The Dick Picks of the Business World
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Success, Writing Tips, Entrepreneurship, Writing, Professional Development

The Dick Picks of the Business World

As I’ve said plenty of times in other places, I like to read Sean Kernan. Yesterday I read a piece which inspired this one. Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Here’s Sean’s piece:

Sean’s a great deal younger than I am, so he doesn’t yet have the advantage of all those decades of doing stuff that others wanna do. He’s a good writer, he’s made his bones, and as he points out, lotsa lotsa lotsa folks want dem summa dat but they:

don’t want to pony up to pay for professional advice, and think they shouldn’t hafta.

Mail room’s hiring, guys.

Before Dear Reader assumes I am only addressing Millennials or Gen Zers, please. Not at all. This is any of us, at any age, who wants free professional advice. Age

and generation are not determinants here.

I love his analogy of Dick Picks. As someone who could very easily fill the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Mapplethorpe-style dick picks from thousands of dickless wonders off dating sites, I can relate. Lotta folks out there who function this way. I show you my dick, you give me what I want.

I don’t wanna hafta earn it. Gimme. Gimme. Gimme.

I‘ll show you the door to the mail room, Skeezix. Just like I did with all those online dating dickless wonders.

People who have enjoyed some measure of success in some area of life rarely had it land, smelling like roses, in their lap, without effort. While it is very safe to say, and accurate, that men, and most particularly white males, have often (but not always) had the advantage of mentors, that’s changed over time. When you and I are apprentices, which is the way of the world from about the time we leave school until right around thirty, the order of the day is fuck up, fail, accumulate knowledge, fail again, repeat repeat repeat. Until somewhere past the first third of our lives we begin to sort out some kind of direction.

These days, as my social media buddy JC Spears points out, that model in many ways has been turned on its head. But not always.

Some hit good pay dirt early. Many don’t. The Internet is full of stories about late bloomers who have spent decades slogging along until what we do best finally swirls into view. We might even be very good at what we’ve done, but by the time we hit fifty or sixty, we’re “suddenly” successful.

Oh. Yeah. About that “sudden.” All those years of slogging and flogging ourselves and failing have led to that “sudden.”

What Sean’s referring to in his piece is what so many of us have been subjected to our entire professional lives. People want to “pick our brains,” which is code for sucking us dry, kindly, for life hacks so that they can avoid the real work.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

First of all, dontcha think if there were a way to have done that, we might have employed those hacks ourselves?

Righteo, Sparky. That’s the whole point. While we might be able to add some value by pointing to where you need to place said schnozz against said grindstone, there is no avoiding the grindstone. Yet the impression persists, encoded into Instagram and social media, that somewhere there is a shortcut, where I don’t gotta do that hard shit, and I can be like Sean. Be like…well whoever, enjoys all the perks but sans the work.

Sean is the product of his father and his grandfather, a military family, his athletic background, time in place being a dating dick (he admitted it, we’ve all done it) and all the things he has done in order to have the particular POV that makes him a good writer. There is no magic Matrix download to give you that.

There is no magic Matrix download for me to give someone the skills to bring a huge audience to a standing O, to give you MY stories, born of military service, sexual assault, and tens of thousands of hours of writing, two prize-winning books and hundreds and hundreds of hours of professional coaching.

And all the fuckups and failures to which I am most certainly still subject, and which make my very best comedy stories. Learning how to do that is part of what makes me good at what I do. No download to learn that. That’s fucking LIFE.

And about that coaching?

Er, PAID professional coaching, Skeezix. I am not going to hand that knowledge over for free. It has value. So does Sean’s expertise.

A few years back I linked to a superb article that I mined off Outside Online by a young man who “gets” ( I love that word, it implies entitlement) to do what I do. In the article, he describes his career arc: living cheaply, spending his own money to travel, adventure, stay in shit hostels and shit tents and suffer the weather, years upon years of building his skills, getting his stories rejected out of hand. These days, he has enviable gigs. Bylines with big names.

The author sledding in Svalbard Julia Hubbel

Everyone wants to know how he GOT to do that. This is precisely the same arc I had to ride. It takes time and money and humility and resilience and patience and learning how to live cheap, work hard, and take a kick in the teeth to your delicate ago.

Don’t want to do any of that? Fine. Then you won’t get to do what we do: badass adventure travel all over the world. And yes, it pays shit. But the life…and the stories, which we both turn into income.

The years we invested in our education about adventure made us worth hiring. Nobody on earth is going to pay you for that experience, so that they can then pay you to write stories. YOU have to pay for that.

From Sean’s article:

Anyone can type words. And anyone can wield a paintbrush.

That doesn’t make you Picasso. Doesn’t make you Hemingway. Any monkey can do either. Which is why some of my commenters have made disparaging remarks about the quality -or lack thereof- of writing on Medium.

Sean noted:

There’s a lot of money moving around in digital publishing right now. People are excited to get into the game, to escape the corporate grind.

Yes. AND a great many of those folks are not good writers.

I write regularly for a website called Perceptive Travel. The editor, Tim Leffel, is a friend. AND he’s my PAID travel writing coach. AND he doesn’t print your stories unless you’ve published a book AND he doesn’t give away his advice for free. I get paid for my stories because I did the work to build my relationship with Tim, I have a book out, I’m a damned good travel writer. There are no hacks for that.

In fact, here’s a perfect point to back Sean up.

Several people asked me about travel writing. I told them to look Tim up. What they didn’t hear was that I told them to sign up for his course. Tim told me later both of them wasted his time begging for free advice,and didn’t want to pay to learn how to write for the travel industry. They assume, wrongly, that travel writing is about being paid to sit on your ass on a cruise ship in five- star accommodations, being served Mai-Tais while you write 100-word reviews, all on someone else’s generous dime. Not only has that never been the case, that ship sailed a long time ago.

If you have the conceit to be a travel writer, when the planes fly again, that is, please see this:

That’s Tim’s training. Do the work. Don’t ask for free anything. Nothing worth having is free- we make a payment for everything from air to airfare.

DICK PICS.

Assuming that that 1) Sean or Tim or I have some magic EASY button to offer- in exchange for your dick pic; 2) that we are so very rich and well off that SURE we give all our BEST advice to anyone who drops trou, and 3) that such behavior is appropriate in the first place are elements of a Very. Bad. Plan.

To that, some career advice for those handing out pics of their flaccid members who are asking for membership in the Club of Folks Willing to Do the Work.

Yesterday, my BF found out that the postal service worker who was delivering to his building got sick. There’s been no mail for four days.

Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

The mail room is hiring, Sparky.

Kindly stop asking for, and worse, expecting free professional advice. We have worked hard for our expertise. DO NOT expect us to hand over keys to the kingdom when you are not willing to earn the right to step into it. That’s why it’s a kingdom, folks, you don’t get to stand on higher ground if you refuse to build your own mountain.

With thanks as always to Sean Kernan, and please go clean that kitty box. Your turn today?

Tagging Roz Warren, who knows something about online dicks, and about coaching writers.