else entirely to take my mind off of it. I’ve got to treat them as if they will never return and they are dead to me in order to really do this, which makes it kinda fun if/when they do, because it feels like a big bonus win.

So waiting, just like being silent, is something I’m working on getting better at. I don’t focus much on my weaknesses because it’s more fun and useful to double down on strengths, but I’m discovering waiting and silence to be strengths when applied tactically, so I’m building them up that way bit by bit.

I often post feature requests to the Crash Slack channel and say, “add it to the list”.

This means I like an idea, and I need that idea documented somewhere so I don’t accumulate cognitive overhead with it floating around, but I don’t know and can’t afford to figure out the relative importance of acting on the idea.

I do this in my personal life as well. Lists are my stress reliever. Once listed, outlined, calendared, or added to a to-do, the idea stops hyping me or splintering my brain and becomes resorbed into my system. My system is relaxing because it is trustless and thoughtless. It does all the work so my brain is free.

My inbox status is always zero I never miss my calendar and I obey my reminders. Therefore anything in those systems finds its appropriate place.

But the “add to the list” ideas are those without clear actions. I just keep them listed and jostle and move them up and down and let my brain see them there every so often as they seep into my subconscious. Eventually, maybe after days or weeks or occasionally months, I either act on them or delete them. If deleted, I trust they seeped in enough that any remaining value has already penetrated my brain and will express itself elsewhere.

I never leave the ball in my own court or leave important stuff in my own brain, unless it’s the stuff I can’t yet articulate or list (which, come to think of it, might be the most important stuff).

That’s how I survive and get a lot done without ever really feeling busy.

I’m sitting in a lab lobby waiting to get blood drawn. The receptionist is one of the rudest people I’ve ever overheard. Every time someone checks in, every word she says is edgy and nasty and she seems to have no tone except one that makes people feel like idiots.

It was like this last time I came here too. I don’t know what’s going on in her life or why this business allows her to keep her job, but it got me thinking about customer service. How is it learned?

I had several customer facing jobs when I was young, starting with door to door candy bar sales for little league and collecting payments from newspaper subscribers. I don’t remember being coached or taught but maybe I was. I do remember feeling nervous and awkward and reading people’s responses. I wanted to not make people unhappy, a tall order in door to door sales but easier when you’re 10. So I’d see what seemed to get the best responses and adjust. I wasn’t consciously systematic most of the time, just adjusting to the situation.

Over time, I learned lots of little things that worked every time. I got good at it. I practiced more running the concessions and pro shop at a small golf course then bagging groceries. Then I installed internet and phone systems at car dealerships and learned to deal with higher profile people in higher stress situations.

The apex of my customer service work was as a legislative assistant to a state representative. Most of the day was spent on the phone and email and physical mail between me (speaking in the voice of my boss half the time) and truly crazy, angry, or delusional people with an occasional nut job for balance. I turned it into a game and tried to find a way to make people happy while being disagreed with. I got good at it.

The ability to interact with lots of people and leave them feeling good after the interaction is really powerful. When I did fundraising for a non profit these skills with receptionist and assistants and gatekeepers worked magic on helping me get meetings.

I’m not sure why some people seem to learn customer service skills and some don’t. It really baffles me. I wish I could crack the code.

Oh, as an aside, say what you will about the U.S., but the customer service in this country is typically about ten times better than any other place I’ve been, save maybe heavily touristy places in Africa. Mises said under capitalism consumer kings rule. It feels so good to be made to feel like a king for merely existing. Vegas is probably the greatest example of this.

I don’t have regular routines. Well, I do, but it’s just that they are typically in short phases and I vary them a lot from phase to phase. I’ve never found any great benefit to a single type of routine to start or end a day, but I definitely benefit from changing things up to go with what phase of life I’m in.

My current routine:

• Get up at 7am (I set the alarm, but I’ve been waking up naturally between 5-6 every day. I’m getting old I guess.)
• Get my teen son up
• Do a 30 minute workout with him
• Eat eggs and meat
• Shower and head to the office
• Make pour over coffee
• Check messages and emails for emergencies
• Write a blog post
• Clear my inbox to zero
• Review my calendar an list out my to dos for the day
• Jump in (it’s usually about 9 or 9:30am by now)

The big difference in this sequence from most others I try is that I am not checking my phone or computer at all until after workout, breakfast, shower, arrival at the office, and even my cup of coffee. Though I typically start checking it during the coffee making. Still, it’s work for me to resist. When I awake, the first thing I want to do is obsessively get my inbox to zero and my task list ready and start knocking things off. It’s very hard for my brain to do anything until I have done that, which is why most of my morning routines involve immediate work for an hour or two, then blog post, then shower and late breakfast. But I gotta say, right now I’m liking this new one.

It’s more possible than it used to be because more of my work involves talking with people on West Coast time, so they don’t start getting into my day until 11am usually, which is awesome. The downside is dinner time with the family is a very popular time for meetings and calls and urgent emails from that side of the continent.

Oh, and if you can’t tell, I still can’t bring myself to stop daily blogging. It’s just too relaxing and grounding.

I love the idea of better and clearer markets in everything.

There already are markets in everything, but most lack clear information flow, have fuzzy incentives, and weak to no liquidity or money prices.

Individual earning potential is no different. There is so much that could be done to better allocate money across time slices to get capital to its highest time value location for individuals. When you need money isn’t always when you have it and vice versa. I’ve blogged before about a world where you can sell shares in yourself and securitize your future potential wealth.

But I want to know who would do it.

I want a marketplace where individuals can share their info and sell shares to one or many investors.

It’s gonna be hard to test the demand. It’s a new category and requires a lot of comfort with the idea, not to mention some parameters and assurances that legal issues won’t kill it. How to test quickly and easily if there are enough people who’d try it on both sides of the market?

My daughter brought home a busted up Motorola Razor flip phone yesterday. She got it trading stuff with neighbors.

It’s still a beautiful piece of hardware. She couldn’t understand how it was so cool when it came out despite doing nothing but calls and texts. I couldn’t explain.

It took me back to the days when cell phones all did nothing but calls, yet they were incredible status symbols. The model you had said so much. It was pure bling to go beyond a basic phone. And there was nuance in the choice.

The iPhone ended that. There is no way to signal status with a cell phone anymore. There’s nothing better than a standard issue iPhone. In fact, new models now rarely innovate, so even two or three models back is not any kind of negative status signal.

It’s interesting to watch in real time as goods go from luxury only, to widespread with luxury options, to standard commodities. Like cars, I suspect it will move into commodity plus collectible or customized market.

Maybe some retrofitted flip phone or custom home built job will be next.

Today’s writing is behind a $5/month paywall.

If it’s up your alley, check out this week and every other issue.

Since 2012, I have published over 1,600 articles, most of them on this blog. I’ve done daily blogging streaks of over a year, and several of six months. Every time I break it’s been a deliberate choice to try something different in my daily routine.

But I keep coming back.

There’s nothing like it for me.

Yet here I am toying with pausing it again for a while. The main reason is because I’ve started up a weekly newsletter called The Inner Game of Startups every Friday. This newsletter is more robust than most of my blog posts, and I’ve found myself jotting notes and partially writing the next issue during the week. I think about the content there, not my blog posts, and my daily posts are more of a chore to check off than something to put a lot of thought into.

Rather than fight it, I think I’ll try running with it. I rarely write long-form content, so if I’ve got a groove making it conducive, why not ride?

I won’t decide for sure today. Maybe tomorrow. It’s so hard to let go of daily blogging, but if I feel like it’s a fun healthy stretch, I’ll do it.

(The team won’t let me get away with “Crashboard” on a consistent basis. The dad joke and pun quotient is too high as-is).

Just wanted to share the current dashboard that job-hunters see on Crash. We’re just getting started! Lots of cool stuff to roll out to manage your career launch and win an awesome next job.

 

You can see that in addition to the profile itself, seekers can create, edit, and manage unlimited tailored pitches to specific companies, people, and roles. These are the real secret sauce of the job hunt.

Profiles can be used and shared individually anytime, but if you want to publicly launch on the Crash platform, you get a professional profile review, feedback, and a go/no-go for launch. (You can see my profile has been found wanting).

We’ve also got a launcher Slack group and a launch playbook to guide you to maximizing the job hunt campaign.

So much more to come!

Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I have a tortured relationship to goals.

Check that.

I have a tortured relationship to other people’s relationships to goals. Me and goals are just fine having mutual respect but little camaraderie.

But everyone else wants goals. Or at least they want to want goals in the absence of having a satisfyingly clear and intense sense of life to drive them forward without clear goals.

Scott Adams and Venkatesh Rao have both written stuff that affirms my anti-goal disposition. Especially the concept of planning to start instead of planning to finish. That resonates.

I like progress and consistency that compound more than I like any particular goal the compounding is supposed to achieve by a certain time. Like driving. The best driving is free and open highway driving where you don’t have a speed goal, you just speed up when it feels too slow, slow down when it feels too fast, and keep moving in the direction you desire.

I want happy accidents. I want turns I didn’t plan for. I want to drive forward as if it’s the only way until a new way pops up. Planning to start allows this, where plotting the whole path to the finish doesn’t.

This is fundamentally how I approach my own life and how I think careers are best approached. The challenge is how to scale this approach when you’re not flying solo.

I think I’ll write about this in my Friday newsletter this week. Thanks for the idea brain.

Go find some great talent to labor for you at Crash.co.

If you’re not hiring, go share a profile with someone who is.

If you don’t anyone hiring, go comment on someone’s profile with ideas, feedback, or support.

Finally it’s here

That time-of-my-escape-year

Except Lions fan

One of the most productive weeks I’ve had in probably a few years!

Or maybe it just felt like it since I’ve been physically unwell for so many weeks and feeling closer to normal feels like a million bucks!

I started a weekly startup newsletter and that turned out to be invigorating.

I’m going to try something I haven’t tried in a very long time and unplug entirely from work today and tomorrow. See how it goes.

I don’t like totally unplugging from work nor do I think it’s any kind of moral good to do so. So it’s more of a disciplined experiment to see if my mind comes back any sharper on Monday (which I just realized is Labor Day, one of those great phony holidays where I get more done because the world is quieter).

See you on the flipside.