I hope you get a little entertainment, practical advice, and wisdom from part two of my intro.
Also, see my intro post part 1 (https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@tom-sullivan/hi-i-m-tom-i-m-29-i-ve-changed-careers-four-times-and-i-m-a-dad-part-1) for context, or just read part 2 if you feel like it.
Between FEMA deployments I spent an amazing summer attending music festivals across Northern California, taking Muay Thai classes, catching up with friends, and traveling to San Diego and other places with my new long distance girlfriend, Jessica.
I met Jessica at Lightning in a Bottle, a very hip and artsy electronic music festival in Southern California. Exactly the kind of vibe I prefer, much more mellow than the EDC raver scene. I almost didn’t go to this festival because I had gone to one the weekend before and was pooped. I had a volunteer ticket and was going completely by myself, hoping to use the volunteer experience to meet people to hang with. I think I was supposed to sort trash, compost, and recyclables, but I never actually made it my post.
Anyway, I decided not to give in and fear, and just face the reality of what going to a festival by myself would be like. I’d always wanted to try it and see what happens, and this was my chance.
I immediately started meeting people and gaining confidence in rolling solo, it was so freeing not to be tied down to a group and have zero drama. I initially met Jessica on the dance floor, complimented her very funky and cool outfit, and went my separate way after dancing and having a conversation that I can no longer remember.
The next day we both happened to be thirsty at the same time and ran into each other at the water fountain, and I miraculously remembered her name. “Is your name Jessica?” I asked, and my life was changed forever. Not only was my life changed forever, but my son’s life was conceived in that chance moment.
"Is your name Jessica?" Best Pickup Line Ever
Neither of us was really doing anything, so we started hanging out. Slowly but surely, we started to connect deeper and deeper, having fascinating conversations about our lives and ambitions, and going through a very intimate festival experience together. We spent the afternoon lying by the lake, and the night partying with the group of friends we assembled from my hodge podge of new friends and the people she was camping with.
We hung out after the festival too. I went to San Diego and we hung out for four days straight total. The longest and best first date ever.
Then I started going to San Diego a lot, she came up to Oakland a few times, we went to Portland together, then we even camped together at Burning Man for a whole week, which was amazing, but I feel like I should save those details for another story, as too much happens at Burning Man to easily put in words.
I was living off of the money I saved working in New York, and was basically pissing it away with all the travel, partying, and festivals, and wasn’t putting anything back, so reality hit that I would need to deploy again to get some positive cash flow.
I did one more really crappy deployment in Colorado, which is a state I love and had an amazing time exploring and connecting with the friends I have there, but the job itself really sucked.
I cried by myself as I was boarding the plane to that deployment, I wonder if anyone noticed.
We were deep in love and we knew it, so Jessica quit her job managing a coffee shop and came to live with me in a Hyatt House residential hotel in Colorado Springs for a couple of months. She spent her time exploring with cooking and getting deeper into yoga and other such reflective self exploring, while I was miserable at work trying to put away a few Gs.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do another FEMA deployment ever again. I knew it because I was in love, and because life is too short. I already made the realization that it wasn’t worth doing a job that you hate just because it pays well, so I needed to live it.
So I quit, and never looked back.
Then we moved to San Diego and got a little one bedroom apartment by the beach. It was amazing, I wish I had done more to enjoy it, but instead I worried too much about finding a job right away.
It didn’t happen right away, but something else did.
We tried what is called the ‘Natural Fertility Method,’ where you try to plan when you have sex based on the woman’s ovulation cycle, so that you don’t get pregnant, or do, depending on what you want.
When we started this method Jessica had just come off birth control, which was messing her up fierce with all the extra hormones. However, it turns out that coming off of birth control makes your ovulation cycle irregular, so all of the calculations we did to avoid pregnancy were actually completely worthless and we had no idea.
So you can guess what happened. “Holy shit, I’m going to be a Dad,” I thought. I am now someone’s Dad.
I don’t think I ever really processed the fact that I was going to be a Dad. I almost lived in a weird state of denial where I was preparing for it but I didn’t really believe it was going to happen, until it did.
Holy Crap I'm a Dad! Holy Crap I'm a Baby!
Anyways, back to the job hunt. I randomly fell into another career, which was actually pretty interesting.
San Diego is home to the world’s largest Comic Book Convention, San Diego Comic-Con, which is run by a non-profit called Comic-Con International.
Because of my teaching experience, experience working at FEMA, and ability to schmooze well during a job interview, I was able to get arguably one of the most challenging jobs at Comic-Con.
It was my job to manage and control the lines. Yes, the lines. There are a bajillion lines at Comic-Con and the other conventions they put on, and my job was to plan for these lines, hire people to manage these lines, and work on ways to make the crowd and line control for these conventions better, year round.
It was actually really boring in the office, lots of long meetings about stuff that nerds would be freaking out about it they heard it, and just a ton of planning. Planning kind of drives me nuts, but I got pretty good at it. I certainly didn’t love it, but I seemed to be good.
The days of the show were my bread and butter. I worked 12-15 hour days managing my five assistants, my 20 or so head line managers, and the 150 or so line managers who managed the god knows how many lines. Some of the lines were over a mile long if they were straight, and had over 10,000 people in them at times.
In fact, the New York Times praised Comic-Con as second only to Disneyland in terms of it’s line management schemes. It was complicated, but very well managed by the line managers at the micro-level, and with good leaders at the macro-level, so it worked. It was tiring and stressful, but it worked.
I felt like a general, constantly fighting to organize the crowd as it started to herd faster and faster as the day went on, and feeling victory as the 6,000 person ballrooms got loaded on time for the big studio production panels to start. It was pretty cool.
There were some things I didn’t like about it, but I look back pretty fondly on a lot of it. The thing I disliked the most was working in the office year round on planning. It was mind-numbing, just looking at lines, planning lines, thinking about conventions and lines, all the time. After two big Comic-Cons and the other shows they put on, I knew I was done, which was convenient because we decided to move to Seattle.
To add some value to this post, here are some lessons learned while working in a stressful crowd control management position at the world’s largest Comic Book/Pop Culture Convention:
When you have to manage people, make sure they have pre-defined roles with work that they can work on independently, without needing to ask you what to do. I was given five assistants that I had to manage in the office for a couple of months before the show with no guidance or idea of how to utilize them properly, and I feel like I did it very poorly the first year, and possibly even built some resentment in them by taking on too much myself and not fully trusting them. The next year I gave them projects with complete control, and full trust, and they not only performed better in the office, but also during the show.
Planning is extremely important, especially for large scale operations or events, but it sucks. Maybe it just sucks for the way my brain is structured, but I’m much better at doing than planning, and often when I’m doing the actual work the plans I spent the whole year on get completely thrown out in order to deal with unforeseen situations. I’m still glad we planned the whole thing out, it was just really fucking complicated, and gave me a headache.
The ability to remain calm in stressful situations is the only thing that will allow you to manage those situations successfully. People who freak out fail. This has been translatable into pretty much all areas of my life. The ability to remain calm in the face of the mob has given me the ability to remain calm while I face my own real problems.
Anyways, so now i live in Seattle, because that is where Jessica’s family is from so we have more help with our son. I miss San Diego and Oakland and New York, but our time in Seattle has been very healing and has helped us refocus our lives and get ‘back on track.’
I completely switched careers again. Now I’m in sales at a small software company, which is by far the best job I’ve ever had in terms of it being a match for my skills and being financially rewarding.
Now that I’m in sales, my success is tied to the company’s success, so I have real ‘skin in the game,’ which is incredibly motivating. Also, if I don’t do well, I don’t get paid as much, but when I kick ass, I get a paid a lot, which is also extremely motivating.
It is also forcing me to learn extremely quick. When you have a monetary reward tied to your success, you learn how to succeed much quicker, which is also relevant to people learning how to create better posts here on Steemit.
I’m not going to get into the details of fatherhood or why I chose to switch to a career in sales. I chose this career, I did not fall into it because I didn’t know what else to do, which was very smart. But I will end with some more bullet points on what I’ve learned so far in my now 4th major career change while still in my 20s:
Sales is one of the most useful skills to learn in any business, because you cannot simply show a prospect a product and expect them to magically see all of the benefits and expect them to buy it. Every decent sized company needs someone or something to bridge the gap between the customer and the benefits the company’s product offers them. Usually a human being who can figure out exactly what the customer needs and subtly explain how their product can exceed those needs and why the benefits of their product are better than anyone else’s is the best way to close a sale.
If you have great interpersonal skills, but don’t know exactly what you want to do with your life, you should really consider sales. Not only will you use those skills, but you will expand on them and get a deeper understanding of how people communicate, and ultimately how people’s minds work and make decisions. Then you will become invaluable because not only do you have interpersonal skills, but you know how to use them to help a company make money, which is needed for almost every single business in the world.
Copywriting, or writing for sales, is another invaluable skill, and should be studied in depth by anybody doing sales, and especially anybody that includes writing or any marketing in their work. Communicating via the written word follows different principles than the spoken word, but you want your writing to sound like regular speaking as much as possible. You also need to understand how to write to people’s emotions first, then to rationalize those emotions with practical analytical thoughts. Copywriting can be used in all writing, not just for sales and marketing. If you can appeal to emotion and make people feel a certain way with your writing, it will be better.
That does it for my intro! I hope I added some value with my thoughts on different career choices and entertained with a bit of life story mixed in.
There is so much to be shared here on Steemit and I’m thrilled for this new community. I’m excited to share my authentic voice and to read yours.
Peace.