The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [101]
If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?
How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?
Or a reputation that precedes you?
Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?
Some say, “well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.”
Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have those, you’ve been brainwashed into acting like you’re sort of ordinary.
Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for . . . those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in resumes. Ever.1
In my own case, I will leave it for others to decide if they think I’m “remarkable.” But one thing I know for sure is, since the beginning of 2007, not one penny of my income has come from any source that has had anything to do with my having shown a resume to anyone. All my work for the past four years, as a freelancer and author, has come through personal referrals, and a growing track record of demonstrable results and projects if you Google my name, all of which are aspects of my own personal brand I’ve been cultivating.
You don’t develop those things in college or grad school, you develop them by doing stuff in the real world. And then making sure there’s a Google trail related to what you’ve been doing. That’s your brand. Create stuff. Sell stuff. Market stuff. Lead stuff. Make sure it’s good stuff, then make sure there’s a good Google trail about it, so when potential employers or clients Google you (as they all will), the brand impression they come away with (the thoughts that come to mind when they hear your name again) are, “This person gets shit done.” Or simply, “Wow.”
■ MARIA ANDROS—THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING YOUR OWN NAME AS A BRAND
Maria Andros—who does not have a college degree—started out her professional life as a makeup artist. She began working for some of the big makeup companies in Vancouver, doing makeup on high-profile shoots and campaigns for them. She eventually networked her way into the corporate side of the companies, and then into a position as a corporate buyer for a large clothing retailer. Despite this rise through the corporate ladders, she began to feel that familiar feeling among so many who work for large companies : being an anonymous cog in a machine.
“I was working ten- to twelve-hour days and I was only making approximately fifty thousand dollars Canadian. I remember I was exhausted and it was really frustrating for me because I just didn’t feel that I was valued there. I hit a place where I had really lost my passion. I felt very stuck. I felt that every single day was Groundhog Day.
“You wake up in the morning, you go brush your teeth. You walk to the kitchen, you make your breakfast. You get ready for work, you drive to work. You get to work. You count the hours until your first coffee break, then its lunchtime. And then you get home from work. You’re exhausted. You don’t even want to talk to your spouse or your friends because you are so tired. You get on the computer and you just numb out and you surf the Internet. Then you go to bed and repeat. That was how my life felt. I knew I had to make a change. I knew I had to do something. I didn’t know how I was going to do it or what it was going to be, but I had to do something.”
In 2006, Maria went online to see if she could get some ideas for some alternative to her Groundhog Day corporate life. She saw on YouTube that many people were building their own followings by making low-cost videos of themselves, almost like their own TV station about them. She had been on TV before for makeuprelated stories and felt intuitively that her future lay in building a brand for herself online.
With the video function of her digital camera, she began uploading simple videos about her quest to learn about business, video, and creating a new