This is a guest post by Ed Han. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines.
There are many truths about job search
Some truths are uniquely personal while others are of broad applicability. It’s one of the latter I want to discuss today: why you should consider changing your profession to miller. And I suspect that by the time you’re done reading, you’ll be have a lot more sympathy for the notion than when you first began reading.
By way of explanation, I’d like to begin by talking about a friend.
My friend Donna Svei, an executive career coach, recently posted a blog entry about the importance of using shorter sentence structures—no more than 25 words in any sentence.
I was astounded to read the word limit: the only other time I ever encountered it was junior year of college. I could hear the professor’s words as he explained that New York Times headlines are 25 or fewer words.
This invocation of the Times recalled to my mind the writing style of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was a journalist before he became a writer and his distinctive, terse narrative style was a reflection of years of honing his craft.
But thinking back to my formal education also reminded me of my involvement with my college’s drama group.
Through the group, I learned a fundamental truth about acting: the actor should be the world’s greatest expert on their character and hence should never be at a loss about the character’s motivation in any given scene or situation. A while back, I blogged about how job seekers must be the world’s greatest expert on finding their own motivations.
The analogy was apt.
All is grist for the mill
As I reflected on the juxtaposition of these two events, I was struck by the expression “all is grist for the mill”.
According to Wikipedia, the expression derives from the fact that historically, a miller would grind whatever others might bring. In exchange for this service, the miller would take a portion of the resulting flour or meal. Therefore, no matter what kind of grain was brought for grinding, the miller was able to realize some kind of benefit.
And then it hit me: the realization that we really do create our own opportunities.
More times than I like to admit, I periodically will kick myself because I realize that not 5 minutes earlier, there was an opportunity before me. However, because I wasn’t thinking about it, the opportunity passed, never to return.
While I dislike a squandered opportunity as much as anyone in even the best of cases, the really difficult thing is that for a job seeker, those opportunities are less common than anyone would like. So job seekers need to be more cognizant and more open to recognizing opportunities.
The solution is simple though: job seekers need to become millers.
About the Author
Ed Han is a wordsmith with a passion for networking and helping job seekers optimally leverage opportunities. A recent convert to Twitter, Ed is now as active on Twitter as on LinkedIn and writes a monthly column for the PSG of Mercer County newsletter geared towards job seekers, Staying Focused. He blogs at ed muses upon.
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--Jacob Share
