Selling Oneself; Building a Business

One of the things that I've never been good at is selling myself to someone. Whether its an employer or just someone that I need to have think well of me, I can't do it. Sometimes, I luck into it; most times, I do the same old thing, and nothing magical happens. Thats not to say that I don't get what I want, ever, but when I do, its more a matter of them not having a good reason not to do it, and a moderate reason to do it. They're not bowled over by me. For the longest time, I thought that people who could do that were magical; in a way, I still do. I can read all of the how-to articles in the world, and try, but it seems like when the people in the articles do it, magical things happen, roughly akin to when the Charlie character in West Wing applied for a job as a bicycle messenger ("I have my own bicycle") and ended up getting one as the President's bag man. When I do it, they don't. I think this stuff is learnable, but I think its learnable the way that tennis is learnable. You can read and practice all you want; you won't be asked to the US Open unless you have natural talent. Its the natural talent people for whom these job search techniques work.

I was thinking about that this morning while reading a brief article about how people of a certain, ahem, age were getting second, and sometimes third, jobs. These were usually because they wanted to continue to work, continue to have handy cash without having to either draw on retirement funds or draw down savings. I've seen articles like this for a while. They used to start out by saying that these people, gosh darn it, just wanted to continue to work, continue to be productive; they weren't going to sit on a rocker and watch the grass grow. Then as time passed, the articles started to mention how while this was still the reason, some of them were doing it because they had to do it; they just could not make it on the retirement funds or savings that they had. Some of them really couldn't make it; it was this or welfare, sometimes both. Today, as an extra fillip, the article said that not only were the people they mentioned doing it for the money as a requirement, they weren't making all that much, either. As an example, they mentioned a guy who had been a principal in a school, earning $90,000; now, working with kids in a training program, he's earning about $15,000. He likes the work, and he doesn't mind the amount, but its clear that this would in no way be enough to live on, given what he was used to. (Heck, it wouldn't be enough, period, except that people do, don't they?)

And then theres the matter of where the jobs come from. The article mentions one fellow who's in his seventies and started by working for another person who had started a business assisting confused travelers at the Minneapolis airport. It then became a job working for an airline, doing essentially the same thing for VIP travellers. That stuns me. How do you start something like that? How do you even think of the possibility that something like that would be useful, let alone, figure out how to do it, how to sell it? These aren't geniuses, I'm sure -- so how did they do it? My image of that kind of thing is very, very clouded.

I wish I understood how you do that. Sometimes, sure, its happenstance and magic (I love the story of the guy who painted houses for money while in college, and once out realized he had a good job, earned decent money, and was his own boss -- so he never went back). But usually? C'mon. There's got to be a method to it. Doesn't there?.