#2 No one owes you anything. Do it yourself.
You can create your own opportunities...
To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities. Bruce Lee.
One of the concerns that young people (university students or recent graduates) often express to me in my classes is that the labor market asks for experience for a certain position, but you cannot have experience if you are not hired and given an opportunity first. It is a vicious circle. Experience that, by the way, cannot be acquired in an MBA, but by working.
And what's the problem?
The problem is that you are waiting for someone else to solve your problem.
You are asking someone else to give you the opportunity to gain experience so that you can have it and make it count along with your training. Why would anyone want to do that? Why would anyone should do that?
There are two mistakes here:
1.- No one owes you anything, why would they owe you? (think about it), yet you are asking, with some sense of appealing to justice, to be given the opportunity. That amounts to someone owes you a chance. No one owes you anything.
2.- You are not taking responsibility on your own professional career, but you are delegating it in the hands of someone else, the one who should give you the opportunity. Wrong approach. The responsible one should desperately want to be you and not being comfortable depending on someone else to toss you a coin and give you any opportunity.
So what do I do?
Create your opportunities. Take the situation in your hand, put it under your responsibility, understand that the world owes you nothing, and now you are in charge of procuring what you need to make your way in the professional world:
Knowledge? You have been studying, you have them or you are going to have them. The basics to get started. Enough. You'll keep learning all the time (I hope).
Experience? You create it. How? Ideally while you are studying, but if you have already finished, it's OK.
You look for companies that can give you the kind of experience you are interested in (or experiences, because being young your opportunity cost is very low and you can try several things with zero risk). Contact them and tell them that you are interested in learning and ask them how you can collaborate with them.
Is it that simple? It's that simple. Now it is simple because the owner, the responsible, is you. Before, you were asking. Now, you are moving. Different, isn't it?
And what about the money? If you can make 50K gross per year from those first interactions, you have a promising future as a salesperson, but if not, money is secondary at that moment. You are going to capitalize on experience, which is your goal, not to make money. You are creating intellectual capital in the form of experience.
When you have capital and you invest it well, you get returns, which will be your future enhanced salaries. Simple.
If you think that your goal when you are a student or recent graduate is to maximize your salary, let me tell you that this is a short term goal that goes against your medium term. Your goal should be to improve yourself, learn and grow as a professional. That will make the difference in the next five years of your career. Not the €200 gross more per month that you can scrape together when you start.
OK, I've tried, I've contacted tens of companies and none of them want me as a collaborator of any kind. End of plan.
No.
Try it from lower down, with easier jobs to give you the opportunity.
But if I haven't studied about this....
It doesn't matter, start with something, you need to get the wheel in motion and one thing leads to another.
OK... it still doesn't work. End of plan.
No.
Start offering services on your own. Alone or collaborating with more experienced professionals from whom you can learn. I don't care. But put yourself in the market, expose yourself to it and start walking.
It's back in your hand. If you don't offer services (you can do it as a freelancer, I'm not telling you to start a company) it's because you don't want to. It depends 100% on you.
Are you too inexperienced to do it alone? Look for collaborators.
Don't you think you are ready to charge for your services for the quality you are going to offer? Let potential clients know and propose rates that simply can't be refused.
Again: your goal is not to maximize income, it's to capitalize on experience and know-how.
If all of this seems difficult for you, that's another matter. But what is an unquestionable fact is that if you start doing this in your second year of studies, by the time you finish, you'll have two or three years of experience, and then, surprise: you won't have zero experience when you apply for a certain job.
Who created that experience? You. You didn't wait for someone else to do it for you. For that reason, your experience will have various nuances that will be very valuable in your professional career in the medium term.
This is easier said than done, I know. That's why few people do it. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
You can choose the path where the Cosmos owes you an opportunity, or you can create it yourself. It's your choice. You can no longer say you don't have options.
If you want to make a movie, make it. Don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it. Quentin Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino is one of the best screenwriters and film directors in the world, possibly in history. He started in 1984, writing scripts and trying to direct. No one gave him an opportunity because no one owed him anything, even though he had great talent.
He kept writing scripts and seeing how no one wanted them. In 1990, six years after trying to break into the film world, he finally got paid for the first time for writing a script: $1,500 for 'From Dusk Till Dawn'. They paid him, but the movie wasn't made.
He continued writing scripts, including 'True Romance' and 'Natural Born Killers’. No one produced them. One of the rejection letters for the 'True Romance' script said:
How dare you send me this f… piece of shit? You must be out of your f… mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here is your f… piece of shit back. F… you. Ejecutivo anónimo de Hollywood que perdió su oportunidad.
After circulating for a year, 'True Romance' is sold for a movie with a budget of $30 million. Tarantino gets paid $50,000 (yes, only $50K out of $30 million). With that $50K, Tarantino decides he will write a script for a film so simple to shoot that he can shoot it with his own money.
In less than a month, he wrote 'Reservoir Dogs' and planned to shoot it mostly in a single location (a warehouse). The idea was simple: if no one wants to finance the film and let him direct it, he would finance it independently with his own money and direct it.
Working hard on networking and pitching his script like the founder of a startup, he manages to generate interest and raise $1.3 million. In 1991, 'Reservoir Dogs' is filmed. He manages to direct it, which was his true ambition and what no one wanted to let him do because he was an unknown and it meant too much risk.
Tarantino was able to negotiate directing the film from a position of relative strength because he knew he was making his movie with his own money and was no longer dependent on anyone. He wasn't desperate.
First law of negotiations: try to build a situation where you're not desperate.
What did Tarantino do for no less than seven years? He created his own opportunity. No one was going to let him direct, so he put himself in a position where he could do it. First creating scripts without getting paid for them (yes), persevering and getting better at his craft, then getting his first sale (which took over a year) and then willing to risk all his money so he could direct his own movie. Let's just say they didn't come knocking on his door to offer him a directing job.
He took responsibility for creating his own opportunity, despite the immense talent he possessed that no one recognized, and he didn't settle for waiting for someone to give him a chance. Good thing, because they weren't going to give it to him.
From that moment on, everything fell into place. 'True Romance', directed by Tony Scott, is released and becomes a box office success. Oliver Stone directs 'Natural Born Killers.' Now everyone wants Tarantino's forgotten scripts. 'Pulp Fiction' is released in 1994, and he becomes the biggest film star in the world as a director. There's not a TV commercial without the soundtrack of 'Pulp Fiction’.
Even his once ignored and never produced screenplay, for which he was paid $1,500 is now released and made into a film with him as an actor. The cheeky 'From Dusk Till Dawn’. The production company required him to be in it as an actor because he was so famous as a director that his name had to be in the credits. George Clooney and Tarantino in the lead roles. Who would have thought? It was directed by his friend Robert Rodriguez.
Tarantino has continued to build his legacy as one of the best filmmakers in the world. But no one gave him a chance, no matter how talented he was and no matter how admired he is now by everyone.
He created it himself.
He took the responsibility to take the opportunity.
What do you think you should do with your opportunities?
José Fortes – La Forja.
josefortes@substack.com