Weekly Challenge: Find Your Precision

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When it comes to our careers, balance is appropriate.  Too much time looking for a job and you burn out, not enough and you don't find one.  You can take classes constantly, and neglect the rest of your life and your social obligations.

There's a sweet spot of effort in our careers that we have to find, where you can be incredibly precise, yet appropriate.  You can step on the Tiger's Tail and not have it bite.

  1. Pick your last job search.
  2. Now, list all the times you overdid it and the things you overdid – did you work too long, change your resume too much, be too aggressive?
  3. Now, list all the things in that search you could have done better, been more aggressive on, done more on.
  4. For each of the lists in #2 and #3, ask what you should have done to have the right level of precision.  Bit of hint – #3 is harder to figure out.

– Steven Savage

Convention Idea: Make Something!

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The roundup of convention ideas is here.

So you want to do a professional event.  There's the speakers, the advice, the stories . . . but what about adding more oomph?  Some extra?

How about doing a pro-level project at the con?

Imagine a project that lasts the entire duration of the convention that involves people leveraging their professional skills to produce a complete work.  People would cooperate, work with pros (who would oversee it), and in the end have a result – and learn a lot from it.

Consider such possibilities as:

  1. A team-drawn and team-written manga or set of manga.
  2. Pro-level costumes made from scratch?
  3. A round-robin serious writing project?
  4. Creating a fan website from scratch?
  5. Actually creating a browser-based game?

Everyone participating gets some advantages:

  1. They make new friends.
  2. They have a piece of work to show off in a job search.
  3. They learn teamwork.
  4. They get to stretch their skills.

So how about it?  Want to jazz up your con's profan events?  How having your attendees sign on to make something . . .

– Steven Savage

Fan To Pro: The Book

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FanToProIcon And it's done.  The Fan To Pro book I've been working on, blogging about, and mentioning for months is done and out at Lulu.com.  In a few weeks if all goes well, it'll be available internationally.

It's done.  It still hasn't quite sunk in.

So now, you've got my distilled advice, wisdom, and exercises for turning from geek to progeek, fan to profan, in one handy guide.  From learning to see fandom differently, to career brainstorming exercises, to using fandom as a tool to help you relocate, its all here.

It's been quite a journey – but it's been worth it.  I learned a lot, did a lot, and now I have a single tool that lets me help people turn their geekery into their career.  I can hand them a book and say "start here."

So what's next?  Well I promote the book, I speak at more conventions, and I do what I always have done – help people out.  I believe in the power of careers, and in the powers of geeks, fans, and otaku.

Of course there's other books in the works with some similar goals.

So go on, check it out!

Oh, and I've already collected notes for "Fan To Pro" Second edition . . .

– Steven Savage