This blog is part 2 of one I posted recently, about my move from New York to Los Angeles in 2000 for a job promotion. They’re both part of a book I’m attempting to write, which I blogged about a few months ago. This is my third or fourth attempt at actually publishing this particular blog. I keep changing it, and am still not sure it feels right, but whatever. In this one, I share copious amounts of wisdom about embracing new job opportunities, and how you, too, can benefit from the wisdom of me. You’re welcome….
One thing I learned in my career is that if you’re going to get a job transfer in the United States, it’s better to go from the East Coast to the West Coast rather than the other way around. The West Coast is three hours behind, so that when it’s 9 in the morning back east, it’s 6 in the morning out west. When you start a new job on the West Coast, you tend to pop out of bed ridiculously early, because your mind and body are still on East Coast time. You don’t need an alarm clock. You just wake up naturally, as if you’ve been a farmer all your life, and you’re used to rising with the sun. It gives you plenty of time to shower and get your head screwed on straight.
That’s a real advantage for people who hate waking up early. Like me.
This was my life in late 2000 and early 2001, after being transferred from the New York City office to the Los Angeles office. I found myself rising before dawn for at least a couple of months. I was always the first soul at the office during those months, and what a blessing that was. It gave me a chance to focus my thoughts and organize my day without any distractions. Those quiet, early-morning moments were sorely needed.
The new job was a promotion, a great opportunity, and one that was nowhere in the cards a few months earlier. The company I worked for was Investor’s Business Daily, a national financial newspaper with nearly 300,000 subscribers at the time, and offices in L.A., New York, the Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles was where the company was headquartered. The HQ was housed inside a large, blocky, drab, whitish-tan building in West L.A.’s Culver City, not far from the Pacific Ocean. Culver City is best known for being the current home of Sony Pictures Entertainment and former home of the Hughes Aircraft Company, back when Los Angeles was still an aerospace and defense hub.
For me, the significance of Culver City is that it was close to my new apartment in Marina del Rey. I could drive to work in 10 minutes. The “commute,” such as it was, involved two main roads – Lincoln Boulevard south to Jefferson Boulevard, and then Jefferson briefly east to the office (lots of U.S. presidential streets around there. I also lived near Washington Boulevard).
Getting anywhere in 10 minutes in traffic-choked Los Angeles is hard enough. Getting to work during rush hour in 10 minutes is a goddamn miracle. Colleagues who lived in the far suburbs, in towns like Santa Clarita, faced a 90-minute drive into work, straight down the 405 freeway, a soul-killing, eternally jammed stretch of asphalt that could only have been conjured up by the Prince of Darkness. These poor folks faced another 90-minute drive heading home, following a long workday. Three hours in a car. Daily.
One colleague who lived in Santa Clarita drove a motorcycle to work, which allowed him to zoom between cars on the freeway. I asked him how much time he saved taking a motorcycle to work instead of a car. His reply: “Two weeks a year.”
You do the math….
*****
The job promotion to Los Angeles happened quickly. They offered it in October 2000, only seven months after I started working for Investor’s Business Daily (IBD for short). I was originally hired as a reporter for the company’s New York City bureau, in midtown Manhattan.
As I wrote about earlier, I was hired by IBD not long after leaving my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, on a wing and a prayer. I more or less picked up and left Charlotte at the age of 40, with no plan in place other than to move to an unknown life in the Northeast, in the hopes of landing a writing/newspaper job in the Big Apple – a lifelong dream.
As it turns out, that dream came true in short order. I was hired by IBD to work in its Manhattan office only a few months after leaving Charlotte. I was excited to get the job (obviously), and figured I’d keep working there for a long time. But then circumstances got in the way, as circumstances do.
I had done well enough as a reporter in New York to draw the attention of the higher-ups at IBD. I cranked out a lot of articles, reported and wrote them well enough, and quickly made a name for myself.
As it turns out, my direct manager, who edited the section I wrote for, wound up accepting a job offer at another company in the fall of 2000. After his move was announced, he called me up from his L.A. office and suggested I put my name in the hat to replace him as section editor. He said he’d recommend me for the position.
Well, I wasn’t so sure about all this. I was pretty comfortable being a reporter. I was living my dream, working in Gotham City. More importantly, I was wary of moving into a management/editor position, in the company headquarters, overseeing a staff of writers, taking on a multitude of new responsibilities, and all under the watchful eye of the senior managers – who I preferred to keep a continent away.
But then a little voice whispered in my ear. A voice of reason, or maybe a voice of ambition. It was the same voice that whispered in my ear in Charlotte only 13 months earlier, telling me I was 40 years old, still living in my hometown, and needed a major reset if I ever expected to find the life I had long desired but had never come close to attaining.
This time, the voice had something more concrete to talk about: a job promotion, at good money. It told me I needed to get up off my ass and embrace the opportunity, the responsibility, and the money. By now, I was 41 years old – nearly 42. If I turned down this chance for a promotion to the L.A. office, there was no guarantee I would ever get a better one.
So:
I put my name in the hat, and flew out to L.A. to meet with the senior management. Not long after, they offered me the position.
Goodbye, reporter’s job in New York City. Hello, editor’s job in Los Angeles.
*****
This is not a chapter about accepting a job promotion in your early 40s, because let’s face it, that’s not exactly something to get all puffed-up about. In fact, it’s the least interesting thing in the world. Your early 40s is when you’re supposed to advance in your career. Millions of people around the world do it every day.
No, what this chapter is about is taking the initiative to accept the responsibility of a job promotion after spending the first two decades of your adult life dodging responsibility as if it were a predator and you were the prey. It’s about changing the script that kept you buried in dead-end jobs for years on end. It’s about recognizing good fortune and then grabbing it before it bolted away.
I’d had good fortune before in previous jobs. But I batted it away before it even had a chance to take root. When I found myself taking the tiniest step forward, I’d figure out a way to undermine it and then kill it altogether.
During the 15 years that followed my college graduation, I skipped between a dozen different jobs at a dozen different companies. That’s a lot of skipping about. And every time it happened, it was like taking two steps back for every one step forward.
I didn’t hit anything resembling a decent career stride until I was nearly 40 years old, when I was recruited to work for the Charlotte Business Journal, an excellent publication with decent management that hired me to do investigative reporting and long enterprise pieces.
The IBD job came a few years later, and took me a little further up the professional food chain. IBD was a fairly large, fairly established financial newspaper that operated just below the industry’s top rung.
The fact that I was hired there in the first place was partly a matter of luck. I happened to apply when the U.S. economy was in the midst of a years-long growth cycle. Lots of companies were hiring. You pretty much had your pick.
I hadn’t planned on an extended career in business journalism, being an investigative reporter at heart (though I also spent a few years as a sportswriter). But business journalism was where opportunity knocked the loudest.
As financial publications go, IBD put me pretty near the big leagues. Some very smart, talented and well-educated people worked there. Considering my checkered career path, it was sort of amazing that I landed a job at IBD. And I was determined to not screw this opportunity up like I’d screwed up so many others.
One thing I knew I needed to do was shed my bad habits and rewire the way I approached work. That process began when I was hired as a reporter in IBD’s New York bureau. It accelerated when I got the promotion to the Los Angeles office.
*****
The job I was promoted to was section editor. This meant I was put in charge of editing articles for the section, managing staff, writing headlines, and designing the layout. It was the best-paying job I’d ever had, by a wide margin. As newspaper jobs go, my salary was considered pretty high. The benefits were okay, not spectacular. The work was challenging in its own way. To succeed, I needed to be at my best.
The staff in our section consisted of six writer/reporters. All had been at the company longer than me. Just about all went to better universities, and had put together much better careers. It was important that I adopt the right mindset to gain their favor and do the job well. This meant providing whatever guidance I could. But mostly it meant giving them the freedom to do the jobs they were trained to do, and trusting they would do it well.
Here’s a brief list of goals I hoped to achieve. It could serve as a guide for others who suddenly hopscotch into a position of authority following less-than-stellar careers:
- Adopt a better attitude (or at least put up a good front): Too often in the past I looked at the workday as a grind to be suffered through rather than an opportunity to excel. That’s not uncommon among rank-and-file workers. But it’s also the surest way to remain stuck in place for years on end. I adopted a much more positive, proactive attitude as a reporter in IBD’s New York bureau. Now that I had been promoted to section editor, I made it a point to show up to work every day ready to be productive and proactive. It doesn’t take any particular set of skills to pull this off. It just takes a willingness to do your best, even when you’re not at your best.
- Be flexible: A boss of mine in a previous job once offered this piece of wisdom: You don’t have a job; you have an assignment. And assignments change. What it means is that you need to be prepared for shifting roles, and take them on with an open mind. I wasn’t always great at this. I liked routine – and didn’t like it when that routine changed. This was another reason I got stuck in a series of dead-end jobs. Now I knew I had to be prepared to evolve into new duties and responsibilities with little or no notice, accept that as part of the process, and find the best way forward.
- Finish tasks early. I’ll refer to another previous job here, one that involved a colleague who always, always (always) got assignments done quickly, well ahead of deadline. I once asked him why he always knocked these things out immediately, even if he had a couple weeks until deadline. He said he just didn’t want them clouding up his brain and putting him behind. Again, it was excellent advice. When I rose to section editor at IBD, I took it to heart. Whenever I was tasked with something to do, I did it as soon as I could. No screwing around, shuffling my feet. Sometimes I got things done quicker than even my bosses might have preferred. But never mind that. It was better to be early than late – much, much better. To this day, I try to knock assignments out early.
- Manage your managers. I cannot stress how important this is. Of course you need to do a good job managing the people who report to you. But it’s equally important to manage the people you report to – to dial into what they want, and then deliver it. I was never great at this in previous jobs, or even very good at it. I hated bosses, hated being told what to do. But that’s a losing formula. You have to be able to take direction, accept that there are people in senior positions who expect you to do things a certain way, and with the right attitude. In my new position as a section editor, I worked very, very hard to develop positive working relationships with those who hovered above me. I did my best to at least fulfill their expectations, but mainly tried to exceed them. When they’re happy, you’re happy.
*****
Looking back on it, I feel pretty good about my experience as a section editor for IBD, and my willingness to take on the responsibility. It turned out to be the single most successful period of my working life, based on all the metrics we put value on.
As things turned out, it only lasted about eight years or so. But that’s only because I made a request to work remotely so my wife and I could move back to North Carolina, buy an affordable home, and start a family.
Since there were no company bureaus in North Carolina, and I couldn’t work directly with my team, I had to let go of the editor/management position. I went back to being a reporter, a worker bee. I eventually got taken over by the same demons that haunted me for most of my career, and ended up in a terrible place mentally by the time my job ended.
But I lasted 16 years with the company. That in itself was an accomplishment, given my work history.
More importantly, I learned that middle-aged dogs can learn new tricks. It’s a lesson that meant everything at the time, and one that I hope never to forget, as I ease into the sunset years.
Image: An AI reproduction of the IBD building in Culver City, circa 2000. The building itself is based on an actual photo, maybe the only one online (I didn’t take any myself, not imagining I would one day blog about it). A food truck did come every workday, because there weren’t a lot of lunch choices in walking distance. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t look like that. I always brought my lunch, or drove home for a quick bite, being only 10 minutes away. I don’t think I ever once ordered from the food truck. I’m not sure the building still exists. Probably not. IBD has moved elsewhere, though I’m not sure where.
Vance Cariaga 