An important aspect of the steadfast spirit is being realistic. How many romantic comedies have we seen when the guy is pursuing society’s version of the perfect girl not realizing until the end the ‘normal’ girl he had never noticed was actually his soul mate. There is no way to count all the times I missed great job leads or connection opportunities because I was overly focused on my ‘dream job.’ I am by no means advocating against swinging for the fences and pursuing your dreams, but sometimes it makes just as much sense to take a single and just get on base.
I recently met a guy dead set on a job in politics. We spoke several times, and I learned he did not just want a job in politics, he wanted a job working on the Presidential race doing fundraising. I explained I did not know anyone in fundraising and that could be a tough job to get. I went on to tell him I did know several people working in field offices on that race and those types of positions were much more obtainable given his lack of political experience.
I was able to help land him a field job to only see him quit a few days later. He explained to me the job wasn’t what ‘he envisioned himself doing’ and wanted to keep swinging for the fences for that fundraising job. Long story short he received a few emails from the fundraising team, but after several weeks of nothing coming to fruition he ended up missing out on this entire election cycle. Now he has no connections or experience.
My senior year in college our fraternity’s recruitment chair left school with less than a month before recruitment week. I took over and quickly organized the over 600 bios of the young men signed up to go through recruitment. As my team began identifying the ‘guys we wanted’ I had to ask them a very tough question. “Do we have a shot of getting these guys?” I came to learn we were focusing money and energy on guys who had no real interest in joining our fraternity and were ignoring great young men who were actually interested. It was as if pursuing those great guys with an interest was not enough of a challenge, they wanted to ‘steal guys from other fraternities.’
In both instances, pride and ego got in the way of doing the smart thing. Often job seekers, myself included, let their pride blind them to opportunity. They are so focused on working for the prestigious consulting firm, the famous senator, or exclusive intelligence agency they totally miss out on the friend of a friend at the new consulting firm, they skip the event at the freshman congressman’s office, or do not follow up with the person at the lesser known but equally important agency.
Keep in mind no matter where you work you are going to be at the bottom of the org chart in the beginning. I know several people who veered from their dream office to take an opportunity that came to them, and they all went on to build the necessary skill sets and experiences to better position themselves for their dream job.
So by all means swing for the fences but please be aware of those opportunities to get on base, which at least set you up to potentially reach home plate.
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