From work we loathe to work we love—in 48 days!

Published 7/4/06

If you have a job interview tomorrow afternoon, Dan Miller says you should cancel it.

The author and career “coach” quotes research that says 83 percent of executives are more likely to hire candidates in the morning and not after 11 a.m. And certainly not on busy Mondays or casual Fridays. If you get to schedule the appointment, says Miller, make it between 8 and 10 a.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays.

Insights on interviewing—and other vocational quest strategies—are all addressed in Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love. In the book’s Introduction, Miller identifies his reading audience: “lifebotchers,” “wasteoholics,” “insaniacs” and others who spend their lives doing work they loathe. Using his successes and failures as a therapist, psychology professor, business owner, counselor and author, Miller offers a step-by-step plan for tallying one’s God-given skills, abilities, personality traits, values, dreams and passions. He then coaches readers on how to position themselves for the job search, leading them in a 48-day quest from work they loathe to work they love. I’ll let you read the book to see how Miller, president of The Business Source, came up with the 48 days theme.

His research also found that…

■ Male suicides peak on Sunday nights, as many men sense the futility of their careers. Likewise, more people die at 9 a.m. on Monday than any other time of the week.
■ More than 70 percent of white collar workers are unhappy with their jobs.
■ The average length of a job stint in America is 3.2 years—meaning that people can expect to have 14 to 16 different jobs in a 45-year span.
■ Ten years after graduating from college, 80 percent of college graduates are working in a field totally unrelated to their college degrees.
■ I.Q. contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, while 80 percent is due to other forces.
■ Technical skill and knowledge accounts for about 15 percent of an individual’s success while 85 percent is due to personal skill—attitude, enthusiasm, self discipline, desire and ambition.
■ 97 percent of human beings do not have a plan of action.

Perhaps this is why on the 48th page of his 48 Days, Miller notes, “The difference between a dream and a goal is that a goal is a dream with a timeframe of action attached.”

Back to the facts…
■ In the last 10 years, small business has been responsible for 71 percent of the country’s new jobs. Likewise, small business now employs 54 percent of the American work-force. This growth trend will continue.
■ In the next four years, 50 percent of the work-force will consist of independent contractors and free-lance laborers.
■ 20 million Americans are now telecommuting, working in a location distant from their company’s headquarters.
■ Only 12 percent of job openings in the country appear in the newspaper, on the Internet or in another form of advertising.
■ One executive’s interview method was to ask candidates out to lunch and request that they drive. This interviewer believed that the organization of someone’s car was a clue to the organization of the rest of their life.
■ 50 million new jobs will open up in the next five years with a demand for new and creative roles involving people who are peacemakers, storytellers and healers. Seriously. (This from The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
■ The downsizing of corporate American and the accompanying insecurity have prompted the idea of a core career supplemented by 1 or 2 other streams of income.

Miller knows this subject well. He has seven areas of income, including coaching his clients on redirecting their careers, selling books and computerized profiles, writing for magazines and Web sites, and employing facilitators around the country to teach his 48 Days philosophy.

You can check out his Web site and even find some interactive career-related assistance at 48days.com.

And when you go interview for that work you love some morning, remember that, according to Miller, many human resource staffers say they make a decision within the first 10 seconds.

Oh.

How one man landed on the disabled wrist list

Published 6/27/06

When x-rays two weeks ago revealed that none of the 15 bones in my wrist were broken, I immediately began to treat my injury using the R.I.C.E. method.

As all orthopedic experts know, R.I.C.E. stands for Rest, Ice, Compression and Eat as much Chinese carryout as possible. Okay, the “E” actually stands for Elevate which any fool would know. But when you’re smarting from an acute physical infirmity, you need to eat as much comfort food as dietary laws allow.

Although I got all the medical attention I needed after my injury, what really hurt was that I didn’t get the media attention that a lot of other newsworthy wrists are getting these days. For example, two weeks ago this paper carried the headline “Oden to have wrist surgery Friday.” Unless your Internet connection is down, you probably know that this surgery patient was Greg Oden, the 7-foot high school Indianapolis basketball star who has attracted Sports Illustrated, USA Today, ESPN and other national news media to the big city south of here. This is a teenager who had his surgery appointment announced in newspapers coast to coast.

As most baseball fans know, the wrist pandemic has touched the carpal bones of Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield and both the Dereks, Jeter and Lee.

Like these players, but with a lot less fanfare and no calls from the press, I suffered a direct impact injury to my carpal ligaments and landed hard on the day-to-day list during a key stretch of the interdenominational fastpitch softball season. Now that there’s time and space to tell the story, I was attempting to score on a wild throw to third. I thought I could go in standing up when I realized that the catcher was waiting for me, ball in glove, and a little impatient with my progress toward the plate. As I faced down this catcher who had the advantage of full protective gear I knew my scoring would take a heroic exhibition of acrobatic athleticism. But as I assumed the athlete’s sliding posture, and fortunately memory fails me at this point, apparently, I caught a cleat in the ground and did a handspring that resulted in a hand sprain and an easy out.

For weeknight athletes, the sprained wrist is a fairly common injury. I know this to be true. I broke my wrist in a game of driveway basketball a few years ago. Craaack! And, as they say, the wrist was history.

That’s why it’s important for the injury prone, who don’t have team doctors, to master the RICE approach to wrist treatment…

Rest: The first 24-48 hours following the injury are the most critical, according to wrist specialists, who caution you to avoid activities that cause pain. That’s why I immediately informed everyone that I would not be sweeping the carpets, dusting the furniture, ironing the underwear or taking out the trash until these activities became more enjoyable. (I did discover, however, that since it was my left wrist in need of rest, I could still play tennis almost every day.)

Ice: Ice packs on sprains during those 48 initial agonizing hours can take the form of frozen vegetables so the bag can be re-used, say the more creative practitioners. But I have found that cartons of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, wrapped around the wrist, are a tastier way of treating a sprain. Since it’s critical not to ice the site more than 20 minutes at a time, I suggest that you eat the gallon fast.

Compression: My doctor fitted me in an ugly wrist brace that looks like a hush puppy for the hand with holes for the toes, or in this case, fingers. He said to take notes if my fingers became blue or tingly. I’m glad I have my right hand fingers to take notes because the fingers on my left hand have been cobalt blue and immobile for about a week now.

Elevate: I’m writing this with my wrapped left hand in the air, upwards of my heart, as if I knew the answer and wanted to tell you.

But, hey, if I really knew the answer, I wouldn’t be handspringing into home at this decade of my life, nor would there be ice cream running down my wrist wrap, and I wouldn’t be writing notes to you about how to get off the Disabled List Wrist.

When it came to boats and travel, father knew best

Published 6/20/06

When I forward Jesse an online article about a domestic issue that I know he’ll appreciate and that I barely understand, and then sign it “Dad,” I always feel like I’ve committed identity theft. Even after 21 years of fathering, I just have not grown into the title. When I pick up the phone and the voice on the other end says, “Dad,” my first impulse is to reply, “Uh, hold on. I’ll see if one’s here.”

Maybe it’s the eternal adolescence syndrome suffered by a subculture of late bloomers within the subculture of baby boomers. At a fatherly age, I hate tinkering under the hood, my Craftsman ratchet set shines from lack of use and I still listen to Steppenwolf. Can I really be a father?

But the question may actually be, “Can I really be a father like my father?” My father took wild-game trips to Wyoming to hunt elk and deer. My father bought a fishing boat which he hitched to the family wagon for vacations. My father then traded up to a fiberglass birch bark canoe which we took to Canada to paddle in Ontario’s lakes while camping in its parks. My father took me to Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium to see the New York Yankees and their legendary pin-striped lineup of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Tom Tresh, Tony Kubek, and company. Frequently, my father took us kids to the zoo. Fortunately, he always brought us back.

As a father myself, I have tried to forward many of these experiences into the life of my own son, although keys are probably the only thing I’ve really ever hunted for. I’ve fished, too—for loose change. Yes, I guess I have deprived Jesse of the many manly values of hunting and fishing.

That may explain why at one point when my son was in junior high, at a time when we were having our generational differences, he looked at me and said in a tone of voice that suggested he was missing out on developmental tasks of early adolescence, “I want to lift weights, drive speedboats, ride motorcycles and see every major league ballpark in the country.” I knew the comment was a frontal assault on my obsession with dragging him into bookstores and used record shops while discussing my favorite existentialists.

Well, I could take a hint. In the next few years we took in an Indianapolis 500 auto race, took a boat—a pontoon speedboat, that is—out on Lake Monroe and became more aggressive about getting into the game. This summer we’re hitting the tennis courts, the softball diamond and the free weights when we can’t afford the pricey ones. We do this as a father and son who have only one year until the son’s wedding. (For the sake of his fiancée, we will not be racing motorbikes.)

My father’s work took me, by the age of 10, to the Southwest and the Northeast and—by proximity—to Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Knott’s Berry Farm, Washington, D.C., the deserts of Arizona and the hillsides of Pittsburgh.

Since Jesse didn’t have the advantage of travels by transfers and has lived his entire life in Madison County, we’ve compensated by sending him to Ireland, Mexico, Japan, Jamaica, Kenya, England and to D.C. for a semester. Okay, so we overcompensated a bit.

When my father would take us up to canoe Canada, we would stop overnight in these little towns where we’d hear echoes of French-accents. On mornings when I woke up in Wawa, Whitefish Falls or Thunder Bay, I thought I had died and gone to…Paris. The car trip culminated with several nights in a tent, where I now woke up and thought I had died and gone to...North Dakota. It’s not unusual for hot August nights in Ontario to become freezing August mornings.

Treks to Canada, led by my father, were one way of seeing the world—the world outside our neighborhood—and understanding the differences in geography, culture, custom, language—or at least accent—and pronouncing them good. If my son has experienced any of that with his old man, he can thank his grandfather—my father—just as I did this Father’s Day weekend.