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Should I Be a Product Manager?

Are you considering a career in Product Management, but feeling lost as to how you’re supposed to gauge whether or not the role would be a good fit for you?

Several people have asked me for advice on the topic, so before you jump into taking a pricey Product Management course -- and for everyone who may not have a “PM friend of a friend” to ask for advice -- here’s a list of 30 questions to ask yourself first. Answer them as honestly as possible, and by the end you should have a much better idea as to whether or not you’d be a good fit for a role in Product Management.

In a ‘former life’, were you:

1. That kid who did whatever it took to help your group finish a school project and get an A?

Product Managers have to do whatever it takes to build and ship the best products, even if it means getting your hands dirty sometimes and doing ‘nothing more’ than organizing a ton of meetings for the right people and taking all the notes, or using task management software that isn’t your preferred choice if engineering happens to find value in it.

2. That kid who did whatever it took to help your group finish a school project, get an A, then shined the credit and spotlight on the group (vs. yourself)?

Product Managers should naturally want to give credit to others. Taking full credit for other people’s work, and sometimes even what feels like your own work, won’t fly.

3. That kid who wanted to try everything, and probably did at least 8 different extracurricular activities after-school in a given week?

Product Managers should be naturally curious people, who — as a result of having tried many different things — are “jack of all trades” types. This doesn’t preclude excellence in one or two things, but tunnel vision and a narrow interest set are antithetical to great PMs.

4. That kid who got along well with many different social groups?

Product Managers have to get along with engineers, designers, sales people, happy customers, angry customers, and the CEO — to name a few. Hopefully you weren’t that kid in school who thought you and your 3 friends were the only people who mattered, and made fun of everyone else.

5. That kid who liked pretty much any subject in school, because learning and challenges were fun in and of themselves?

Product Managers thrive on problems that are challenging to solve. If you hated AP US History or Math because “it was just so hard and I HATE ‘hard’!” then this might not be the right job for you.

6. That kid who wasn’t afraid to talk about feelings, and encouraged your friends to also talk about feelings?

Product Managers aren’t therapists, per se, but sometimes customers will have very strong feelings about your product. You shouldn’t want to run away from feelings.

7. That kid who actually listened to your friends when they talked about feelings?

When customers are sharing their very strong feelings, Product Managers need to really really listen. When any coworker is sharing his or her feelings about the process, product, or anything else — PMs need to genuinely listen and make them feel heard.

Today, do you like to:

8. Write?

As THE central source of communication, you will be writing a ton (taking notes in meetings, cleaning up and distributing those notes to your team, email updates for individual teams as well as the whole company, product specs/project briefs, user stories, etc). You cannot dislike writing, or even be a slow writer. It’s your job to keep things moving, so sitting on email drafts for 3 days at a time definitely won’t work.

9. Research?

Many decisions will be left up to “your recommendation”, from which API to use to accomplish x task to which smaller company you suggest acquiring because it will be better in the long run than trying to build y feature yourselves. So you best be doing diligence and research before making those recommendations.

10. Keep up with the ‘latest and greatest’?

Back to that natural curiosity, PMs should be naturally curious about and interested in staying on top of the latest developments both in and out of their domain. If the thought of reading yet another TechCrunch article about a new messaging app sounds torturous, or you’ve never heard of Product Hunt, then you might have a hard time staying excited about Product Management.

Are you competent-to-good at:

11. Using Excel?

I mention Excel because most business and finance teams use Excel to some capacity, and Product Managers have to work with business and finance teams; therefore, some Excel-ing might be needed from time to time. Excel is also an easy way to capture and organize data.

12. Using task management tools?

Asana, Assembla, Basecamp, Hackpad, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Teamwork, Trello, etc. — are you competent at using at least one of these?

13. Learning how to use new task management tools?

If you’ve used Jira before but not Basecamp, Trello but not Teamwork — could you pick another one up relatively quickly?

14. Learning new things in general?

If you’ve never used any task management tools ever, CONGRATULATIONS, I NEED TO HAVE YOUR LIFE. Just kidding. But seriously, if you haven’t, are you a fast learner in general?

15. Drawing things by hand or using software to visualize things?

Pointing at the air or making dramatic gestures with your hands can sometimes help you explain things better, but alternatively, 10 minutes of explaining something and being misunderstood could be easily remedied with a quick diagram on the whiteboard. You don’t have to be an amazing illustrator, but it definitely helps to be able to draw and diagram what you’re thinking in your head for others to see.

Are you really-good-to-amazing at:

16. Listening to others?

This might be the #1 most important “soft skill” for a Product Manager. If you’re often told that you’re shitty at listening to others, cut people off a lot, etc. — you should probably stop reading right here, because this is not the job for you.

17. Talking to people?

See “getting along with many social groups” above. Product Managers are constantly talking to different groups of people to facilitate communication, convey vision, and remove roadblocks. However, this does not mean you are the loudest voice in the room at all times in group settings, or literally speaking all the time. PMs know when to speak.

18. Diffusing tension?

People on your team are not always going to get along. Product Managers can’t be the ones fueling the flames; we have to manage egos and diffuse tension so the show can go on.

19. Handling stress?

This is a stressful job. You will not be able to hide in your corner with headphones on and simply go ‘heads down’ or ‘ride things out’. Everything will basically always be your fault; can you handle that kind of pressure without freaking out at people or getting crazy defensive?

20. Explaining things to others?

Do you have an uncanny ability to simplify the most intimidatingly complex thing so that even a n00b can understand it? Or is the other way around, where your explanation of even the simplest concept has everyone’s eyes glazed over in a cloudy haze of confusion and wishing-this-torture-would-please-hurry-up-and-end?

21. Prioritizing things?

There’s no room for indecision in a Product Manager. You have to be organized and rational enough to come up with a system for prioritizing ‘shit to be worked on’ that also works for your team and company.

22. Context switching?

You will get interrupted a lot. Deal with it, or don’t…

23. Noticing details?

You are the ultimate gatekeeper and owner of your product(s). Few, if any, inconsistencies or defects should get past your eagle-eye.

24. Selling narrative?

Product Managers are unofficial “salespeople”, in that we are constantly selling and promoting a product’s vision to stakeholders, team members, customers, the list goes on. And the most effective way to do this is to sell the story; the compelling, undeniable “why” that gets everyone excited and on board.

Do you dread:

25. Meetings?

Sorry. As the “chief facilitator of stuff”, some meetings will be unavoidable; you may even be in meetings more than most.

26. Being the one to have to schedule meetings?

If you’re used to other people scheduling things for you, or feel that scheduling meetings is “an assistant’s work — this is beneath me!” then you’re going to be disappointed. Product Managers are often the ones scheduling meetings, because it’s our job to make sure everyone is synced, not anyone else’s.

27. Being the one to have to lead meetings?

The job really isn’t going to work out if you absolutely hate the idea of having to lead meetings — especially when you put many of those meetings on people’s calendars in the first place.

28. People telling you their problems?

If this sounds like the worst thing that could ever happen to you… well, somehow you made it this far down the list, but godspeed!

29. Having to make decisions (about anything: what to wear, where to take your date for dinner, what to do this weekend)?

See above on “prioritizing things”. If even the smallest decision in your personal life can take a huge toll on your well-being, then Product Management will probably be the end of you.

30. Change?

Product Managers have to be adaptable, and ready to roll with the punches. If you’re a stickler for “doing things the way they’ve always been done” and feel anxiety at the thought of having to switch directions / priorities / task management tools / chairs frequently, then this ain’t gonna work out for the long haul.

If you’ve gotten through all 30 questions and don’t feel like running away, awesome! You might just make a happy Product Manager someday :)

#Product Management #careerswitch #career advancement #jobs #job advice

Demystifying the PM Interview

Landing an interview for any job that you want feels awesome. In your case, if you’re reading this, maybe that job is for the role of Product Manager.

So what can you expect from the interview ahead of you?

To start, recognize that you won’t be able to anticipate every single question. That’s okay. Blindly cramming hundreds of Quora responses or stacks of product management books right before your interview isn’t really an effective strategy, and the sooner you accept this, the better off you’ll be.

Instead, you should focus on just the concepts and questions that you are most likely to encounter. You also need to understand, at a high level, the motivations of those who will be interviewing you; why might they need a Product Manager to come and fill this role in the first place? What are they looking for?

Having interviewed at a variety of places now from smaller startups to bigger tech companies, I’d like to share two resources that I wish I’d focused on during my interview prep process:

Ken Norton’s essay, How to Hire a Product Manager

Madhu Punjabi’s blog post, The Product Management Interview

That’s it. Given limited time and capacity, these are the only two resources you need familiarize yourself with in order to understand what will generally be expected of you from the PM interview.

Let’s review why.

You need to know what they’re looking for

At a high level, what is the role of a Product Manager? What kind of people make good Product Managers? What, therefore, might an interviewer be looking for? You need to figure this out before you head into that interview, and there’s no resource that answers these questions as succinctly or straightforwardly as Ken Norton’s classic essay, How to Hire a Product Manager.

Drawing from the points in Ken’s essay that overlap with what I’ve personally experienced, here are the qualities and skills that interviewers generally seem to care about:

Your overall intelligence and creativity. Are you well-spoken? If I ask how you would improve x feature with very little time to think about it, how thoughtful and creative will your response be? Can you think on the fly? (cue market sizing exercises…)

How technical you are, to a reasonable extent. Are you technical, or technical enough to work with engineers and gain their respect? Even if you didn’t write any of the code for it, can you explain how x API works? Can you articulate the business considerations that influenced the way y feature was built?

How you handle process. Are you good with process-y things like prioritizing features or making sure the right meetings happen amongst the right people? Have you done lean/agile/scrum with a team before, or implemented some successful version of those processes from the ground up for your team? Are you rigid about doing things a certain way, or can you adapt to what your engineering team and stakeholders need and keep it all from turning into a shit show? Which goes hand in hand with…

How you handle people. Can you inspire and convince people to do things, even when it seems like they don’t really want to at first? Are you an effective communicator? Someone on your team is stirring the pot and spreading negativity; what do you do? Some particularly disgruntled users are very publicly leaving negative reviews and blowing up the support ticket queue; what is your instinctual response? How do you deal with this?

Your ability to take things from nothingness to somethingness. This one is probably the most straightforward: are you capable of shipping and/or have you shipped things before?

You need to know what they might ask

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the nuances and requirements of the role (intelligence, creativity, technical fluency, knack for process, people skills, ability to ship things), you need to prepare for some of the questions that you might actually get asked.

The best resource for common PM interview questions -- in my humble opinion -- is Madhu Punjabi’s blog post, aptly titled The Product Management Interview. These questions “tie it all together”, testing your propensity to be an effective Product Manager for a specific company. This means you have to do your homework not only on what the role of a Product Manager is, as we went over earlier, but also on the specific company you’ll be interviewing with.

Madhu is, by the way, a kickass Product Manager at Pinterest.

These are the 8 questions she recommends preparing for. I can vouch and say that I’ve been asked every single one over the course of my interviewing experience:

Why do you want to work at this company?

How would you improve the product?

What is your favorite feature or product and why?

What are the 3 metrics that our company cares about?

You have to choose between feature X and feature Y, how do you decide?

How would you test a feature?

Tell me about a time where you had to convince someone who didn't report to you to work on something?

Do you have any questions for me?

I highly recommend visiting her post directly for even more advice and insight into what interviewers are looking for, specifically, with each question.

Recap

The PM interview doesn’t have to feel like a scary black box. Though the role tends to call for a wide range of qualities and skills, most companies are looking for the same general things in a PM candidate: intelligence, creativity, technical fluency, knack for process, people skills, and the ability to ship things.

Additionally, most companies will ask some version of the 8 questions covered in Madhu’s blog.

Focus on preparing for those 8 questions. Read Ken’s essay. Be able to articulate your own experiences -- especially those that are applicable to the role.

Then take a deep breath.

Don’t sweat the rest.

#Product Management #interview preparation #career advancement

Sorry I’ve Been MIA! I’ve Been Writing on Medium

A year or so ago, I decided to try writing on Medium as my primary platform. It was mostly an enjoyable experience, and I even got one of my posts published in a Medium publication called The Launchism. That was pretty cool :)

That said, I kind of miss having a place that feels more like “home”. On Medium, I felt weird being too honest or personal, but that’s kind of a shame because being too honest and personal is sort of what I do. I think it’s why people connected to some of my earliest posts here on the blog, anyway.

Still, I think I covered some interesting topics on Medium like how you can compare the evolutionary abstraction of the Starbucks logo to the process of learning to write better code, or ways that Snapchat can further monetize itself.

If you’re interested in any of those posts by the way, this is what I spent some of 2014 plus some of 2015 writing about, with gaps in between that I’m not so proud of but oh well:

Let’s Talk About Snapchat

What the Music Industry Can Learn from Tech

Why I’m Working on Kyndrd

I Launched My PRE “Pre-Launch” Page Yesterday (published in The Launchism)

5 Surprising Jobs That Could Help You Be a Better Product Manager

Why I’m Obsessed With Blue Ocean Strategy

Progressive Reduction is Everywhere

The Road to Product Management

When Success Eludes You

Have Good Intentions... But Make Even Better Choices

It feels good to write here though, so I think I’m back to writing here. And anything I write that feels sort of smart-y (like the stuff that the rest of the Medium community writes), I’ll post to Medium too.

Also, I redesigned this page! Think it feels cleaner and better now.

Oh, and I moved to LA!

😎

Unwittingly Stumbling Over the Confidence Gap

I totally resolved to blog and write more this year, yet pitifully, here I am in June trying to make up for a silence-filled February, March, April, and May. One of these years, I’ll get it right.

In my defense, it’s been a relentless sprint to survive these last few months. I’d been warned prior to starting this job, by smart friends with real experience in the domain: are you sure you want to put yourself through a startup? And being the baby that has to stick its finger in the candle each time (and never learns its lesson), I assured them yes, it’s gotta be a startup. I don’t want to work anywhere else.

For fear of coming off like I’m generalizing all startups, I should clarify what I have in mind when I use the term, and note also that “startup” has come to encompass a nebulously broad swath of meaning. Today, it seems, every company is a startup. However, the particular kind I have in mind is the 11-50 employees kind — an entity whose proof of concept has allowed it to grow past it’s humble “two guys just hacking away in a dorm room” beginnings, but still has a lot to accomplish and prove. This kind of startup is on the cusp of some major breakthroughs, but fights on each day not without its challenges — borne of systemic nascence.

Ironically, it is this very nascence that makes the idea of working for a startup so alluring nowadays. Where systems have yet to become stale and brittle, where the rules have not all yet been defined and calcified by tradition and hierarchy, therein lies the hope for endless possibility.The possibility of defining one’s own rules, of contributing and executing simply game-changing ideas that will elevate the place far beyond its status prior to the auspicious day you arrived.

The truth is, a startup at this stage is a scary and tumultuous place. Because it’s “real” enough of an institution that there are actual expectations, from real coworkers and real users and very real investors. There are people all around that you need to prove yourself to. But what are the rules? Where are the guidelines? How does one become a “game changer” and valuable player at a company that doesn’t yet seem to have its own rules or systems defined?

You quickly realize that systemic nascence, while promising in theory, is in most cases tantamount to a giant clusterfuck — i.e no one really knows what they’re doing. It’s far easier to follow a set of rules than to establish new ones, and crucial to a startup at this stage is a set of systems. But systems don’t build themselves; they aren’t built overnight, even on the backs of the most dedicated and hopeful employees. And I learned all this very recently, in the latest role as my company’s first Product Manager.

About 4-5 months into my own nascent career as a front-end developer (and ad hoc technical project manager), my boss sat me down and gave me a promotion. Only I didn’t see it that way, at the time. Because I had diligently paid my dues in the trenches of our product, he said — unearthing all kinds of bugs and potholes in the name of doing a lot of tedious front-end client work that no one else really wanted to do — he felt I’d make a good candidate for a new role that the company had naturally grown a need for: someone to manage the Dev team.

I remember taking the news in a really odd way. On one hand, there was the conscious acknowledgment of the promotion (for example, he told me then and there that he was bumping up my pay); but on the other hand, there was this nagging feeling that somehow, this was all a trick. The thought crossed my mind that in this new role, I probably wouldn’t be spending as much, if any, of my time writing code; this made me panic. I’d just spent a lot of money and time learning to be a developer, and all my friends who’d started out in the same boat were already sailing far past me in their development skills — this move would surely be the nail in the coffin. And then the thought crossed my mind that maybe they were moving me away from the Dev team because they thought I was a lousy front-end developer, and that this was some kind of peace-offering to gracefully dump me without my realizing it.

What kind of sad, insecure person thinks like this, anyway? Ah yes — apparently there’s a name for it: women. Some days after I let it all sink in, I recalled an article in The Atlantic called The Confidence Gap, wherein I’d read in great detail about the very real issues many women have with accepting their own success, due to lack of confidence.

"…there is a particular crisis for women — a vast confidence gap that separates the sexes. Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities…

A review of personnel records found that women working at HP applied only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements… Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back.”

So there it was. I was being a wary idiot, doubting my boss’ intentions in offering to pay me more to be a part of the company’s executive team and partake in higher-level strategies because I was insecure and didn’t think I was ready for it.

Well, I’m lucky my boss thought otherwise. I suppose a big part of success is recognizing when opportunity is at your fingertips and being brave enough to go after it. And sometimes, despite your best efforts to self-sabotage and play it safe, you’re firmly handed an opportunity so that you literally can’t avoid or run from it — all because someone believes in you, and thinks others will too.

In the month or so that I’ve been Product Manager, I’ve learned more about myself and all of my coworkers than I could’ve imagined; I’ve learned that it is completely acceptable to be “60 percent qualified” for a job, because you’re inevitably going to learn as you go (and when, really, are you going to be 100 percent? If you’re a perfectionist, maybe never?). I also learned, in suddenly needing to enforce systems, that nothing at my company had really yet been set in stone; that’s what they wanted me to help them figure out. I’m not sure what I was expecting to come into, but it soon became clear how much we psych ourselves out over the idea of a company. I work for a company, which means there’s a way that things are done, and there are ways in which things AREN’T done around here. I mean, come on. It’s a freakin’ company. Duh. There’s like, rules and stuff.

While I hadn’t felt prepared or worthy of leading a group of developers (who are all male, no less) at my company, once I stopped thinking about it in those terms and realized that a company is really just a group of people agreeing to gather at the same place every day to accomplish more or less the same goals — the job felt less daunting. Well, perhaps daunting isn’t quite the right word; it’s certainly still a daunting task, trying to build systems from the ground up. Perhaps the more accurate term is intimidating — it all felt much less intimidating, once I realized that we’re just a group of people trying to figure it all out.

Wasn’t that why I’d wanted to work at a startup in the first place?

It’s crazy how quickly and easily we can get swept up by the idea of things, by our insecurities, by what we think is the right or wrong move in our careers. I’d been so hell bent on the need to put in more hours coding at my job, because all my friends were doing it and because that’s just what I’d decided was the right thing, that I almost turned myself down for a promotion. And I somehow almost forgot that my longer term career goal was to eventually work on the Product side, ideally one day as a Product Manager.

I squirmed the whole way and now I battle impostor syndrome on a daily basis all over again (does it ever end?), but somehow, I think I safely stumbled over the confidence gap. It didn’t grow wider or more treacherous at my approach; it didn’t swallow me whole.

The key now, is to stay the course and fight the demons. And to let go of obsessing over do I deserve this job? — focusing instead on: how do I rock this job?

#startups #product management #confidence gap

Why I Decided to Learn Programming, and Other General Musings

The Wall Street Journal recently published a trend piece on liberal arts majors-turned programmers (or at the very least, aspiring programmers). I was asked to comment on my experience going from a double English/Theater Studies major in college to an executive assistant in music, to now a junior front-end developer/technical project manager — and all I can really conclude is that I was lucky to find my way out.

It’s hard to pinpoint, though I get asked over and over again, what the turning point was; the reason I decided to get into programming. (Yes, a part of me thought one day hey, I’ve always been good at languages and the syntactical layer is the first step to programming — so maybe I’ll be okay at it. Sure, another part of me saw parallels between the pattern recognition I’d developed as an essay-editor and the probable use-case for these same abilities in programming.) And while I now feel like I have a set of explanations that serves just about every occasion (depending on who might be doing the asking), there’s one that I always conveniently seem to forget. So I wanted to make sure I got it down this time and wanted to share it here, for the record. Because I think this is the truest one.

Six months after I quit my job in music, I began to feel the pangs of nostalgia — and even possibly some regret. Had I made the wrong move? Was this new life of tutoring kids and studying aimlessly for the GRE actually an improvement? In a move made out of sheer impulse and probably some mixture of self-pity and the aforementioned (temporary) regret, I submitted my resume and applied for an Office Manager/Executive Assistant position at a young music tech startup in New York. *Voice of reason screamed, “But you don’t like doing this job at all!* *Voice of stupidity screamed louder, “Yes, but it’s tech! It’ll be better because it’s in TECH!”*

After interviewing and meeting with all three co-founders, I was dejected and bummed when they informed me they were going with a more “experienced” office manager candidate. In reality, this was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Had I gotten the job, it would have been a complete and utter disaster for my life. In a moment of caprice wrought with poor judgment, I’d seriously applied to be a dual Office Manager/Executive Assistant YET AGAIN — even though the strain and lack of mobility in this role were the exact reasons I’d left my previous job in the first place. Furthermore, I would basically have said yes to being the Executive Assistant to all three co-founders, in addition to playing receptionist and coffee stocker-upper, and all three co-founders were basically my age (come to find out later, the CEO and I even had mutual friends; the potential for an awkward run-in with the same crowd at some brunchtime booze fest in Brooklyn flashed before my eyes).

In all seriousness though, by getting (and taking) that job, I only would have perpetuated the cycle that I’d made such a conscious effort to break. Being an assistant — especially an Executive Assistant — can lead you down a tricky path. On one hand, you might justify that it’s your “foot in the door”, and that hard work and paying your dues will lead to promotions and opportunities to switch into a department you actually want to be in. This is all very possible, and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But it depends heavily on the industry, your company’s culture, and most importantly: on your boss. Overall, it takes a pretty big person to say, “You’ve done such an amazing job at making MY life easier that I’m going to let you go now to do what you really want to do. You’ve earned it.” That sounds insane, even as I type it. Why the hell would anyone want to let a good thing go?

Anyhow. Out of this experience, in addition to realizing that sometimes I make horrible decisions, I realized how badly I wanted to work in tech. So badly, in fact, that I’d been willing to (almost) shoot myself in the proverbial foot — just for the chance. And though there’d been other positions open, what prevented me from being able to apply to them was that I didn’t have any of the required skills. All of them were technical.

It was after this experience that I began scouring job postings across every single music tech startup in New York, then across New York startups in general. And I couldn’t believe what I was only then realizing: THAT 99% OF JOBS AT 99% OF THE PLACES I WANTED TO WORK AT WERE TECHNICAL.

It seems painfully obvious now, but at the time it was a huge revelation -- like grasping around for your glasses and finally realizing they've been atop your head the whole time. Initially, you feel a rush of relief. There they are, silly glasses. Wow, so many jobs! Omg, a whole world of jobs!! Then, relief gives way to sheepishness, and finally in my case, to a feverish cocktail of panic/anger/desolation. Omg, a whole world of jobs I might as well kiss goodbye. I'll never be qualified. It's too late for me. I should've known about this in college. I should've known about this in high school and never gone to college. I should give up at life right now. I should get wasted with some friends and go eat a burger.

After many drinks and unhealthy food choices, I had the brilliant idea to do my own thing: to start my own startup. There were so many aspects of the music industry that had irked me while I was in the thick of it that I had plenty of "problems" to "solve". So I picked one and ran with it. And by running with it, I mean I assembled a small group comprised solely of non-technical people (best idea ever), furiously mocked up a series of wireframes with the aid of my UX-designer friend, and applied to a bunch of incubators and startup accelerator programs with little more than a glorified idea.

I should have been quicker to acknowledge that this lofty new "career plan", borne whilst I'd had on my beery bingeing "thinking" cap, was not the most sensible one. In reality, it was a move not unlike one that a scorned lover might make -- slightly retributive, probably a little immature, and the real thorn: most likely totally unnoticed by its intended audience. The lesson? Don't think you can or should start a (revenge) company (take that, world!!!) just because you had one unsuccessful interview for a job you probably wouldn't have been happy in anyway.

The real, underlying issue was that I wanted to feel more valuable. I wanted to feel like I had options, thanks to whatever this highly-coveted and sought-after value might be. And once I got my ego in check -- as well as all the rejection letters from every single accelerator we applied to -- ("without at least an MVP..." "without a technical co-founder in your group..."), I finally realized that what I really wanted was to learn how to program.

It doesn't take an Econ degree to understand the basic principles of supply vs. demand (take it from someone who almost failed Intro to Financial Accounting), and though I feel like a broken record what with the proliferation of media coverage on this particular subject, the fact remains that tech is a hot sector right now. And tech, unlike many other industries traditionally reserved for "liberal arts degree types", actually has measurable barriers to entry. It's not just who you know or how long you've been so-and-so's assistant; it's not just getting lucky. First and foremost, if you want to be a developer/designer in tech, you have to know how to code and design. You need to possess real skills of the trade.

Looking back on my blind, so-dumb-it-was-almost-endearing desire to first get into tech, I'm reminded of the days (which I've only read about in history books, of course) when skilled craftspeople used to specialize in their trades and totally fucking owned it in their respective guilds. If I'd been alive back then, I would've been that numb-nut who thought he/she could just "network" their way into an iron-casting guild, or "goodwill" my way into a baker's guild because I like to eat bread. *I like music! Hey Pandora, can I come work for you? How about you, Songza??*

So there you have it.

I wanted to learn how to program because I was tired of feeling un-valuable, not to be confused with invaluable. I was tired of fighting for the same 3 entry level jobs against 10129381029809384 other twenty-somethings who had nothing more to offer a prospective employer than a college degree and at least one internship experience at Sony, NBC, Disney, or all of the above.

And it all began with a job rejection that turned out to be the biggest blessing in disguise. So don't take those too closely to heart; you really never know if you're dodging a bullet and priming yourself instead for something much more rewarding down the road.

#programming #careerswitch #coding #liberalarts #rejection #tech #guilds

Why No One Hears You

From the moment I got into music, I knew I wanted to be an A&R.

Okay, there was a part of me that also daydreamed about being the star — the artist — but my ‘practical’ dream was to get paid to scout and sign talent and to help develop their sound.

The first time I tried to prove my potential as an A&R was about 6 months into my job, when I convinced some of the more open-minded higher ups to let me invite a then-unsigned band to play a showcase at our office. I’d gone to college with two of the members, but regardless of this, I’d heard the stuff they were playing at the time and been completely blown away by the musicianship and songwriting. The band was Delta Rae.

It was one of those performances that I’ll never forget. They assembled together on the small makeshift ‘stage’ in our listening room, illuminated by a single light shining down on their group of six. I was sitting near the foot of the door, in case I needed to make a speedy exit to answer emergency emails or calls; the listening room was packed. I prayed to God in my head that they would totally kill it, for reasons that were as honest and true as they were self-serving. After all, this was my chance to prove myself as a future A&R — if the band was good, then I was good. Or so I thought. The band collectively closed their eyes and opened with "Memphis".

And they fucking nailed it.

They proceeded to nail every single song in their set list, and by the end of it all, the whole room was going apeshit. The higher-ups loved it so much, they pulled the CEO out of a meeting to come listen and made the band re-perform their entire set list another time through. I couldn’t believe it; it was like a scene straight out of the movies. And he liked it too. A lot.

After their second run-through, the whole office trailed out of the listening room, buzzing with excited chatter and that’s when people finally began to ask the questions I’d been dying to hear: “How’d we find out about these guys? Who brought them in?” My palms were cold and my heart was racing with hopeful anxiety. I wanted it so badly. To be the one. To be the dark horse that no one saw coming. “Stephanie? The assistant? She brought them in?”

I was eventually credited with the showcase and flown down to my old stomping grounds in Durham, NC with three of the company’s higher-ups to try and sign the band. My co-worker hated this; and I felt super awkward asking my boss for permission to fly down for the trip. Even though I felt I’d earned my moment.

By all accounts the trip felt like a success, but the band didn’t end up signing with us. A few weeks later, they signed a deal with Warner Brothers Records.

And that was the end of my moment.

Perhaps foolishly, I’d thought that the episode would emblazon in everyone’s minds my “undeniable ear and knack for talent”. It doesn’t mean much coming from a failed A&R-that-never-was, I know — but I truly believed that in order to be a great one, you had to have intimately played and suffered the heartbreaks of music yourself. How else were you to distinguish the good stuff from the great? To recognize potentially great talent if you’d never performed a day in your life? And because I’d done all those things, and proven myself with Delta Rae, I thought maybe. Finally. Someone might consider my musical opinion now.

But the showcase was soon forgotten and quickly faded away as nothing more than a blip. I remained an assistant.

Undeterred, I tried for many more months to find cool acts and suggest new things. It was 2011 — just shy of the reign of Psy, and though I could never have predicted he’d ultimately be the one to do it, I knew it was only a matter of time before K-pop would break pop culture barriers and take the world by storm. So I brought up this group to some of the execs — we could be trendsetters and do something nobody else was doing at the time. That was, after all, what A&Rs were supposed to anticipate? In response, I was promptly cut down to size via email by one exec (who’d cc’ed a few others to the thread for good measure): “What is this? What is this music? What do you want me to do about it?” And that was the end of that, no further discussion. I felt like a total ass for trying.

Two years later, the group would go on to sign an $11.3 million dollar deal with Cash Money.

I’m a persistent motherfucker when I want to be, so I tried a few more times, even after that shitty email. None of it ever amounted to so much as a response from anyone. I can detail at length the nature of each of these attempts, but I’ll spare you the sob story (ha) and share one more significant anecdote.

Around October of 2011, I decided I’d be better off finding and working with talent on my own. So I began independently managing an American producer, based in New York. He’d had a smash hit in South Korea (which was, incidentally, co-written by one Bebe Rexha, a struggling artist at the time who recently found mega-success with a little song she co-wrote called “The Monster”) and after listening to some new tracks he was working on, I was completely sold. We had a great run together, and before I parted ways with music for good in the summer of 2012, I’d helped him land this single and gotten him an offer for a publishing deal at the company that now publishes Lorde. I felt I was leaving him in good hands.

Why wouldn’t I have tried to bring him into my own company if he was that good? Well, I did. But the head of publishing and A&R never responded to any of my emails, or gave me the chance to play him any of his music — even though we sat approximately 20 feet away from each other.

The best part of this story is that a year after I’d already left, someone else would introduce the producer to my company. The head of publishing and A&R would go apeshit over the same songs I’d tried to play for him one year prior. And he’d go on to sign him.

Nothing had changed except who was pitching the music. You wanna tell me it’s not about perception?

Sometimes, you have to be able to face the music and admit that shit ain’t gonna work out for you — a sentiment I’ve expressed in previous posts. I guess this is the closest thing to the full story behind it. It’s really, really hard to do, not the least because society likes to preach this idea that “we can all be ANYTHING we want to be, if we just try hard enough.” Sometimes, trying hard enough really isn’t enough — especially if you’re going after a job (read: A&R) wherein you’re totally disposable and have 1 million other arbitrary goons who could do your job, as long as they were “dope enough” (what the fuck does that mean, anyway? And shouldn't great music be great, regardless of "who found it"?)

The harsh reality is that much of life is not about metrics or proof — it’s about perception. For whatever reason, despite the fact that I’d made friends with Grammy-winning producers and studios on my own and displayed a track record of finding great music, my own company just didn’t want to accept that I could be “dope enough” to do anything besides book flights and order peoples’ lunches. If it came from me -- a measly assistant -- then it wasn't cool. And for every Karen Kwak (my longtime idol) who’s able to rise the ranks, there are a gazillion others who just won’t. Maybe her boss wasn’t a total asshole. Maybe he was willing to promote from within. Maybe she just got lucky.

Sometimes, no one wants to hear you because you legitimately suck. But more often than not, no one hears you because it’s just fucking loud. There are too many others. You don’t fit someone else’s shallow bill. And you can wait around for your lucky break; you can wait for it to get quiet for a moment, so you can have your chance to speak. But you might be waiting an eternity. And even then, there are no promises. So you try something else.

Some may call this “copping out”. But then sometimes, “copping out” brings you everything you wish you could’ve had, from someplace completely unforeseen and unexpected. I think all of this was best expressed by Alina Simone, a struggling-singer-turned-acclaimed-writer who’d fought for years “to be heard” as a musician — only to find that people finally started paying attention and listening when she re-emerged as a writer. She would eventually be offered gigs to teach writing at universities.

"For me, salvation came from an unexpected corner. Late one night, after playing a show, I came home to an e-mail from an editor at a publishing house. He’d heard my music on Pandora and bought my albums at the (now defunct) Virgin Megastore in Union Square. He had a question for me: Would I consider writing a book?

Two years later, my collection of essays was published. I did some freelance work for newspapers and published a second book, a novel. This year a university press commissioned another book. Without quite intending to, I’d transformed from a singer into a writer.

…

When I got my own first university teaching job, it struck me as odd that it was only by virtue of switching genres that I’d become eligible to help undergrads channel their creativity.”

I still have to pinch myself sometimes to realize where I am in life and my career today. It’s only the beginning, but it’s the beginning of something completely different from what I was doing just 18 months ago. And what’s most unbelievable is how embracing this industry has been, so accepting, of someone who barely started coding and programming just six months ago. In contrast, my professional experience in the music industry was marred by people who rejected and discouraged me, though I’d lived and breathed it for 22 years.

As Simone muses, it strikes me as odd that only in leaving music was I finally, very recently, emotionally ready to share some of my own. And it strikes me as odd that only now, having put some distance between us, am I able to really enjoy music again.

In reality, if you choose a path because it’s a matter of survival, or ultimately find that thing you were striving for — be it recognition, nicer co-workers, money to live a better life, or just the opportunity to be creative and be heard — then there is no such thing as a cop out.

And if tech and entrepreneurship are, by any measure, “cop outs” — then I’m sure as hell proud to be one.

#A&R #delta rae #Songs #perception #bebe rexha #inspiration #tech #entrepreneurialism #copping out

If You're Unhappy... Consider Tech

I recently shared the news on Facebook regarding my new job. The amount of support I felt from people who responded to this — in whatever way — was really incredible. So I just want to thank any and all of you who showed love.

To some degree, I like to think that more of those comments and likes were genuine than not (what, you’ve never “liked” an engagement announcement just so you wouldn’t be the only asshole who didn’t like the announcement?), thanks to this blog where I’ve been able to air all my failures and “progress” in an honest fashion. Which is to say, I think people are genuinely happy for me?

Hopefully I’ve delivered a palatable balance of self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement, and hopefully I’ve avoided being one of those lame-o’s who do nothing but brag.

Anyway, I read this via Facebook the other day, and it got me thinking. It’s one woman’s honest account of how losing 100 pounds completely changed the way people treated her — for the better — but how this also disturbed her.

Mostly, it opened her eyes to the ways in which she had been treated like shit by people when she was 100 pounds heavier, and how she’d come to think that’s just how people treated each other:

"As my weight came off, I saw the world around me change. Men would enthusiastically hold doors for me. Women, with a snap of their gum and a flip of their hair, would compliment my “cute blazerrrrr!” Employees at coffee shops smiled at me, and made eye contact…

As a fat person, I had been used to folks rushing ahead of me on the subway, not making eye contact at the store, or not smiling back when they passed me in the hallway of my apartment building. These behaviors were what I recognized as normal.

After a childhood of being bullied, and a young adulthood of being overlooked, when the world started behaving appropriately toward me (which occurred somewhere around when my weight reached the 130s), I was gobsmacked.”

When the world started behaving appropriately toward me… I was gobsmacked.

I almost got chills reading that line.

I began working at a music company the first week of January, 2011. I remember being sick as all hell on my first day of work, inarguably from stumbling around Manhattan in sub-arctic temperatures and an ill-suited New Year’s Eve outfit a few days prior. Ears ringing, fever pounding, my very first task as an assistant was to clean out and re-organize my boss’ office from top to bottom. This involved a lot of crawling around on my hands and knees, moving boxes of stuff, and throwing shit away.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of manual labor, and I’m not saying I was above that kind of work — especially as an assistant. But there was something about starting a new job sick as a dog and being treated like a typical “industry intern” (don’t even get me started) that felt a bit inauspicious. And now, I can look back on that entire chapter of my working life and say I wasn’t wrong about my initial misgivings.

I ended up staying for 1.5 years, but for the entirety of that time, I was made to feel constantly overlooked. Often bullied. I had one co-worker in particular whose job it seemed to make sure I was as miserable as possible, and I started to dread coming in to work. Everything I did was liable to become a point of contention (“SHE booked those tickets, not me. SHE fucked up!” --tickets I never booked), grounds for throwing-under-the-bus, or straight up lies. I would find out after the matter that everyone at the company had been out to an important event — except me, and the two interns. I would help coordinate the company’s biggest event of the year, then be told my flight and hotel probably wouldn’t be covered though I could cover my own accomodations if I still wanted to go (everyone else was flown out and put up in a 5-star hotel). I was barked at, yelled at, and generally not spoken to like a person who deserved basic human respect.

To this day, I haven’t been able to figure out why I was singled out. Was it out of some feeling that I hadn’t paid my dues long enough? Was it my being the only Asian in the entire office? Was it my being, specifically, an Asian woman with a good college degree in an industry that typically celebrated, well... NOT that? Was it that my aforementioned coworker felt threatened by my age (I was almost half her age) and ambition, and decided I had to be done away with? I hope these observations don’t come off pretentious in any way; I never really cared about any of it. I was just ready to work and be valuable and maybe also be treated as “one of the team” in return. But that never happened.

Anyway, the point of all this is that as much as it bummed me oiut, this kind of treatment at the workplace sort of became the standard for me. Because it’s all I knew. I looked at friends who seemed happy at their jobs and wondered what the big secret was; was it the money? Or was it something else, something that you couldn’t put a price on? Certainly, their situations had to be better than getting paid shit money to also be treated like shit.

People ask me why I made such a big career pivot sometimes, and the truth is: I just got tired of the negativity. I got tired of being broke, and I got tired of justifying why I deserved to be at my job on a daily basis to people who just wanted to see me fail.

On the other hand, tech seemed like a meritocracy; and after working in an industry that functioned on literally zero logic with close to no tangible metrics of merit, I decided I had to give tech a shot.

So far, after four days at my new job, I can barely describe how relieved and happy I feel. It really is like getting out of a bad relationship, then meeting someone new and wonderful who takes care of you and appreciates you in ways you never even considered options. Or, apparently, losing 100 pounds and suddenly finding that the entirety of the human race is ready to treat you appropriately now. Where suddenly, people who used to race as quickly past you as possible now want to smile at you and hold the door. You mean, you’re NOT going to bark at me to clean up the toilets while 3 phone lines are ringing? You’re NOT going to stifle my opinions? And wait, you’re actually going to encourage that I share them? I get proper, even flattering introductions to people on outgoing emails as a new member of this company? Is this a joke??

In all seriousness, I have felt uncomfortable around all this newfound geniality. Are coworkers this... nice? I know my battles with prejudice and bullshit probably don’t even compare to hers, but I feel like I can relate in at least a few ways.

Maybe this kind of thinking is why “us Gen Y-ers” get a bad rep, but I think life’s too short to put up with irrational abuse at your job. It’s not about “going soft” or being unwilling to put up with any kind of discomfort; and it has nothing to do with being lazy.

It’s recognizing that work is where you’re going to spend most of your time — so it’s vital to your mental and emotional health to get away from abusive work environments. I don’t give a fuck what some people say about certain industries being “vanity industries that everyone wants to get into”, thus shit pay and shit treatment come with the territory. It’s not the way it has to be.

And if you’re stuck in a similar situation, I say get the hell out.

You can’t wait for the people around you to change; if you’re unhappy, the hard truth is that only you can do something about it.

And in the mean time, if you haven’t already, consider tech.

#tech #happiness #respect #careerswitch #bullying

My Case Against New Year's Resolutions

I’ve had so much I’ve wanted to say since my last post, but every day there was some excuse or some other distraction. I guess a few of these were fairly legit, as I was swept up in the whirlwind that was "Flatiron coming to an end" then immediately dove into the pre-holidays interview circuit. Still, I ended up letting all of that momentum slip by me without so much as a word jotted down. So I’ve resolved not to wait so long between posts anymore; more writing in 2014! Damnit, was that a resolution?

God, I hate those. "Have you made your New Year's resolutions yet?" "What are your resolutions this year?"

It’s always the same little dance, year after year: we reflect on all the things we didn’t get done over the past year, then we “resolve” to do better this year. We make lists. We envision all of the awesomeness that’s going to transpire over the next twelve months as a direct result of these lists — weight loss, promotions, big new purchases, fluency in new languages and subsequent vacations to cool places where newfound fluencies can be appropriately flaunted. Basically, we imagine a lot of stuff and then feel good about ourselves.

The problem is, we prematurely experience the high from these (imagined) successes without yet having done anything to achieve them. Feelings of accomplishment and giddiness are palpable just for having thought up a bunch of goals. It's really quite incredible; you feel like you're already halfway there! In some cases, you feel like you've already arrived. And therein lies the danger. Lists are so fun to make up and think about that the effort it takes to ACTUALLY achieve the things on that list feels like a buzzkill.

So yet another year passes by where you haven't lost 15 pounds. You're still at the same job you can't stand. And you certainly haven't learned to play that guitar that's collecting dust in the corner of your room.

So clearly I have qualms about the list-making aspect of New Year's resolutions. Another major problem with the whole thing, in my opinion, is in the name itself: resolutions. Why do we call them that anyway? There's an implicit suggestion that you have a lot of issues that need attending to and resolving. And the longer your list, the more imperfect and fucked up everything in your current life must be (what happened? did you not cross anything off of last year's list, or the year before?!). I don't know about you, but I don't think it can ultimately be the healthiest approach to go into a new year calling yourself out for a laundry list of flaws and need-to-fixes.

A better approach, I think, might be this: ask yourself, how would I summarize each of the last two years in one word? Now, given these, what do I want to make my 'one word' for this next year? For example, I can say fairly confidently after some reflection that 2012 was largely about regrouping. I felt like much of it was spent coming to terms with my unhappiness, leaving something behind that I'd worked really hard to build because it was no longer making me happy, licking my wounds, and trying to figure out what would be next. 2013, in turn, was risk-taking. After picking myself up from 2012, I felt brave enough to take some risks again; in the process, I discovered programming and poured my heart and energy into the Flatiron School.

What do I want 2014 to be? Well, I'm currently pouring my heart and energies into the job search once again, except this time, to find a great dev job. Words I never thought I'd say. It's a new direction for me, but one that I'm extremely excited about and one that makes me feel hopeful for the first time in a while. So an appropriate word for 2014, I think, is commitment. I want to commit wholeheartedly to this amazing thing that started out as not much more than a "wouldn't it be cool if?" and a lot of self-doubt only less than a year ago. Plus, I still (inevitably) have other things I didn't end up seeing through in 2013 that would make great commitments in 2014: like writing more music. Fleshing out more of a novel that I started. Traveling to Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. Not that I'm making a list or anything... DAMNIT.

I'm especially curious to see how this word might change by this time next year. In reflecting back on how commitment shaped and directed my year, I might have a different word to sum it all up. Like world-domination (I guess that's technically two words), moneeeyyy (is that how you spell it?), or amahzing.

Anyhow, it's time to stop making lists, time to stop THINKING about things on lists, and time to just start doing.

More doing.

More writing.

Commitment.

2014.

Being Really Good at 'Everything'... Until You're Not

Hello world! As you may already know, two Mondays ago I began my time as a neophyte programmer at the Flatiron School.

So far, its been crazy. I imagine a little bit like trekking through the wilderness at night with no flashlight and only a small hand knife that you don’t even know how to use. It’s also been insanely exposing. Did I mention that it’s been really, really hard?

I don’t want to sound like I’m whining — but I’d be lying if I said I was used to this level of mental discomfort. As a species, every step of our evolution has been towards stripping away ANY and all possibilities of experiencing discomfort (hence, well, modern technology). So this feels a little foreign. And definitely uncomfortable.

I was curious, though, to trace my life’s trajectory from the early days all the way to where I am today, in order to try and diagnose why exactly my first two weeks at Flatiron have felt so jarring. So I did some reflecting on past times— seemingly from another life, at this point — when I felt like I was really good: at everything.

I know, that sounds like… really presumptuous. That’s because it was.

Family members concur that I started singing before I was really speaking. I begged my mom to take piano lessons at the age of three, she obliged, and I won a national piano competition in Hong Kong (where I was living at the time) at age 8. They even put me in the newspaper.

I moved to Seoul, Korea shortly after and really took a liking to art, so I amped up my drawing hobby and started taking some actual art lessons. At age 9, I won an environmental art contest in Seoul with an acrylic painting of the city trapped in an hour glass, disintegrating under the weight of its pervasive pollution.

The next year in 1996, an international touring production of Les Miserables came to the Seoul Opera House and I discovered musical theater. After seeing the production, I felt like my world had been tilted completely off its axis. I was done.

The following year, a touring production of Puccini’s La Boheme came to Seoul, and they were looking for children who could sing and act a little to play the street children in the big opener of Act II. I begged my mom to audition, and I got a part. After school for the entire fall, I rehearsed and eventually performed at the Seoul Opera House — something I had only just dreamed of doing the previous year.

I didn’t stop acting, performing, drawing, or singing for the next 13 years. During this time, I also relentlessly strived for the best grades and tried to cultivate a befitting social persona. And honestly, it felt like whatever I wanted to be good at — I could be good at. I was even really good at dieting, controlling my weight like a spartan and pretending like I had a normal relationship with food — when I had anything but.

During college, I began to have the first misgivings about the extent of my “being really good at everything”. This is symptomatic of most people who come out of the international/private school mold, which tends to shelter the “high performers” with its small-pond/big fish ecosystem. For one, I stopped getting lead roles all the time when I auditioned for shows. By senior year, after three years of feeling under-valued and misunderstood, I had pretty much turned my back on the theater program all together — despite being a Theater major. At the time, I chalked it up to the department’s “racial prejudices” and “cliquishness”.

Once I entered the job force and real world, my misgivings turned into more serious quandaries, which then turned into full-blown feelings of inadequacy. When you feel like you’ve been really good at everything for 21 years but are somehow unemployable, it’s completely soul-crushing. When you’ve never really been conditioned to deal with that kind of repetitive rejection, you literally have zero coping mechanisms to help you see the light.

This is what happens when you grow up too sheltered. And this is what happens when you only stick to what you know you have some natural knack for: you fail to cultivate perspective.

Hence, the narrow-minded misconception that you are somehow “good at everything”. You are absolutely NOT good at everything! You’re only good at the same few things you’ve repeatedly gravitated to your entire life! And in most cases, you’re not even THAT good at those things! You get out into the big wide world and realize that you’re an averagely good singer, an averagely okay artist, and a below-average student (when you compare yourself to the REALLY smart kids).

Anyway, the point of all this was to map my trajectory, right? And it seems clear that my life mapped itself over a kind of bell curve: it’s like I peaked at age 16. But you hold on to the fallacy — for many years longer — that it’s not you; it’s the world! I’m underused and undervalued and don’t get chosen for roles because EVERYONE ELSE is stupid! I’m talented! In fact, I’m good at everything!

Well, no. Ya aren’t. You’ve just been livin’ it safe (small pond) and playin’ it safe (sticking to things you’re good at) YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.

So yeah, I guess I figured out why my first two weeks at Flatiron have felt so brutal: this is the first time I’ve chosen to do something I am not really good at. No natural disposition for the thing. Nothing. Our instructor Avi, a self-taught programmer (and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in my life ), assures us that there is “no such thing as a naturally-born programmer.” He maintains, rather, that a good programmer is born out of sheer time and effort put into programming — I suppose the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell attributes to greatness in any discipline. While I completely see his point (for example, it would be unreasonable for someone to pick up the piano for three days and be upset that they can’t play as well I can, when I’ve been playing for 17 years… And I was no piano prodigy — I just practiced a lot) — there’s a part of me that still believes certain people DO having a natural disposition toward certain things. Or maybe that just goes back to exposure to the thing, and if you’re exposed from a young age, it will retroactively seem like a natural disposition.

Whatever the case may be, all I know is that programming is hard. My mind has never been forced to think so sequentially before. And while I’m starting to see the natural junctures between writing and programming — the former being something I’m much more comfortable with — there’s still so much syntax (in Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, you name it) that the unfamiliarity poses serious challenges daily as I try to write reasonably passable code. I’m probably in the bottom quartile of my class in terms of pace and comprehension, and this is just something I’m not used to. I’m used to helping others out, not constantly asking for it myself.

But I feel really humbled, and humble is good. It’s really valuable, I think, to go after that which we are NOT good at, and challenge ourselves to become better. Otherwise, you’ll stay stuck in your little pond and the rude awakenings may come unexpected later on in life - as mid life crises, boredom, or worse yet: regret.

Making Less Than All Your Friends (and Watching the Rest Get Married)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, ergo since I’ve written anything. But this is something that’s been on my mind for some time now.

Let’s see. Where do I begin? By sharing what it’s been like these last few years to be making less money than just about all my friends — both college and high school? Or by opining on the fucking weirdness of seeing half my Newsfeed taken over, lately, by engagement announcements, wedding albums, and ultrasounds I never asked to see? Yeah, you — really good for you and all, but TMI.

I mean let’s face it. If you’re reading this and unmarried, whether by choice or circumstance (read: a stagnant career… not enough money in the bank account for a wedding) there’s at least SOME small part of you that’s just the slightest bit not-the-happiest when yet another old friend or acquaintance posts a cloying wedding album. Or perhaps even worse — posts daily updates, one month in advance, COUNTING DOWN till “the big day”.

And let’s face it. The real insult to injury is when “that super scumbag” and “THAT slutty hot mess” from college officiously infiltrate your feed: Engaged. Married To (and not to each other, either). It’s like, “Fuck, what the hell am I doing wrong here???” Of course, you probably should’ve removed them from your ‘Friend’ list a long time ago — but hey, how else were you supposed to FB-stalk ‘em?

In any case, I guess it makes sense to start with the issue of money, then marriage. That seems to work out in real life too.

If you don’t make less money than all your friends, or aren’t at least able to reasonably surmise that you do, then you’ve never been forced into hermitude. You’ve never HAD to be anti-social because you literally couldn’t afford to go out to a nice dinner, followed by table service at a club or rounds and rounds of drinks at really any bar, divey or not. You’ve never had to watch everyone else post exotic vacation albums (family trips subsidized by your parents don’t count) or casual updates (“#NBD!”) from random three-day getaways to Ibiza — while you were stuck at home, rationing out your produce from Trader Joe’s for the week.

Now, if you’re in my boat, this is all too familiar. To be really frank, I have yet to earn more than an annual income of somewhere in the ballpark of $30,000, after taxes. And I’m comfortable enough to admit now that it wreaked some havoc on my ego and self esteem for a while… enough so that I became seriously alcoholic from 2009-2011, requiring an 8-month cold-turkey abstinence from the stuff for the better part of 2011 because I couldn’t stop thinking about it and was drinking so much of it that hangovers had turned into comedowns and I had developed a slight tremor in my hands. (Seriously — Caroline Knapp’s painfully self-baring Drinking: A Love Story helped me face the music and make some life-saving changes.)

Point is, it sucks to make less money than everyone. And let’s be really honest here — if you went to a top ten school and STILL found yourself making less than your non-top ten school friends, well. That fact secretly sucked the most. And any time you’d think about it, you’d immediately force yourself to feel some shame, “Shame on me!” because you knew it was really fucked up to think that way. By the way, it is. But you can’t blame yourself entirely — no. A good chunk of the responsibility is to be apportioned to mom, dad, and the rest of “society” for over-blowing the merits of a top ten college degree. That, and the shitty economy, wherein said degrees stopped doing as much shit for us as they once did for our parents.

Well, time’s a funny thing. And the thing about time is that sometimes, unbeknownst to your conscious decision-making, your values shift in tandem. Which is another way of saying: one day it’s your pathetic annual income that’s a total ego crusher, and the next day it’s something else.

For me, that something was THE SUDDEN AND METEORIC UPTICK IN WEDDINGS.

One day, I woke up and my income didn’t make me feel like shit anymore. Instead, it was seeing everyone else get married. Did this mean, suddenly, that I myself was itching to get married? To have a wedding of my own, complete with the towering 10-ft. cake and enviable white dress and African parrots, endangered elephants, jugglers on stilts and what’s left of the Amazonian rainforest — all transformed into my personal wedding wonderland?

Hell no.

Like I said above, I’m a firm believer in that money must be dealt with first, then marriage. There’s no way in hell I’d ever dream of having a wedding if I couldn’t afford to have one without putting myself in debt. Not that I’ve ever had one, but I imagine even the most “modest” of ceremonies and receptions costs a good sum.

So why did weddings piss me off all of a sudden? (God, that sounds so horrible to say, like admitting you enjoy punching baby kittens.)

I think, ultimately, it comes down to progress. Getting married is a big sign of “progress” in one’s adult life. So seeing everyone’s wedding albums on Facebook became a kind of rude awakening that I had fallen even further behind in this race we call life than I could have imagined in my worst nightmares: not only was everyone making more than me, but everyone was also making enough to have WEDDINGS, and both sides had found parental approval, permission, all that good (and if you’re Korean, notoriously unattainable) stuff. Nevermind how HAPPY and perfect everyone looks in their wedding photos.

You know what’s funny? I finally found peace with it all — I mean all of this wedding-envy crap — through a recent tutoring lesson. Imagine that. Not long ago, the idea that I was earning a living as a tutor was all doom and gloom, but it’s been really helpful to come to terms with everything through this blog thing.

So I’m sitting there, discussing themes and scenes from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning play, Our Town, when we come across the wedding scene. Or more accurately, the Stage Manager’s monologue preceding (SPOILER ALERT) the big wedding in Act II. And here’s the part that really got me:

"There are a lot of things to be said about a wedding; there are a lot of thoughts that go on during a wedding… People were made to live two-by-two. This is a good wedding, but people are so put together that even at a good wedding there’s a lot of confusion way deep down in people’s minds… The real hero of this scene isn’t on the stage at all, and you know who that is… every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being."

BAM.

I interpreted the full monologue to be a reflection of Wilder’s personal views on the celebration of tradition vs. nature. And I think what he was trying to say is that in all the trappings of the wedding day — which can be extended to mean any man-made tradition — we tend to lose sight of what’s really important. Nature. The nature of things and their natural purpose. And the more I hear my girlfriends bitch about their bridezilla friends, the awful, budget-breaking bridal showers they have to participate in (by plane, no less) and the ridiculously expensive bridesmaids dresses they’re often forced to buy, the more I think Wilder was on to something.

Weddings, sacred unions, new life, giving birth to new life forms… incomes, salaries, hard work, fulfillment, happiness, honest lives…

Perhaps we ought to step back every once in a while and reflect on the natural purpose of the things we seek. And make sure we seek them, as much as we envy or resent them (and I’m fully guilty of playing on both sides), for the right reasons.

#wedding-envy #salaries #careers #engagements

How I Got My Job in Music (and What It Was Like Once I Got There)

If you’ve been reading along the last few posts, you already know that I got my job in music out of waiting tables. The full story, however, is something really close to my heart that I’ve always felt warranted a little explanation. So I’ll do my best to expound here.

See, when I’m only allowed the truncated version, it sounds like I had some kind of Cinderella moment: “Yeah, like, I was waiting tables one day and then like, I waited on Cee Lo’s manager’s wife, and like, the rest is history.” As if I was plucked out of obscurity because the heavens deemed me special and dropped my dream job into my lap on a silver tray, complete with delicious tea sandwiches. Recounting this version makes me feel like an ass, because the magic of it all is a load of hogwash. It’s misleading.

Trust me. Luck was an unmistakable part of it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t break my back to put myself in luck’s way.

Which brings me full circle. Here are the three most common misconceptions about my story:

All I had to do was ask the first person who walked through the door and sat at my table for a job. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I worked at Houston’s for exactly 1 year, during which I schmoozed my ass off with every guest, every night. I even made a concerted effort to schmooze extra hard when I felt a ‘music type’ had been sat at my table. And I HAPPENED to have waited on three of these ‘music people’ (of varying degrees of importance) — none of which resulted in any real opportunity, by the way — before I left, because I couldn’t take it anymore. Then, I waited tables here for approximately 2 months, at which point I FINALLY met and waited on The One. Overhearing that she’d just gotten back from a trip to Raleigh, I struck up a fortuitous conversation about Raleigh-Durham, which prompted her to ask if I’d gone to Duke, which turned into a conversation about Mike Posner, which I took with great shock because his single hadn’t even hit mainstream radio yet and there was no way she should even know about “Cooler Than Me”, at which point she explained that her husband worked in music, had recently signed on as Cee Lo Green’s manager, and was looking for a new assistant. All the while, I was delivering lemon-drop martinis to her table like a madwoman and trying to make sure she and her guest were having a great girl’s night. It took 14 months and two restaurants — not even counting any of the music internships I’d had throughout college or any of the tables I’d waited back in Durham — to meet this woman and get my ‘lucky break’.

Anyone who waits tables can score his or her dream job out of it, too. I hate to be a killjoy, but I do not recommend that you go out and wait tables in the hopes of landing a music or entertainment job. The chances of turning this into The Opportunity are really, really slim, and you might seriously end up wanting to off yourself in the process — especially if you went to a good college. The reason the chances are slim is because there are only a handful of restaurants where you can reliably find ‘music types’ (and athletes, apparently, with their side chicks) on any given day, meaning the pool isn’t very wide, which means even if you KNEW where to look, you wouldn’t be starting with too many options. I only knew which restaurants to haunt because I’d spent nearly every summer of my childhood with relatives in Bergen County. Another reason the chances are slim is because these types of restaurants are hard to get jobs at (yes, there’s competition even in the service industry — Asian parents, are you taking notes?), and they probably won’t hire you unless you have prior experience. So thank god I backed into that fratty dude’s Audi in 2007, because it forced me to get a job and gain some fuckin’ experience waiting tables.

After all of that, I finally landed my dream job.

It was anything but.

Don’t get me wrong — I was beyond stoked for the opportunity. To get my foot in the door, finally. But once in, I discovered the kind of office and work environment that I never, ever want to be a part of again. The kind of place where the CEO calls in all 42 employees to the screening room to make a grandiose speech about the company’s values, and about valuing “everyone’s input”, and insists that because this is “a scrappy young music company” that “everyone should feel welcome to keep his or her ear to the ground and share when they’ve found new music or something special” — then shits all over you the second you try. Even goes so far as to cc people on emails you’ve sent him about new business opportunities or artistic endeavors, just to belittle you in front of as many of his ‘colleagues’ as possible. The kind of place where you get thrown under the bus by crazy coworkers who completely lose it when you try to suggest a more efficient way of organizing an artist’s calendar, even though you were hired on board to make the team more efficient in the first place. Especially when said crazy coworker is almost old enough to be your mother, and can’t stop talking about the glory days of working at a record label. That’s how you know he or she is a fucking ‘dinosaur’ — people who are completely out of touch with the way the industry is changing, and think they’re genuinely showing you the ropes when they suggest to you on day one, “Okay, the best starting point for artist research is this website, www.google.com.”

Seriously? A website called “Google.com”?

(As a side note, if you think I just sat around and waited to be promoted or praised and am now bitching that this didn’t happen, you’re wrong. I leveraged that job for what it was worth, hustled my way into studios, slept fewer than 3-4 hours a night as a result and managed a few songwriters, artists and producers of my own. One of them’s even been offered a few production deals, and landed this huge single for Japan’s queen of J-Pop. I also almost self-combusted during the first 6 months of this time due to stress, self-doubt, and alcoholism.)

So this is why I’ve always hated the 5-minute update version of my story. Because the truth is, getting my job in music wasn’t this big dream come true. But I can see why people might get the wrong idea about it.

Even now, if you only bothered to read what I accentuated in bold, or decided to cheat and skim — you’d get the same truncated BS that I’ve been trying to rectify in the first place. That, and you’d think I was a total egomaniac (conversely, the fact that a close reading of my Facebook Newsfeed actually sounds like the self-congratulatory, pseudo-inspirational crap I’ve bolded is a laughable topic for another post, perhaps).

Mark my words. People in music who’ve stumbled upon this post are probably scoffing at my lack of gratitude. Indeed, it is the widespread and prevalent attitude of those who still remain in the music industry — those who have scratched and clawed their way up, eaten shit for years, and still continue to be shat upon by the ‘powers that be’ — that ANY opportunity to work in this ‘luxury’ industry should be met with so much thanks and gratitude that after this profuse thanking of the music deities, you’re left with not one drop of thanks in your sorry bones for anything else.

Well here’s what I have to say to that nonsense. After some years of toiling and clawing, am I grateful someone took a chance on me? Absolutely. I have always supported the underdog, always as a senior given freshmen the opportunity to step up and shine and take solos and leading roles, even when everyone else in the group vehemently protested this breach of ‘tradition’ with shock and horror. Will I forever feel a little bit indebted and thankful to that someone who gave me the opportunity to work in the industry I’d dreamed of working in — an industry that’s notoriously competitive and impossible to break into — regardless of whether it worked out or not? Of course. But to suggest that I ought to feel grateful to have been shut out and discouraged from every opportunity to be useful or contribute creatively to my company? To feel thankful that I was constantly singled out and bullied and belittled when the belittlement and bullying never seemed to happen to anyone else?

Hell no.

The opportunity was one thing, and once I got there… well, that was something else, entirely. I don’t think they should be mistaken for one and the same. And I certainly don’t want to hear it from you if you’re a white male who’s never had to play down what college you went to, just so that your boss and coworkers wouldn’t give you more shit than they already do.

Since when did being a motivated person (for most of us, that means student) from age 3-21 become such a shameful thing, anyway? The school of hard knocks and a top ten university aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive… but no one in music (with any legitimacy, anyway) seems to be able to grasp that concept. And that’s probably why the business is broke and can’t afford to pay anyone decent salaries. And thus why everyone in music wants you to eat shit, and secretly hopes you’ll never do better than them.

Anyway. For me, The Opportunity didn’t materialize into the ‘dream job’ — so I grew some balls, and I left. To pursue the next challenge. To shift gears, develop some new skills, and hopefully revisit my dream industry (because I haven’t given up on it yet) from a new angle.

Like maybe building a music startup one day — and hiring smart people.

And when I take that leap, It’ll feel closer to the ‘dream job’, because it’ll be on my own terms.

Not anyone else’s.

#music #music-industry #job #perspective #advice #networking #waitressing

RE: Why I Waited Tables After College

More than a few old friends and acquaintances came out of the woodwork to respond to this post.

This reaffirmed to me that many of us, whether we ascribe to it or not, have been smacked in the face by the ugly nine-headed monster that is "societal pressure". Someone even took the time to write me an EMAIL in response, so I wanted to share a highlight:

"...going to a place like Duke can really skew our perspectives... There's tremendous pressure to have your shit together right after you graduate, and the definition of 'having your shit together' is rather narrow (e.g consulting, med school, law school... the usual...).

When I first started working for [ ]... I found myself cringing whenever I mentioned to people that I worked on the retail side (which of course is FARRR less glamorous than... corporate) because it would inevitably result in them giving me that look. The one where they're thinking 'oh... what happened?'

...[But] talking angry customers down from their pedestals taught me a lot more about people and life than working on an excel spreadsheet ever would."

I hope he/she doesn't mind that I shared this, because they nailed it.

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a job that requires frequent and pervasive use of Excel spreadsheets. I had a few Excel-heavy banking internships myself back in the day -- back when the ugly nine-headed monster and I were constant bedfellows -- from which I admittedly learned plenty. I even had to use Excel a few times during my music job (though somehow, I don't think having managed the tween guest list for Cody Simpson's 14th birthday party will get me as far in a standard job interview as having built complex financial models from scratch. I've never successfully done the latter, by the way).

So spreadsheets aren't the enemy here. But presumption and superiority complexes? Definitely. And these tend to run rampant amongst the suit-wearing, spreadsheet-wielding ilk.

For the record, my first week of training at Houston's was more demanding, soul-crushing and limit-pushing than any week I spent in my two summers at Goldman Sachs. Servers can even out-drink and out-do bankers in lines of... well, maybe in another post.

Anyway, it takes courage to take the "fuck you" path.

So the next time anyone gives you the "oh, what happened?" face, simply tell 'em you bought a ticket on the next bullet train to F YOU.

Why I Waited Tables After College

There’s a rampant social misconception about waiting tables: that it’s reserved only for the biggest fuck-ups in life.

Yeah sure, there are some other presumptuous ideas about servers that are also casually tossed around. Like the fact that “ALL servers want to be singers and/or actors”, or my personal favorite — that “we just LOVE to wait hand and foot on cheapskates and assholes”. If you’re wondering where such miserable specimen exist (in the largest numbers), you need look no further than basically any establishment in Bergen County.

I first got into the service industry during the summer after junior year in college, because I backed up into some fratty dude’s brand new red Audi convertible. One second he wasn’t there, the next second he was; and just like that, I owed him something like $967. Rather than take it up with my insurance company, however, I decided to deal with it on my own. So I got a job.

My first gig was playing hostess for $9/hr at the local sushi hotspot. Once I’d proven I could memorize a floor plan, delegate table sections and pack up to-go orders, I was allowed to join the ranks of the tip-earning servers.

I’ll save for another post the visceral details of what it’s really like to work a busy night when the guest list is on a two-hour wait and 90% of the people dining at your restaurant are your peers and classmates. But just for fun, I’ll recount a few gems… like waiting on large parties comprised of slutty sorority girls and their drunk, douchey dates. Or recognizing one of those drunk douchebags as someone you may or may not have been set up with at your last sorority semi-formal. Or hearing people butcher the word “edamame”. Or explaining to a guest that a veggie roll consists of avocado, cucumber, and carrot — then being told, “I’ll just have an avocado roll then, but like, can you add cucumber and carrot to that.” Or best of all — getting a $1 tip on a huge bill from some rich bitch in your Pub Pol class who probably didn’t even recognize you go to school with her (and you know she’s rich because she has a building named after her family; that, and you stalked her on Facebook).

The good times continued into my senior year at Duke, by which point I was kind of hooked on the extra cash that waiting tables allowed me. How else was I going to fund my extracurricular activities, Monday through Sunday? And how else was I supposed to pay off my gazillion campus parking tickets?

Then shit hit the fan in 2009, as the story goes. After a string of unsuccessful interviews here, here, here, and here (the list goes on, by the way), I graduated without a single job offer and no real skills to speak of. After all, college isn’t where you go to acquire “job skills”; whoever heard of such a thing? No. It’s where you go to get an education. There’s a big difference.

In July of 2009, after two months of putzing around in Durham post-graduation, I packed my bags and moved up to New York to continue the job search. Okay, that’s a bit of a lie; in actuality, I moved up to New Jersey and took over a spare bedroom in my aunt’s house — but for a while, I let everyone believe the fantasy that I HAD DONE IT! I’D MOVED TO NEW YORK!

I didn’t have to pay rent; my aunt was super gracious. But I still had some bills to pay and wanted to chip in for groceries so my family wouldn’t think I was completely useless… and no one was biting. I couldn’t even seem to get interviews anymore. So I got the only job I could.

I waited tables.

What was supposed to be a temporary means of survival turned into 13 of the most demoralizing months of my 22 years (22 at the time). One time, at around the 6-month mark, I dropped off a bowl of spinach dip at someone’s table; as I looked up, I realized it was an old varsity-cool guy-superstar-prom king from my high school in Seoul, Korea — with his newly minted wife. Another time, around the 1-year mark, I waited on another one of these old acquaintances from high school… and his entire family. It was only as I brought out dessert menus, however, that he finally tapped my arm in recognition — fuck if I was going to acknowledge him first! Yeah, I was ashamed at the time. Then he looked deep into my eyes, and holding both my hands in earnest he asked me: “What happened to you? W.. Why are you working here?” I muttered something back sheepishly about “networking” and “trying to get into the music industry”. But I know he was barely listening; all he could see was how far I’d fallen. How far I’d tumbled from the days of my ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ yearbook superlative.

I went home and bawled my eyes out that night, and more than likely polished off a bottle of wine or two. He’d looked at me with such searing pity and concern, I felt like all of my innards had been totally eviscerated. Upon some tear-soaked investigating, I discovered he’d graduated from Swarthmore the year before me and was now pursuing some course of graduate study at Columbia. Just great. I’d now thrown gasoline onto my roaring fire of self-pity.

Years later, I can finally look back on those days with some semblance of humor. I mean, life really does work in funny ways. Within a month of that ego-demolishing encounter, I was offered a job at Time Inc., took the job, then was offered another job in music (FINALLY!) by an old acquaintance I’d met… waiting tables.

So if you’re reading this by any chance, aforementioned-asshole-who-made-me-cry, I hope you know that I’m talking about you. And that I did get that job in music, even though you didn’t believe that I would.

I’m not vindictive, but I feel vindicated in my own small way for all of us servers who do and have done what we do to survive and make a living. Biting our tongues, day in and day out as crazy people shout at us because they wanted their steak well done but “still juicy”.

There’s still a lot of life ahead, wherein which — yes — I may prove to be the biggest fuck-up yet. But maybe not. And one thing I can say for sure is that every ounce of success I’ve had thus far, I owe to waiting tables. It taught me patience, humility, and most importantly — it gave me grit. I never would have survived a day in music without it.

And that’s more than most of you degree-touting ninnies can say.

#waiting-tables #waitressing #2009 #college-degree #hustle

What I REALLY Did Between Music and the Present (Besides Study for the GRE)

I've been on a kick lately. Sadly, not a juicing kick or all-kale-everything kick, either of which could probably do me some good; I've put on about 10-15lbs in the last year, and I blame the GRE. Just another reason (of many) to hate on grad school exams. But this kick I've been on -- being real. I've been in the mood for disclosure. Someone left a few kind words for me on Facebook the other day for this very reason, so I felt it would be a kind of breach of disclosure if I didn't admit what I've been up to these last 13 months. Between quitting my job in music last June and receiving my acceptance email to the Flatiron School three days ago, I've been working as a tutor. Yup. You know, it's that job that people usually take in the summertime when they want to make some extra cash, after which they either go back to school or to their "regular" jobs. Or in the case of non-Asians, it's the excuse to go live in Seoul or Beijing or something for a few months, maybe a year. And if you're Asian, namely Korean, it's what you do when you've striked out from all career options and efforts and have essentially given up on life. At least that's the stigma. So for the last 13 months, I have been too ashamed to record anywhere online, on any of my social media profiles, that my job title really ought to say: Tutor (if we're getting really specific: General Writing and College Admissions Essay Tutor for Students Grade 7-12). The saddest part of this ego-fueled shame is that tutoring brought me more fulfillment than any other job I've had since graduating from college. And okay, maybe that's not saying a whole lot because to date I've been a waitress (or server, as we call them now), a salesperson at Louis Vuitton, an executive assistant in print/media, an executive assistant in music, and the office servant in music. But to think! My ego got in the way of being proud to say I teach kids for a living. And made me think I had to present shit differently to the rest of the world. And by "rest of the world", I mean everyone and anyone who has access to any of my social media activity, excluding family and close friends because those people already know what I'm REALLY up to, so basically I'm putting up this show for... Who exactly? Pathetic, right. I worked with roughly 10 high school seniors last fall on their college admissions essays; 30 rising 8th graders in preparation for the infamous entrance exam to the exclusive Bergen Academies; and countless other students who just needed someone to sit down and explain how a semi-colon works, and to tell them that life is bigger than all of this, so not to worry. To learn to appreciate writing as a lifelong companion. 20 of the 30 8th graders were granted interviews. One senior achieved his lifelong dream of acceptance to Yale. Another to Columbia (if my anti-grad school self sounds like a hypocrite here, let me just clarify that a dream is still a dream, and at 17 I too had similar dreams, even if they are different now). To think, there was a time when I was prouder to say that I answered phone calls and screened homeless people from trying to hand demo CDs to my boss for a living. What the fuck. Short of illicit activities that could land you behind bars, I think we ought to be proud of that which brings fulfillment and feels rewarding. And know that no job is ever as cool as your friends are making theirs out to be. I don't care how many Red Bull-fueled Insta videos they upload depicting "OFFICE SHENANIGANS!" and "JUST ANOTHER DAY IN MY COOL ASS OFFICE". Pushing paper for the man is no different than pushing paper for Cee Lo Green. And backstage access to SNL next to Gwyneth Paltrow's dressing room doesn't define your self-worth. Though she is pretty fucking hot.

Being Honest is Pretty Cool

Anyone who knows me knows that when it comes to dishing out my opinion, I'm pretty point-blank. Sometimes this offends people, because very few seem equipped to handle the truth anymore. That, and sometimes I can get really juicy with my insults (my college roommates used to bring up people I hated or couldn't stand, just to hear me rant because they found it entertaining). My excuse is that I was an English and Theater Studies double major, which meant I had to read a shitload of Shakespeare, which meant my college tuition was basically spent learning a variety of very colorful and juicy verbal insults.

Anyway. I recently wrote a post on Facebook dishing out the truth about what I've been up to these last two years. Working in music, then quitting my job in music because 99% of the people in music pissed me off, then doing what every top-ten college grad does after a few years in the workforce -- study for grad school exams -- then realizing this was stupid and likely to cost a lot of unnecessary money, all the while starting to get interested in tech and realizing it may be one of the last truly creative spaces left in this world, but being too scared to admit to myself that I wanted to join this coveted and competitive space, then FINALLY cutting out the bullshit and just going for it.

And truth be told, the juiciest parts of my awesome life story (post-college) aren't even included in these last two years. Like slipping on soggy french fries and serving steaks to really really annoying rich people at the mall. Or selling designer handbags to the very same annoying rich people who'd tipped me like shit and probably didn't recognize me from lunch and probably assumed I was some college drop-out and should be really really grateful for this awesome opportunity to be around expensive stuff all day and hobnob with the well-to-do.

But there's time yet and many a post left to expound on those golden days.

What I was getting at earlier is that I wrote a really honest post on Facebook for the first time in a while, laying out my insecurities and shortcomings and failures and then sharing what feels like the first success in a long time. And it got more feedback than anything I've ever posted.

Point is, it felt good to be honest. And though my Newsfeed mostly reeks of self-congratulatory garbage and too-carefully curated insincerity, every once in a while I do come across a really really genuine post.

I don't know if Facebook's the best space for honesty anymore, so I'll do my best to lay it all out here.

Being honest is pretty cool.

I hate everyone.

Just kidding.

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