Part 2

Preparing For Battle

A woodsman was once asked, ‘What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?’

He answered, ‘I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe.’

I had no idea who Wilt Chamberlain was until I heard his story on This American Life, the NPR podcast, and realised that he has a whole lot in common with you, the job seeker reading this book.

Wilt Chamberlain is widely considered to be one of the best basketball players of all time, apart from his terrible free-throw percentage. In basketball, free throws are an opportunity to score points by shooting unopposed from behind the foul line, usually as a result of your team being awarded a penalty. The free-throw thing is particularly important because that’s what turned Wilt Chamberlain into the star of a parable that’s now told all over the world.

Here’s what happened:

Chamberlain sucked at free throws. But, with help from fellow ballplayer Rick Barry, he famously changed technique before starting the 1961–62 season and brought his free-throw percentage up to a career-best 61% average. He scored more free throws in a single game (28 out of 32) than anyone ever had in the history of the sport. By the following season, however, he had given the technique up entirely.

Rick Barry had taught Chamberlin how to shoot underhanded, a method often referred to as granny style. Shooting that way, Chamberlain said, was embarrassing. It made him feel like a sissy. And so he went back to doing things the old way and, predictably, his free-throw percentage declined back to where it had been before. He never again shot as well as he did during the 1961–62 season when he’d been brave enough to try something else.

The desire to follow the crowd is so strong that we will hold ourselves back on purpose just to blend in with what everybody else seems to be doing. We revert to the ineffective choice even when we’ve discovered a better way to go about things.

I think about that a lot.

The mainstream approach to finding a job has not worked for you up until this point. As we just spoke about in Part 1, that’s not entirely your fault. In this book, I’m going to be the Rick Barry to your Wilt Chamberlain. I’m going teach you a better technique for career success and, unlike Chamberlain, you’re going to be brave enough to use it.

Starting today, your job search strategy looks like this:

1. You’ll become crystal clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ll be able to name the exact companies and organisations you want to work for, and the exact job you want to do for said companies and organisations.
2. You’ll do the prep work required to become extremely hireable by those companies and organisations.
3. You’ll proactively and methodically introduce yourself to the right people until you get hired.

This strategy might sound so intimidating that you are already convinced you’re now just going to fail at the job search from another angle. Alternatively, it might sound so obvious and achievable that you no longer feel the need to read the rest of this book. Either way, you need to give yourself permission to shoot underhanded and see what happens. This is all I ask of you.

But before we begin for real, I have a few ground rules I’d like to lay down, because — after all — you’re playing ball on my court from here on out.