Yesterday, I was fishing around for consultants to work on a specific task and I closed the email asking for references to other companies who would do this work, if they weren’t interested in the opportunity with our company.
On the way home, I suddenly realized I was practicing something I had learned at the very start of my career. I finished college at the bottom of the dot-com bust in 2001. Work was not easy to find, and I had to resort to the classic brute force approach to finding interested firms, going down the phonebook calling every architect on the list.
After multiple repetitions, I remember a transition from focusing on the opening pitch to honing my response for the inevitable rejection. That of course was exactly the line I preemptively used in the emails to my consultants yesterday. This time I’m on the other side of the exchange, offering money while fishing for labor, but its the same thing. And it was the same when I was in private practice calling around manufacturers fishing for products.
The skills I honed almost twenty years ago scrapping for work are still being used today. So when you get handed some crummy little task (like cold calling down a phone book), go do it well. The skills you practice might serve your entire career.