Reframe Your Experience Like You’re Liam Neeson In The Movie Taken
Someday you may decide you hate your job and you want to switch careers. This happened to me. I was working as a video editor. I’d worked for major news outlets and documentarians, music videos and reality shows. One day I realized that despite having studied directing and writing, the two things I was most passionate about, I was in a profession on its way out. Editing is a skill slowly being folded into other jobs in many media outlets, and a lot of the time if you’re a “pure” editor, you are viewed as a cost to be cut, not a valuable resource, and that’s a toxic environment. Don’t get me wrong, I love editing as an essential part of the creative process, but if you aren’t in a creative environment, and an environment of trust, it feels like you aren’t regarded as much more than a button pusher, a technician, not an artist. I needed out.
So here we are. Perhaps you are in that situation yourself. Like me, you want to do something completely different, or at least so different that your current resume doesn’t seem to be the best endorsement for your new career path.
The problem is that you are your skill set and your skill set ain’t what you think you need for your dream career. You sit with Word open in front of you, your sad, irrelevant resume staring you in the face, and you have a little cry.
Dry your eyes. You’re going to shift your perspective a little and go from sad sack to Liam Neeson in Taken.
Remember that scene with the phone call?
If you were to dismantle your CV and look only at the skills you’ve got, what you’ll probably find is you have a very particular set of skills that will set you apart in your chosen career path. These are unlikely to be skills other people in that career path will have, and they make you special in ways they are not.
Here’s how I broke down my own skill set and made it make sense in a new setting.
My goal was to direct films. I wanted to shoehorn my experience into that. I looked at my career path and isolated the skills I’d picked up in my various jobs that would be applicable to my new career, even if they seemed random and not directly applicable.
When I left editing, I needed a job to keep food over my head. So naturally, I settled on being a magician. Seems obvious, right? Well, I owe it mostly to professional magician friends who said I should do it. So I did it and still do. It’s a good hustle, and enjoyable. I took something I was already doing for fun and monetized it. Magic involves a lot of special skills, none of which are camerawork, working with actors, writing screenplays, budgeting, editing, etc. They’re very interesting, but really only applicable to doing card tricks, right?
Well, no. Here’s how I framed it.
The first film makers were magicians. Making movies is making illusions after all, and a lot of the skills and more importantly artistic theories picked up by magicians are directly applicable to film, if you’re a director. Also, for some inexplicable reason, most people think magicians are cool (this is grossly inaccurate) so there’s an undeserved but very useful halo effect.
I’d also done a lot of editing, which meant I knew what was needed from the director by the editor to make the final product of a film. As a director, I could think backwards from the editing room and avoid wasting time on shots that the editor wouldn’t need, and I knew what I could do without. This not only streamlined storyboarding and made the film cheaper by means of subtracting shots, but also when on set and stuck in a time crunch, I could say which shots we could nix if we needed to, because I understood how to prioritize things in a dispassionate way; the editor’s way.
The term “editor” comes from Latin. It was the name for the person in a gladiatorial match who decided who lived and who died. It was not a job for the faint of heart. So I took this idea into my new career as a director. I would be ruthlessly unsentimental, something directors aren’t exactly known for, so it becomes a unique strength.
The final component was generating creative materials. This was something I would have to create completely outside of my existing portfolio. I hadn’t made my own work in at least seven years, and all I’d done was in SD.
I spent years in classes at places like UCB and Gotham Writers Workshop, and working with talented collaborators on films, as well as developing my own projects on the side, so I could say “Here’s a script I wrote, here’s a film I made, here’s a sketch I directed.”
I also used my satirical writing on the internet as a way of expanding my writing portfolio. When you write, people want to see what you’re capable of, so having lots of examples of different things will not only show them that, but in making the portfolio, you are honing your abilities.
All these things — putting together work samples (writing and film), reframing my random skills as components of what makes me a good director, and casting myself in the role of the pragmatic, amazing, magician-director — rebranded me.
This brings us to the here and now.
When I get a meeting with someone, it’s usually through networking and connections. That’s the nature of my industry. However, because of how I introduce myself — how I frame my skills, experience, and identity — no one ever asks for my resume anymore. That’s because when I talk to them about who I am and what my strengths are, I’m like Liam Neeson telling a kidnapper I’m going to hunt him down and kill him. I lay out my skill set with total certainty that I am right and who I am is exactly what is needed to do the thing I love to do. They don’t need to see a piece of paper with proof of what I’m saying, because it’s so well framed for them that they believe it.
Here’s the best part. It’s all true. I’m right. I am good at what I do, and I’m good at it for these very reasons. That’s the funny thing. When you try this reframing thing, at first you’ll feel like a cad. It feels like you’re trying to lie; you’re saying that selling used cars in any way qualifies you to manage an internet startup, for example. The truth is however, that selling used cars means you’re used to being in a client facing role, you communicate clearly and effectively, you negotiate deals, handle legal paperwork, and are good with numbers. Those are all really useful skills anywhere, and especially if you’re running some new business that needs a hard nosed business badass to run things like a well oiled machine.
So next time you’re upset about the direction your career is headed and you feel the need to chase your passion, take a lesson from Liam Neeson. You don’t have a bunch of random bullshit jobs on your resume. No. You’ve got a very particular set of skills, skills you’ve acquired over a very long career. Be proud of them.
