While Looking for My Next Job I Decided to Give Away My Time
The most valuable thing in the world is not money or gold. It’s actually time. There is no way to create more of it, and you don’t know how much of it you actually have left. If you want to see something sobering just watch this breakdown of an average person’s life.
That said I decided that I am going to find ways to give my time away as I look for a new job.
It’s been 8 months since my first real adventure into the startup world and the ride has abruptly come to an end. Startups pivot all the time and MindSumo was no exception. I wish the team the best of luck and thank them for the great opportunity. Now time to dust off the resume.
Having gone through the job search process a few times now, I can safely say it never gets any easier. The experience is humbling, frustrating, lonely, confusing, and stressful. Even more so when you don’t have the backdrop of business school or a current job to fall back on during your search.
In my past experience, looking for a job consumed me and put me on this roller coaster of highs and low between interviews and decisions. It was not fun.
This time around I decided to do things differently. Rather than dedicate 100% of my time to informational calls, company research, and LinkedIn stalking, I am only going to spend 50% on these activities.
For the remaining 50% of my time I am going to help people and give my time and knowledge without asking for anything in return.
It’s no secret that giving and helping leads to happiness and often good karma. It also puts you in the right mindset of helping and value creation when those interviews do finally come. Most importantly it helps me feel balanced during a time when I am asking for so much from other people who are giving me their time and lending me their reputations for referrals.
Two weeks into this experiment I can say that giving my time and knowledge has certainly given me much peace of mind during a time when I should be panicking instead. Here’s what I have been up to.
The first thing I decided to do was help my friend Kelsey launch her edible cookie dough business, Doughp. While it’s fun to say I am helping a Doughp dealer in San Francisco open a store, I’m motivated to help because it’s an incredible experience watching good people succeed.
Kelsey is a great inspiration to me because she left a very comfortable and successful marketing job in tech to follow her passion for sweets. She is taking the risk of opening a totally new food concept store in one of the world’s most expensive cities by herself. You can’t help but root for her.
Through helping Kelsey, I am also finding a creative way to help keep my growth marketing skills sharp and learn how to do public relations for a launch. It’s really a win-win.
Another way I have been giving away my time to help other people is through answering questions and giving advice on Quora. This was something I did a lot of during my time with Critical Square where I would focus on answering questions about business school. I’ve since expanded my scope of advice to help others on launching companies, building better habits, and navigating careers.
I think Quora is an incredibly powerful channel because you can reach so many people looking for help at once and it’s evergreen content that continues to help people years later. At the same time I also learn so much myself when I get to read other responses from experts.
If you have great advice and experiences to share, I highly encourage people to spend some time on Quora. It’s much less intimidating than writing a full blog article and you can a big impact on thousands of people.
Feel free to check out my Quora Profile
I am discovering that this giving mentality doesn’t have to only happen outside of my job search. I have been finding ways to successfully apply it during my coffee chats and informational calls as well.
The mistake that I see from many of these conversations is that the focus is only on the person looking for a job. This creates a one-sided interaction that is fine if you know the other person well but it is not so great when it is a stranger or someone you barely know.
Instead what I have been doing more of in my conversations is spending more time asking the other person about the challenges he or she is facing in his or her role and then brainstorming solutions together. Time during these meetings are typically very limited but I decided that it’s worth using some of it to help the other person instead of having it all be for my own benefit.
The most extreme example of this came when I was at an event and starting having a random conversation with the person standing next to me. He just so happened to be the head of product growth at Yelp.
My first instinct was to go into pitch mode and sell myself in hopes for a job referral but I stopped myself. After introducing myself and my situation, I spent most of our conversation focused on learning about his business and his challenges instead.
I got his card and could have ended things there (he made no offer to refer me which is fine). Instead, I really wanted to help him solve this problem so I spent the entire following day doing a competitor analysis and developing recommendations on what his team could try next. Here’s a Google Drive link to the 8 page document in case you are curious what I sent over.
All I asked in return in the email was if he wanted to grab coffee to discuss my ideas further because I was really intrigued by this growth problem. I really didn’t expect anything else to come out of it.
But it ended up paying off. The guy offered to refer me for a role on his team which led to a final round interview at Yelp for their product team. It was a role that I definitely did not think I was qualified for but I was given the opportunity to interview anyways because I made the decision to invest some extra time into helping someone out.
It shouldn’t have taken a situation like looking for a new job to remind me to give more of myself to others. But it’s so easy when we are busy with work to focus only on ourselves and completely disappear when we do finally find some downtime.
My next step is to signup for volunteer opportunities to help out my local community. Generosity should go beyond just friends and Quora so I am going to add even more to my plate in hopes of making a difference.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this inspires you to give more than you take whether or not you are looking for a job.
