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Here, Read This.

Every Thanksgiving, I write my Things I Believe post. It’s one of my favorite ways to take stock of who am I, what I stand for, and how I’ve changed over the previous year.

This week, I stumbled upon this: a very Things I Believe-ish list from investor Richard Jenrette, who died in April. There’s a lot of good advice in here. (“Stay in the game. That’s often all you need to do — don’t quit.” “Keep your standards high in all you do.” “Don’t leave old friends behind — you may need them.”) It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Read it here.

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Invest In Your People.

When someone finds out that I used to work at BuzzFeed, they usually end up asking me: What made that place so special?

I typically give them the short answer: BuzzFeed did an exceptional job of hiring people — people who were funny, smart, hard-working, and unusually curious. When you hire amazing people, and give them the freedom to do great work, you get a place like BuzzFeed.

But there’s a second thing that BuzzFeed did incredibly well, and I don’t mention it often enough: BuzzFeed invested in its people.

At BuzzFeed, there was a Learning & Development team that helped power everything we did. (A big shoutout to Regis, Annie, Michelle, Kris, and everyone else who did such great work on L&D!) Most BuzzFeed staffers were young — in their early-to-mid 20s — which meant that our staff was talented but inexperienced.

That’s where the L&D team came in. They put together classes and learning opportunities for everything. There were classes to help new managers learn how to manage a team, and classes to teach them how to hire someone new. There were classes for employees to learn how to communicate more clearly. There were classes to help with the little details — how to come up with story ideas, or how do more with Google Sheets — and the big picture stuff — how to be persuasive, how to give a great presentation. The L&D team would bring in coaches to work one-on-one with staffers, or invite college professors to speak about their areas of expertise.

What it meant was that BuzzFeed built a culture of learning. You were expected to learn new things, to push yourself, and to take advantage of these opportunities — that was part of your job. It was OK to not have all the answers, because there were always new opportunities to keep learning.

By investing in these L&D opportunities, BuzzFeed sent a pretty clear signal to its employees: We care about you and your growth, and as long as you’re here, we’re going to give you opportunities to grow into new roles. There’s a reason why so many of my co-workers stayed years at the company — even in a climate where many in media seem to switch jobs every year.

If you’re in a leadership role at a company, you should be asking: Does my team have the tools to do their jobs well? Are they learning and growing in their roles? Are we challenging them?

You may discover that you’re not doing that well enough — or at all.

Go out and invest in your people. Get them the coaching and the learning opportunities they need to grow. In turn, it might help you build a truly amazing team.

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That stock photo at the top comes via Unsplash.

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You Are Not Behind.

A J-school student told me a few weeks ago that she’s worried she’s behind when it comes to her career. Her peers have more experience or have won more awards than she has. She sees college journalists at other schools who seem to be a few steps ahead of her professionally.

“Am I behind?” she asked. “Should I be worried?”

I told her that I remembered feeling the same way in college. Back in 2005, I remember watching ESPN and seeing a headline-making interview that NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens had done with a college sophomore at Syracuse. I’d always thought I was a little ahead of the pack: I’d been published in The Boston Globe, had written for a few different papers at that point, and was in journalism school at Mizzou. I’d won a national award for high school journalists. I was doing pretty well!

And then I watched that ESPN interview and thought, There’s someone else ahead of me! I’m falling behind!

How were they “ahead,” exactly? They’d done something different — something pretty exceptional — and it scared me to think that there were others doing great work, too.

But a few years later, I started to look back and wonder why I’d been so nervous in the first place. I wrote:

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.

In the meantime, what really matters is that we keep going.

That’s what I reminded that J-school student: There is no race. There is no ahead, or behind. There’s only the path you take, at the speed that suits you best. Keep moving forward — launch things, try things, keep learning. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done at 20, 30, or 70. There’s always more road ahead of you, and new opportunities. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done today — your best work is still ahead.

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That amazing dirtbike race photo is by Simon Moog on Unsplash.

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Here, Listen To This.

If you’re a sports fan, you might remember the story of Jay Williams, the star point guard for the Chicago Bulls who got into a motorcycle crash that cut his career short. Maybe you haven’t heard the story of what happened after, of how he picked up the pieces and rebuilt his life. In a podcast with Oprah Winfrey, he opened up about how he moved on from the accident. And at about the 32:30 mark, he said something that echoes with something I’ve written about before on the blog: How much it matters to surround yourself with amazing people.

Oprah Winfrey: Anybody who’s going through their own setback, their own challenge, their own difficulty, their own crash, what is your best advice to them?

Jay Williams: I was lucky enough to form a committee. For every successful business, they have a board, a board of advisors. My mother was on my board. My dad was on my board. My girlfriend at the time was on my board. Coach K was on my board. I had some other really good people. And what I did with them is that I sat down and went through the pros and cons about, “What is Jason good at? What is Jason like?” I never took time to actually think about what are my passions.

Oprah Winfrey: You built another kind of team.

Jay Williams: Exactly.

Give the whole thing a listen — it’s a fascinating conversation.

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6 Simple Tips For Writing A Great Resume.

Here’s a not-all-that-surprising declaration, based on 5+ years of looking at resumes: Most resumes aren’t very good. They suffer from the same basic issues in design and editing.

But you — the future job applicant! — can do better! Here’s a simple list of ways to make your resume better right away:

1) Use a template from Google Docs to design your resume — They’re clean, they’re simple, they’re easy to share, they’re free, and they’re designed to help you get all of the key information onto a single page. (They also come with a matching cover letter template, which is a nice touch.) Use their templates — you career’s too important for a resume created in Word!

2) Showcase what you’ve actually done in a role — Every bullet in your resume is an opportunity to show me what you’ve actually done, and how much of it you did. If you had an internship in college at a newspaper, saying, “Wrote stories about _____” is OK, but “Wrote 20 feature stories about _____” is far better.  The more you can show the size of your impact, the better.

3) Be strategic about where you place the education section — If you’re in school or just graduated, education should probably be the first thing on your resume. Recruiters will judge a resume differently if you’re in school or a recent grad. If you’re a few years out, it probably belongs towards the bottom of the resume.

4) Throw in a fast fact about yourself, but only if it’s really great — If you’ve achieved some sort of truly unusual feat — maybe you won your university’s Scrabble tournament, or you’re a championship slam poet — it actually might be worth including! The goal with your resume is to catch a recruiter’s eye, and a detail like that might help you stand out from the crowd. But it would have to be a heck of a tidbit to be worthy. (It’s great that you’re the captain of your rec softball team, but that’s not quite the level of excellence that will help here. And if you do include a fast fact, limit it to one, please!)

5) Put everything in the past tense — I’ve seen resumes where some roles are in present tense, and some are in past tense, and it gets a little unwieldy. Keep it simple, and keep it all in past tense — even your current job.

6) Keep it to one page — A recruiter is using your resume to decide if they’d like to know more about you. The resume is a first glance, not a deep dive. No matter how much you’ve done, you can keep it to a page.

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Don’t Make Business Cards. Build Your Own Website Instead.

I talked to a group of journalism students last week, and they had a professional question: Do students need their own business cards?

The short answer: I don’t think business cards help much with the job search. Every journalism student’s business card looks pretty much the same: Your name, your contact information, and a line somewhere that says “Reporter/Editor/Journalist.” When you’ve got three inches of space to work with, you can’t say much.

If I were in J-school, I’d focus instead on the space where you can say a lot more: Your own domain. I’ve given this advice before, and I’ll say it again:

When someone gets your resume, the first thing they’re going to do is Google your name. And if you’re pitching an organization on your digital skills, you need something better than yourname.wix.com. Go to domainr.com and search for your name. If you can buy yourname.com, do it. If that’s taken, try something that fits your career aspirations: yournamereports.com, byyourname.com, yournamestories.com, etc. Build a website that showcases your reporting, and make it easy for someone to contact you. (You wouldn’t believe how many people build websites with no contact information!)

Then take the next step: Open up an incognito window, and search for your own name. (That way, you’ll see results that aren’t personalized for you.) What comes up? Is there anything on there you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see?

Your goal should be to get your own domain to the top of the page — but at the very least, you want it on the first page. (If you built your site with WordPress, use a tool like All in One SEO to set up your site correctly for Google.) Make sure that what comes up represents you: a LinkedIn profile (and yes, take a minute and personalize your LinkedIn URL), a Twitter account, and clips or work from your previous experiences.

If you meet someone new, remember: What matters most is what they’ll see when they Google you. Make sure that what shows up there — your personal domain, your professional social media profiles, etc. — showcases who you are and what you want to do next in your career.

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That photo is by Nick Adams from Unsplash.

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Why A Side Project Can Be So Valuable.

If you’re still in school, or just out of college, you should really have a side project. If you’ve got a job or an internship for the summer, that’s great — but that gig probably isn’t showcasing your work in the way you want. It’s up to do to build your own showcase.

But you should also understand this: As someone who’s hired (and, at this moment, hiring), when I look at your side project, I’m going to be asking two questions:

1) Does that side project make you better at the thing you really want to do?

2) Does it reveal something about you?

Let’s take those one at a time:

Does it make you better at the thing you want to do? — If you’re applying to a newsletter job, and you’ve got a side TinyLetter, I’ll be intrigued. I’ll want to see how you’re applying relevant newsletter skills on a personal level: Are you running A/B tests? How are you measuring success, and what tools are you using to measure it? If you’ve been working in a non-editorial job for a few years (like marketing or advertising), having a TinyLetter as a showcase for your skills might be a good way to prove that you’re ready to transition to a newsletter job, and to show me that you’ve been honing your skills through that side project.

Does it reveal something about you? — Maybe you’re applying to that newsletter job but your side project doesn’t have anything to do with newsletters. Maybe — and I’ll use a random-but-real example from two of my old co-workers — you launched a podcast about the Baby-Sitters Club series.

Making that podcast won’t tell me a lot about your ability to edit a newsletter, but it’s still relevant, because it tells me a lot about the way you think and the way you take on big tasks. Just from listening to your podcast and talking with you about it, I’ll be able to learn a lot: What you’re interested in, how you approach a new project, what kind of tools you use to stay organized, and how you collaborate with others.

I can’t say this enough: Start something new. It’ll give you an outlet for your creativity, showcase your work — and it might help you get hired.

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That stock footage at the top doesn’t have much to do with this post — I just kinda liked it. It comes via Unsplash, my favorite site for stock photos, and photographer Stephen Di Donato.

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Some People Specialize, Some Are Versatile.

A basketball team can put five players on the floor at one time. A baseball team can have 25 players on the roster on game day.

So how do you build the best possible roster with those limitations?

I’ve been fascinated by some of the ways teams are trying to address that question. In basketball, the buzzword of the moment is “positionless.” Instead of trying to find players that fit traditional roles — like a big, burly center to play in the post — teams are looking for players that can fit multiple roles. In today’s NBA, the ideal big man might be asked to dribble the ball up the floor, hit 3s, and also defend inside.

Of course, it’s not easy to find players who can do that. LeBron James is built like a center and passes like a guard — but he’s a once-in-a-generation type player. The challenge is how to find lesser talents that still bring a meaningful combination of skills — scoring, passing, defense — to the table.

Baseball started moving in this direction last season, when the San Diego Padres tried to use their backup catcher, Christian Bethancourt, as an occasional pitcher. (He got hurt in the first month and only played in eight games.) Still, the idea made a lot of sense. On a baseball team, you’ve got eight starting position players and five starting pitchers. That leaves 12 spots for your backups: 7 or 8 pitchers, and 4 or 5 players for the rest of the field. But if you can maximize those spots by having a pitcher who can also field, it opens up new possibilities for a team. Suddenly, you can keep an extra player on your roster — a sixth starting pitcher, an extra pinch hitter — instead.

This year, the Los Angeles Angels have a player on their roster who might really kickstart a trend towards versatility: Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese-born player who came to the majors this year with LeBron-like hype. He’s one of the Angels’ starting pitchers, and when he’s not pitching, he’s the team’s designated hitter. It’s only the second week of the season, but so far, it’s going incredibly well:

The old model would have forced Ohtani to specialize: You can hit, or you can pitch, but not both. But if Ohtani continues to play at a high level at two positions, this might change the game for good. It could take a few years for the impact to trickle down to college and high school ball, but eventually, you’ll see more players who can serve multiple roles on a team.

For anyone early in their non-sporting careers, it’s worth thinking about what’s happening here and how it might impact your career. If you had the choice, would you rather pitch yourself as a specialist, or as someone who’s versatile?

There are some limits to versatility: I remember pitching myself after college as a do-it-all backpack journalist, someone who could shoot video, write and report, handle social media, and edit stories. The truth was: I was a hard-working reporter, but barely proficient at the other skills. There’s a big gap between “I can produce video” and “I’m great at producing video.” Companies hire for excellence, not competence.

I wish I’d pitched myself as more of a compromise, a combination of versatility and focus. I was a strong writer, a good reporter, and starting to develop as a photographer. Those three skills made me an interesting candidate. But the more I added in — I talked about work I’d done with interactive graphics in Flash, and experience with data — the more it looked like I was trying to pad the resume.

The point is: Versatility can be an asset. It’s something that might get you in the door at a place that only has so many spots on their team. But if you’re going to pitch yourself that way, you’ve got to be good at everything you do — recruiters will see through it if you’re just adding fluff to your resume.

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You, Too, Can Make A Thing.

I was so excited to find a story in the New York Times Food section this week, titled, “A New Generation of Food Magazines Thinks Small, and in Ink.” Here’s how it starts:

Shayne Chammavanijakul, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, felt let down by the way some magazines depicted Asian cuisines — framed as alien, styled with visual clichés and oversimplified. So she started her own.

Last summer, between her freshman and sophomore years, she fried corn chips and rolled burritos at Chipotle, saving her wages to pay a few contributors. She gathered enough financial and editorial support from friends and family to print 10,000 copies of the first issue of Dill, packed with articles about noodle dishes, from Indonesian soto ayam to Filipino pancit puso.

“We present things in a way that isn’t sensational,” said Ms. Chammavanijakul, 20, whose family has roots in Thailand. “Food isn’t bizarre or cool or something you do on a dare. We have no interest in exoticizing it.”

At a time when traditional food magazines are shrinking and cutting staff, Dill is part of an unexpected groundswell across the country: a wave of small, sophisticated print magazines, produced on a shoestring by young editors with strong points of view and a passion for their subjects — from the subtleties of regional Thai home cooking to the intersection of food and queer culture.

I read that story and smiled because… well, this is exactly what I’d be trying to do if I was still in college.

I’ve written before about stry.us — what we did right, what I did wrong — but I don’t think I’ve ever written about this before: Part of my plan in Biloxi involved a print magazine. (Somewhere back in a closet in D.C., there are still probably 50 copies in a box. At the top of this post, that’s a photo of the cover.)

Why a print magazine? When I was in Biloxi, I wasn’t quite sure what I was building towards. I didn’t know if stry.us was going to be a business, or just a showcase for my work. But I knew that either way, I needed to be able to showcase my best work — and the basic WordPress site I’d made together wasn’t quite it.

So I found a printer in Biloxi who liked what I was doing. I took my favorite 8 or 9 stories, and packaged them together into a more cohesive story about the Katrina recovery. The idea was that if I was meeting with a publisher, I could always pull a copy out of my bag and say, “This was what I was working on the whole time.”

If they asked who wrote the stories, I could say: I did.

If they asked who took the photos, I could say: I did.

If they asked who laid the thing out in InDesign, I could say: I did.

I didn’t want to be a designer or a photographer. But I did want to prove that I was capable of being more than a reporter.

The barriers to making something basic weren’t high: It took a lot of time, and a few hundred dollars. I wish I’d tried something like it in college: I think a group of reporters, editors, photographers, and designers could have made something pretty amazing — and it would have been a heck of a showcase for our work.

It doesn’t have to be a business. It doesn’t have to be anything more than an issue or two. It’s just something to show off your work.

When you make something new, you show us how you work — and what you can do.

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Here, Watch This.

I love a good behind-the-scenes video. This one’s about a Spike Jonze-directed Apple ad, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see how many people and moving parts (literally, the set moves) go into making something like this. I watched it and couldn’t stop thinking about how incredible the talent must have been on this production — the dancers, the coaches, the engineers. When you work with the best people, you can make something exceptional.

Watch it here.

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