advice

Geek As Citizen: Change In Your Geek Job Guru Routine

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Time Moves On. As A Geek Job Guru You Need To Move With It.
Time Moves On. As A Geek Job Guru, You Need To Move With It.

For the last week I’ve been posting on how you could do your own geek job guru work and help your career and how it’s a good part of geek citizenry.  It is my true hope that you, my fellow geek, will seek to help others in their careers and indeed in their lives. I’d like you to coach, speak, and be a role model.

I want you to be the kind of person you could look up to if you were younger than . . . er . . . you.

There is, however a problem.

Also at some point you’re going to have to realize you’re going to have to change what kind of geek job guru you are. This is because no matter how good you are, smart you are, and helpful you are, the inevitable march of time is going to alter the value of what you know, how you communicate, and how relevant you are. When this change happens you need to catch it, or you’re going to end up giving the wrong advice and setting the wrong examples.

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Geek Job Guru: Don’t Take Your Role Model Personally

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Role Model

I’m a big advocate of having role models in your career (and for that matter, anything else). Role models provide people you can relate to, so you can understand them on an almost instinctive level, and then emulate what they did right. Role models show that success is possible so you can keep motivated and keep reaching even when you’re at your lowest. Role models show specific paths to success that you can follow.

Best of all, people who know they’re Role Models give actual, useful advice, write books, and so on.  A good Role Model may be such an information font they’re a kind of Orbital Bombardment of wisdom.

We geeks are often blessed with role models, and it’s a big part of geek culture. – I think because a lot of geek culture is achievement/activity based. There are people we look up to and admire, who inspire us. We can meet them at conventions, buy their biographies, and surf the internet to learn more about them. Rare indeed is the convention guest who at some point is asked about job options, or the head of a website or Maker Group who doesn’t end up providing career advice.

As much as I’m an advocate of using Role Models, I’d like to note their limits. No matter how good a Role Model someone is – and you can probably find several in your life – they have a limit.

Their limit is they’re a unique individual.

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Form Geek Voltron: Might As Well Be The Head

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voltron_screenshotThere’s a valuable lesson in the various incarnations of Voltron. No I’m not talking that giant robots are cool (obvious), that Pidge is creepy when you have him get older (surprising), or that movie adaptions are chaotic and unpredictable (depressingly true). I’m talking about the basic core idea of Being Stronger By Coming Together.

That’s a lesson we usually brush off. Giant robots made from smaller robots, power of love, friendship is magic, fighting spirit of the team, what have you are all common ideas in anime, movies, etc. The idea of Being Stronger By Coming Together is so common we don’t even think about it, and thus don’t learn the lessons. It’s probably not helped by a culture with the delusion that we somehow magically succeed without the help of (even if unappreciated) others.

But it’s a damned valuable lesson. Plus illustrating it through the idea of cool robots coming together to make an even more kickass one is a real inspiring illustration that harmonizes with our half mechanical, half magical geek hearts.

We’re stronger when we come together. Specifically I’d like to focus on the Applied Geek aspect of that – in our careers and our lives.

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