Dichroic Reflections

don't read this book

I spent half an hour this morning reading a book on how to get jobs. That's half
an hour on the WHOLE book; the author was a man of few words and much
whitespace.

I wasn't sure I'd actually finish the book; the fact that
the author used words like "dollarize" got on my nerves early on. The presence of
the phrase, "that matters not a wit(sic)," had me questioning his editor's
competence as well. Thank fortune it was a library book, and so none of my dollars
were spent to support the author's conviction that he could write
English.

He did have some good points though, and I will reiterate
them here, out of the goodness of my heart, to save anyone else having to read
this thing.

• Treat job-hunting as sales, because
  you're selling yourself.
• Use the word "you", not "i", in letters
  and interviews.
• Use the basic sales technique: find out what your
  customer's problems are and solve them.

I list these
here to remind myself; I can see how I haven't done each of these when I should
have in recent job-hunting efforts.

The book is Don't Send Your
Resume, by the way; I'm reluctant to mention it because I don't want to give
them the Google hits, but there's no point in summarizing if I don't name the
book.

I also need to keep reminding myself that this is not what I
want to do for the rest of my life (either the jobhunting or most of the resulting
jobs) and so I need to work on my book project and on finding other avenues toward
a Proper Job.

I also need to kick back and enjoy a lazy weekend, but
no self-reminders are needed for that.