Getting Started In Your Twenties
Author: Kenneth Jedding

In the years following college graduation, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.

I knew I had to take action (I had bills to pay; my parents were poking their heads in my bedroom door, “politely” asking when I was going to get a job; and more than anything, I wanted to figure out my plan, my life direction.)

Here was the problem: Since I didn’t know what to do, I worried about going in the wrong direction and getting stuck wherever I ended up. In the fantasy, I’d turn sixty and still be grinding away, thinking “If I’d only known what to do after school I wouldn’t have wasted my life this way.”

And if that wasn’t hard enough, career counselors were telling me that I wasn’t only going to have one career, but three to five. Not jobs but careers! Three to five! I thought, Oh great! I don’t even know what to do in the first one, so I’m behind schedule! And even if I did know what to do, how can I ever be a success in one if I’m going to have more than one?

So, worrying about getting stuck I was stuck…worrying.

Yet I now see that I was looking at it all wrong and the time I spent worrying was wasted time. (Isn’t it always?)
Here’s the thing: We tend to look at life as a photograph and life’s a movie. Let me explain. If you had taken a picture of me at graduation, or even in my mid-twenties, you would have seen a person who assumed that his life was going to be full of experiences. Full of Friday and Saturday nights. Of new friendships and loves. Of jobs and other jobs. So in that way, I understood that life was a movie; a process.

Yet in that photograph, I would have expected the person smiling at the camera, frozen in time, to know exactly what was going to happen. I expected my perspective on the whole process to have been fully intact; fully frozen. In other words, I wanted to know exactly what I was going to do, where it was going to lead, what it all meant, etc. But it doesn’t work this way. In our lives, as our experience grows so does our perspective.

And as for our careers? The same rules apply. We figure out what we’re going to do by…doing it. OK. That’s confusing. Let me put it another way: We don’t need to know exactly what to do. We just need to use our best idea (often a somewhat random idea), to get started and trust that things will become clearer along the way. And one more thing: the things we learn along the way will save us steps as we move forward.

Let me tell you a story that will explain this is a real way. It’s about my wife, her entry-level job and how it led to her unexpected career.

My wife always wanted to be an art dealer. She graduated college as an art history major—yet when she showed up in the real world, no one hired her.

Here’s what she did: She got a job in a wine store. Actually, a wine purveyor. One of the best wine stores in New York City. So there it was: She had a college degree and her first job after college was standing behind the cash register in a wine store. How depressing!

(OK. It had nothing to do with art but at least she loved wine, so it was vaguely connected to a passion. Score one point) But it was still depressing.

Here’s what happened: She worked her way up to becoming an expert in red wine. People would call and say “I’m having rack of lamb at my dinner party. What wine should I serve?” and she told them. Since she loves wine, this was becoming a dream job.

Then one day she was walking home and a light bulb went off in her head. She said “If these people trust me to choose wine for their dinner parties, they’ll trust me to choose art for their walls.” And she went out and bought art she could afford, put it in her apartment, and invited her wine clients over to an opening. And guess what? They bought the art! She did it again, and this time was able to spend more money on the artwork—and they bought out the show again. And then she was able to rent a space, and start her own gallery (and quit the wine store). It was one of the most important art galleries of its time in New York City.

There’s more, but first I want to interrupt the story for a moment to make a point.

Remember I said that we all have three to five careers and I was worried about losing time in one if I was going to have more than one? My wife’s story illustrates why we don’t lose time: Skill sets transfer.

It’s like Six Degrees of Separation—where we’re all connected by six steps or less. (You know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows the anyone you can think of. Do you know the website Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? It’s the same principle. You type in any actor or actress, and the site connected that person to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less. For example, you enter Julia Roberts. (Julia Roberts was in Oceans 11 with George Clooney. George Clooney was in The Peacemaker with Nicole Kidman, and so on.)
In the same way, I’ve written about Six Degrees of Job Relations. All jobs are related, though not through the labels (job titles): art dealer, wine purveyor—but through the skill sets.

And the skill sets? Being a good wine purveyor requires an aesthetic skill: telling good wine from bad wine. Being an art dealer requires telling good art from bad art. (In one she was using her nose and mouth, in one her eyes, but it was an aesthetic skill.)

Next, a research skill. To know about wine, you need to know vintages and vineyards. To me it seems almost impossible. Imagine knowing that 1998 was a good year in France, but 1999 was a good year in Australia. Or knowing every boutique vineyard in the world? I’d rather have to memorize all my friends email addresses—that would be easier. And art dealers research as well: They have to provide a provenance of each painting they sell. So if I sell you a Picasso, I have to say “In 2001, this sold from Steve Martin to David Geffen, and in 1999, from the Berlin Gallery to Steve Martin, and so on. But the third skill you need in both is a sales skill. If you can’t sell art, you’re not going to be an art dealer.

And here’s where I pick up my story.

Let’s say that to be happy my wife needed to be using three skill sets. To feel like getting out of bed in the morning, to be excited to go to work, to hear the birds chirping, to smile and smell the coffee brewing, she needed to be using an aesthetic skill, a research skill and a sales skill. But in entry level what was she doing? Selling wine behind the cash register. And what skill was she using? The sales skill. Period.

And just using the sales skill (i.e. selling people wine who came into the store) was not enough to make her excited about work. In fact, it was enough to make her not feel like getting out of bed in the morning, not be excited to go to work, not hear the birds chirping, and not smile and smell the coffee brewing, In fact, using the sale skill by itself was making her think: What am I doing? And once there, other voices join the show. For example, “I’ll be stuck here, behind the counter in a wine store for the rest of my life!”

And this is what I call The Problem With Entry-Level: Using just one skill set doesn’t feel very good and then we think we’re going to feel that way forever.

So the challenge in entry-level is to do two things. One, to have faith that you’re picking up more than you think you are. And two, to make it real for yourself. For my wife, that involved going out of her way to make it interesting. For example, the store had wine tastings, and she attended those whenever she could. She read the catalogue whenever possible. And if someone came in to buy a bottle of table wine, she talked their ear off and learned all she could about wine. That’s how she made it real.

So, to sum all of this up: You don’t have to know exactly what to do. All you need is a working plan (or as I call it, a working clue) to get started. The first thing you do won’t be the last. Getting started in one thing may lead to something else that is completely different and much better. You efforts are not wasted and along the way. You can save steps. Just try to get started in the most productive possible way.






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Mr. Jedding gives specific techniques for finding your passion in his book Real Life Notes: Reflections and Strategies for Life After Graduation. www.reallifenotes.com

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