If you haven’t heard the metaphor, it goes a little something like this. In the giant corporations with hundreds of millions of free cash flow, a great deal of that money is generated by technically advanced individuals who have invented something great, or made excellent improvements to something mediocre. Where are those geniuses? You don’t see them when you visit the skyscraper of corporate HQ. They’re somewhere in an isolated cubicle farm. In the dark. In a basement. Shielded from the normies. They are like mushrooms.
My friend Norman keeps reminding me that I should be telling young people about the importance of communications, and so let me do that. Uh. Communication is important. Actually, communication is everything. It is the reason the internet has changed the world, because now we can all communicate with anyone anywhere. But here’s the thing. It’s not enough just to communicate. You have to communicate well. That’s why the sales guys at the mega software company make more money than the developers who build the product. They generate the cash. They know that “If you build it they will come” is just half the story. Just because somebody comes to ogle your brand new x doesn’t mean they are going to empty their pockets and buy it. This is a fantasy:
This scenario is only the case for those known to the industry as first adopters. First adopters are never enough to sustain any business. You don’t make money until you engage the mainstream. The mainstream has to be convinced. How do you convince the mainstream? With drama. If you are unable to create and sustain drama, everybody except the nerds and the geeks will become bored with you and all your technical genius mumbo jumbo. That is, until the zombies come, then they’ll want what you have, but they won’t give you money for it, they’ll shoot you and take it from you. In the meantime, you need to communicate well in order to make the sale.
Here is a seven minute lesson.
And guess what? You have to sell yourself too, as well as you technical capabilities. You have to become more than just the sum of our technical competencies. You have to become:
Someone trusted.
Someone good to work with.
Someone adaptable.
Someone worth showing off.
You may be all of those things, but you are none of them until you can convince everyone around you that these are your strengths. You have to figure out a way so that you are not just another gear in the machine, but the kind of gear that others want to engage. You may be in the belly of the beast, but your fellows have to be comfortable with you there. And of course, your boss had to know and recognize. It goes without saying that if these are not your current strengths, you better start working on them.
Here’s what a lot of young professionals forget. You will soon have spent more years on your job than you spent in college. If you’re not growing as much as you did in college, then you’re just taking up space. So you really need to engage some ambition and quit acting like you have overcome all there is. It is a big deal to get a foothold into the upper middle class. Nobody can take that away from you. Congratulations, you won the 5k, but the marathon has just begun. There are literally millions of people who make six-figure salaries. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you if your career stalls at 105k per year. Nobody.
Here’s what happened to me.
I just recently had gotten married and moved from NYC to Atlanta. My young beautiful wife was pregnant and we moved into a swanky apartment complex in the area known as ‘Outside Northwest’. We got a sweet two bedroom apartment and we were both working. Everything was so cheap compared to NY. We soon got a new car and started looking around for a place to buy. I was an independent contractor with five figures in the bank and she was working at the Olympic Village.
Life was great. Better than great. It was easy for me to decide to close my business and get a full-time job for the benefits I needed for my growing family. A small sacrifice. For the first time in my career, I worked with sales reps that weren’t all snakes, and they gave powerpoint presentations that mades sense and were not boring. I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen technology presented so clearly.
My wife and I went through all of the calculations and decided to move back to expensive California so that I could take a job in technical pre-sales, and then the kids could grow up with their cousins. I had to take sales training and rethink my entire career, yet within three years the payoff was real. I doubled my salary.
The weird thing was that people had told me before that I could probably do technical pre-sales aka systems engineering, but I hated the idea and always rejected it out of hand. I felt insulted as a technical person; yet I had no idea of how people valued me or were gauging my potential. I wanted to code and prove that I could build systems. I still have that value, but now it is yes, and. I have both those skills and more to boot.
The mistake that I made was to assume that a technical person was a kind of person and that kind of person could never be a sales kind of person, or a management kind of person, or an executive kind of person. What I forgot to calculate was my ability to learn all of those different kinds of skills and how much time that would take. I was stuck thinking Masters = 2 years. PhD = 3 years. That’s the end of it. I was a family man. I knew I couldn’t stop working, and I knew I couldn’t go to school part time for my wife to give up her career. But when I took that risk to learn the communication skills necessary for sales, I became more capable than I had previously estimated I could be.
This was the first of many surprising lessons I gained. Stay tuned.