What’s Your Name Again?

Hello, by Travis Wise

A few weeks ago, I read a Q&A with Walt Bettinger, the CEO of Charles Schwab, and I keep coming back to something he said:

Q: What about lessons you learned in college?

A: A business strategy course in my senior year stands out. I had maintained a 4.0 average all the way through, and I wanted to graduate with a perfect average. It came down to the final exam, and I had spent many hours studying and memorizing formulas to do calculations for the case studies.

The teacher handed out the final exam, and it was on one piece of paper, which really surprised me because I figured it would be longer than that. Once everyone had their paper, he said, “Go ahead and turn it over.” Both sides were blank.

And the professor said, “I’ve taught you everything I can teach you about business in the last 10 weeks, but the most important message, the most important question, is this: What’s the name of the lady who cleans this building?”

And that had a powerful impact. It was the only test I ever failed, and I got the B I deserved. Her name was Dottie, and I didn’t know Dottie. I’d seen her, but I’d never taken the time to ask her name. I’ve tried to know every Dottie I’ve worked with ever since.

It was just a great reminder of what really matters in life, and that you should never lose sight of people who do the real work.

I love this so much. For one, it’s a wonderful message about being decent to the people you work with. There are a LOT of Dotties in my life, and I need to learn more of their names.

But another thing: Learning these names (and a little about these people) is also good for your career! When I was first working as a stringer covering D.C. sports a decade ago, I noticed something about the best beat reporters: They were usually there a long time before the game, casually chatting up everyone. It wasn’t just the players and coaches — it was the equipment managers, the trainers, the ushers, the elevator guy. They knew everyone’s name. They built relationships with everyone, because they never knew who might open a door for them one day.

We could all be a little friendlier to the Dotties around us.

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That photo was taken by Travis Wise and is used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.

Owning My Own Thing.

running, by Linh Nguyen

I am not old — but working at BuzzFeed sometimes makes me feel old.

Our staff is filled with so many awesome and truly talented young people. There are a lot of staffers in their early 20s. At 28 — almost 29 — I’m probably well above the median age at the company.

And the thing about working with so many young people is that every once in a while, you see someone truly kicking ass and realize: Oh, they’re five years younger than me.

Sometimes, a little bit of jealousy sets in. I’ll wonder: Why wasn’t I doing that when I was their age?

Whenever that happens, I have to remind myself of something I wrote four years ago about that exact phenomenon:

“I get jealous, sometimes, when I see 25 year olds who are way ahead of where I am. I get competitive. How’d that person pull off a book deal at 25? How’d they get a movie done? How’d they make their first million already?

But then I remember that this isn’t a 400-meter race. We’re not all shooting for the same end goal.

We’re all on different paths. We’re all running our own races at our own speeds.

It’s tough to tell where each of us is going now. It’s only with time — a decade, maybe more — that we’ll start to understand where we’ve been going.”

That last sentence really echoes with me now, this idea that it’s only with time that you understand where you’ve been going. If you’d asked me in September 2012 where I was headed, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything about BuzzFeed or newsletters. I thought I was on one path. Four years later, it’s clear I was headed somewhere different — and had no idea how fast I was getting there.

As for BuzzFeed in 2016: I get to work with so many awesome young people. I get to help them make great work, and they get to push me to make better things. We’re all on different paths, but at this very moment, we get to work with each other — and for that, I’m thankful.

And most importantly: I am doing my own thing, and I love it. I have to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, and keep owning my own thing.

———

That absolutely awesome photo of someone running comes via photographer Linh Nguyen and Unsplash.

Where We Come From.

New York, New York

Everybody has bad days. Especially at work, everyone has days where you get weighed down by the little things: Too much stress; Thoughts about better work/money/hours somewhere else; Little details that can overwhelm you.

Lately, when I have one of those days, I try to remind myself of something:

A little more than 100 years ago, my great-grandparents fled Eastern Europe and came to America. If you go see “Fiddler on the Roof,” that’s basically an autobiography of the Oshinsky family.When they came to America, they came to New York. They came here for opportunity for their family, and a better life.

A century later, I live in New York, working a job so thoroughly modern that — if they were alive — I couldn’t even explain to my grand-grandparents, and the job I have pays better than they ever could have believed.

Sometimes, I try to play out that conversation in my head with my great-grandpa, a butcher in Jersey City, trying to figure out how I’d explain to him words like “email marketing” or “viral news” or “BuzzFeed.” I’m not sure how I’d explain it, or if he’d even understand. But I think he’d be proud to see how far his family has come. My ancestors came here for opportunity, and they gave me all that — and more. The opportunities I’ll have in my life are unexpected and pretty remarkable, and it’s thanks to the risks that they took, and the work that every subsequent generation has put in.

So when I get bogged down in the little details, I try to remind myself of the big picture. 100 years ago, we came here for the chance to have these opportunities and the hope of living this life, and now I have it.

Best to be thankful, and work hard for whatever — and whoever — comes next.

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That photo of New York was taken by Vita Vilcina on Unsplash.

Little Things You Can Do To Be A Better Team Player.

Office life, Vladimir Kudinov

I got coffee the other day with a friend who’s maybe a year out of college, and we were talking about how her work was going.

You know, she said, I just didn’t understand how hard it would be to adjust to working at an office.

And that’s a common sentiment! I know didn’t understand it either when I started my first job. Working at an office is a little different than working a service job or in education. At an office, you have to learn how to operate within a team and what kind of etiquette is required in the workplace.

Here are seven things I’ve learned over the years about being a good co-worker:

Be on time. — Everyone has the one co-worker who shows up 10 minutes late for everything. Don’t be that co-worker. Being on time means showing up at the assigned time if you’re meeting someone in your office, and 5-10 minutes early if you’re meeting someone outside your office.[1. This is really hard to do, and I’m still trying to get better at it myself.] And if you’re late — make sure to send the email 5-10 minutes before apologizing for your lateness.

Prepare people before the meeting. — Nobody should show up for a meeting and not understand what they’re meeting about. Make sure everyone’s on the same page — and has the necessary documents — before they walk into the meeting. And follow up with actionable next steps after the meeting, too!

Respond to emails/calls within 24 hours. —
If someone writes in asking you to take a specific action, you’ve got 24 hours to respond. After that window, I find that emails sit in the inbox for days and days, and projects stall. Respond quickly, and you’ll become someone co-workers actually want to work with because you have a track record of getting things done quickly.

Deliver on deadline. — This goes hand-in-hand with responding quickly. Be a “get shit done” kind of person, and be someone who sticks to deadlines. When you find out that a co-worker doesn’t finish their work on time, you might be less willing to work with them in the future.

Send friendly emails. — The occasional “Congrats!” email goes a long, long way towards setting a tone for your work. Send those friendly emails!

Ask great questions. — I love working with people who are curious and ask great questions. They’re people who think critically about issues and can push work in interesting and unexpected directions. I always try to work with people who love to ask “Why?” and “How?”

Be honest. — You can earn my respect by doing the work every day. But you can earn my trust by sitting down to have the tough conversations. If you do both, I’ll run through walls for you. Being honest with someone — even if you’re saying “I don’t know” when you don’t have the right answer — is the first step towards building that trust.

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That photo of an office — as viewed from the outside — comes via Unsplash and photographer Vladimir Kudinov.

How Long Does It Take To Build A Great Reputation? Try 10 Years.

Mizzou football, 2007

An unusual and alarming thing has been happening lately, and I’m only now starting to figure out how to handle it:

College football is making me feel old.

It started about a year ago, when recruits coming to my alma mater, the University of Missouri, started saying things like, “I was a huge fan of Chase Daniel and Jeremy Maclin growing up,” or “Sean Weatherspoon was my favorite player when I was a kid.”

Those guys played at Mizzou when I was at school. Some of their teammates were in my classes.

If they’re the heroes that today’s 18-year-olds looked up to when they were in elementary school or middle school, that means….

Well, I must getting old.

But it also means another thing, something more about how long it takes a team or a business — or even someone like you or me — to build a reputation.

When I came to Mizzou in the fall of 2005, we weren’t particularly good at football. We’d beaten our biggest rival, Nebraska, just once in the previous 25 years. Mizzou was more famous for our losses than our wins.

But starting the fall of 2005, we started to win — and win a lot. Over the next decade, we’d win two Big 12 North titles, and two SEC East titles. We’d win three January bowl games. We’d have a Heisman trophy finalist. We’d reach no. 1 in the country.

And over the course of that decade, the conversation around Missouri football changed. When I entered as a freshman, nobody knew what “Mizzou” meant. My own grandmother often got confused and thought that I attended Washington University in St. Louis, and not the much larger, much-better-at-football school 120 miles west in Columbia, Mo. (When we hit no. 1 my junior year, she figured out which school I really went to.)

A decade later, I walk around New York in a Mizzou shirt and regularly hear people screaming “MIZ!” from across the road, the same way I see Michigan grads yelling “Go Blue!” when they see Wolverines gear. We even have a bar in the city, and we fill it every Saturday.

A photo posted by Mizzou NYC (@mizzounyc) on


It took a decade of success for Mizzou to switch the conversation. Why? Old timers in the state still think about Mizzou as the hapless team from the ‘90s and early ’00s that couldn’t win big games and could never beat Nebraska. But the younger generation — people like me, or the kids just entering Mizzou now — only know Missouri as a perennial football contender. In the decade we’ve been following Mizzou, we’ve only ever seen success. So why should we expect anything different?

It took an entire generation of success — a full decade of winning — to change the conversation.

And that’s gotten me thinking about the idea of a decade of great work. My first big journalism breakthrough came in the summer of 2008, when I covered the Olympics for the Rocky Mountain News. Which means that I’m two years away from that 10-year mark. In that decade, I think I’ve had enough highs (Stry.us, the RJI fellowship, BuzzFeed, speeches at several conferences) to have built a reputation in the industry. I’m not all the way there yet, but eight years in, I’ve established myself through my work.

Here’s to changing the conversation — and finishing off that decade strong.

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That photo of Mizzou football in 2007 comes via Flickr, a Creative Commons license, and Jim Ross for EAGLE 102 Sports.