180 Days at Jubilee Media
At my first paid internship, I asked the CEO what I could do to be in his position. Everyone in the room laughed.
You’re an intern, lol!
You should be making coffee and learning how to count!
Why don’t you worry about getting a return offer, first!
Recently, I decided to ask again — at Jubilee. Of course, I learned my lesson and didn’t bluntly ask about becoming a CEO. I asked if I could just sit in a few leadership meetings, instead.
This time I was laughed at by a million people.
But it was pretty cool.
I spent the past 6 months interning at a really awesome company called Jubilee Media — a media startup that aims to create a movement for human good, primarily through thought-provoking, real, and empathetic videos on YouTube.
A lot of people got a glimpse of my “day to day” through my instagram stories. Which, as we all know, always tells the full story of everything : — )
I was lucky enough to learn an incredible amount about work, life, and myself. In an effort to summarize those thoughts and also maybe get some of you to apply to the team : — ) here are a couple takeaways from the last 180 days of my life.
Uncertainty
(Some) Things work out.
On January 1st, I had already committed to taking the full year off. I had no plans for Spring, Summer, OR Fall at this point.
The team was quite literally 50/50 on deciding to hire me. I was almost never hired. I got the job on January 4th. I ended up interning until May, figured I’d extend to June, and ended up extending to July.
Some things work out, luckily.
Everyone is making it up.
When you see the output of Jubilee’s work (and every other company’s work), you assume someone has their shit completely together. There is no way this well orchestrated and beautiful, emotional, high-quality product was made by someone just like me.
Well, it was. And they had no fucking idea what to expect when they started, just like you.
You don’t really know anything — until you act.
Will this video do well? What about this thumbnail? What about that product? Should we do X or Y or Z?
It’s hard to know. If you can do something to test the waters first and give you an inkling of what works best, then do that ASAP and learn. Until then, all you spout is theory. And theory is mostly for school, not for seeing results in the real world.
You can (need to) make it happen.
Someone has to create structure and process. Someone has to be the first to start a product line, or a better method, or propose a crazy idea.
If it’s not you, who?
Humans
You can be yourself.
This was refreshing. It was weird to be able to bring (most) of my full self to work. Be pretty much as weird, sometimes vulgar, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes curious self at work. Reflecting now, I think it’s really quite doable at any company, as long as you aren’t an asshole like me :-) Know that everyone is a human, just like you.
You aren’t as weird as you think! Probably.
Every human is, well, a human.
Same deal. Everyone is a human. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has shitty days. Everyone has their quirks, and positives, and negatives. Your boss is human. You are human. No need to always be following the status quo. Literally, stop and take a moment to think for yourself. Otherwise it’ll just be easy for me to wait for instructions and other people to do the thinking for me for the rest of my life.
Fuck that!
Pour into others.
This was a tough one for me, and something I am still working on. Luckily I had a bit of eye opening feedback at some point — for me, it’s easy and natural to take on a funny guy persona. It’s fun, sometimes! Unfortunately, it’s pretty exhausting for everyone else and myself to keep that up. Everyone is going through shit; it’s usually much cooler and beneficial for everyone, if I can listen to the life, work, & daily problems people have and take that route to try to help everyone have a better day.
Jubilee-Specific Expectations
It’s fucking HARD to work at an idealistic/public facing company like Jubilee. You have expectations for your work, for the people and culture, and for how fulfilled you feel. Your friends and loved ones definitely have some expectation for how fun, chill, GREAT it is to work there.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s pretty amazing. But like every other company, you are busting your ass, you are going through shit with people, you are figuring things out. It’s really not much different than working at any other company at the end of the day, and you can’t really expect anyone else to fully understand when your IG stories are just of you making Tiramisu :)
Communication
Calling people out & being authentic.
Something I need to continue to get better at. Both aggressively admitting my flaws and failures and learnings, and calling other people out in an effort to grow.
Our CEO was solid at both, and it was great to see that in a leadership role.
1 on 1s.
Are fucking important. Even for a company like Jubilee, where it “feels” like you can talk about anything and everything, I think that just makes it even harder to bring up the shit that exists. There will always be passive-aggressive conflict, one-off issues, and challenges that people face in secrecy. Or, ideas that are 10% baked but still need to be shared and iterated on. Or, people getting crowded out by the loudest or most passionate voice. (Reference: The Hard Thing About Hard Things)
You need to regularly dig in to provide a space to understand how well you’re serving your team.
Day to day.
It is just easy to have problems come up, whether that be people problems, or challenging work problems, or self-imposed insecurity problems.
You need to just figure out how the hell you’re going to take a step in the right direction to deal with that, or it’ll eat you up for 8+ hours every single day. And do it quick.
Building a great workplace is fucking tough. It feels like Jubilee is doing a pretty solid job. Being great at work is also fucking tough.
I’m still figuring that one out.
