Sharpen Your Skills: Adding To Your Business Toolkit Rachel Roberts knew the answer to the question, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice. To earn her first degree in flute performance, she spent hours and hours every day with her instrument, repeating each measure again and again. And again. Sadly, all of that practice never made Rachel perfect, and she could not snag one of those coveted but extremely scarce seats with a major orchestra. Unwilling to abandon her passion for music, she decided to plunge into the world orchestra management. Within a year, she had discovered a new passion and a surprising talent for arts administration. She went on to earn a master’s degree in organizational leadership and rose in her profession to a position as head of the entrepreneurial musicianship program at the Northeast Conservatory of Music. Always eager to gain more and more business savvy, Rachel embraced the MOOC movement with gusto, seeking out business courses that offered an opportunity to learn something new. With a performance career beyond her skill level, she knew she needed to add new tools to her skill set. Chapter 4 reveals the power of putting new tools to work. Whether you spend the day building rockets, performing brain surgery, landscaping gardens, or running a clam shack, continued success requires that you keep expanding your capabilities. And you must use them or lose them. That means maintaining an active, rather than passive, approach to learning. You will learn: Why you should focus on applying what you learn. Which specific new skills will propel your forward. How to create an active learning laboratory. Chapter 5
Think Like a Marketer When I graduated from college, I mistakenly assumed I could land a great job with a snap of my fingers. Boy, was I wrong! Oh, I had held jobs before, shelving books in a bookstore during high school, taking on a summer jobs, first at an arts camp then at a national park, and helping out in the campus career center during college. But I was totally unprepared to move from those little ponds into the big wide pool of degree-holding job seekers, all vying for a limited number of entry-level positions. Imagine my shock when I didn’t make it past the first interview for my dream job at a non-profit organization that served the Spanish-speaking immigrant community. How could they possibly pass up a wonderful applicant like me, who had studied abroad in Ecuador? In hindsight, I can now see that I had approached the job search completely backwards. Up to this point, all my searches began with me. What college was best for me? What course of study would suit me best? When I wrote my first job application, I approached it the same way, arguing that the job fit me like a glove, that it would move me on the career trajectory I imagined for myself, and that I would learn so much working for this outfit. It was all about me. I didn’t stop for one second to think about them, about how the organization would benefit from hiring me. That seemed implicit to me. My husband recalls a similar obliviousness to the realities of the job search. He remembers hearing, along with the rest of his graduating that he was one of the future leaders of America. Imagine his disappointment when none of the organizations he was pursuing even granted him a face-to-face interview. It finally dawned on him that he was one of over 1 million people who graduated that year, each and every one a future leader of America. Looking back, I see that my husband and I failed to grasp two fundamental facts about landing a job. Number one: It’s not about you; it’s about them. Number two: The fact that you can DO the job does not automatically mean that you will GET the job. I may have been a great student and an all-around wonderful person who could do a thousand jobs quite well, but I had never considered that I needed to sell myself to an employer. A buyer does not spring for a new car because it will make the dealer happy, she buys it because it