The ground rules

1. Quit the job-search junk-food diet today.

No more applications, at least until you read through Part 2 and figure out how to sharpen your axe. None. Until you know exactly what you want and you are prepared to put your best foot forward, we do not need you out there frantically hurling CVs at people.

You are only allowed to continue conversations that are already underway. You are not allowed to start any new conversations, send out any new CVs, or submit any new applications until you complete all of the task list items assigned to you at the ends of Steps 1–5.

2. Schedule in your job search tasks — and schedule in your off-time, too.

‘I can’t come,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘I’m job searching.’

It was my best friend from university, calling from New York. No one had heard from me in weeks, and she wanted to make sure I had booked my flights for the weekend away everyone had agreed on. ‘Lex, the weekend we’re talking about is three months away. Please. It’s the first time we’ll all be together again since graduation. This is important.’

I couldn’t hear her through that panicky fog that often accompanies unemployment (or underemployment or hate-your-employment). All of my instincts said I needed to stay right where I was, in case the Big Call came in from Some Boss who was about to offer me Some Job at Some Company. I couldn’t be busy — ever. I needed to wait by the phone. I needed to be ready to report for duty.

If that sounds familiar to you, I want you to hear me loud and clear: if anyone ever calls you on a Friday afternoon and tells you that you need to start working at 4pm that very same day or else they’re rescinding the offer — well, first of all, I will pay you £5 if that actually happens. For real, though, if this fictitious company refuses to hire you unless you come back early from a weekend trip with your friends, something is off. You are dealing with a massive red flag situation and you do not want that job.

I demand that you keep living your life while you look for work. You will not make this process go faster by chaining yourself to the desk.

I want you to set a weekly (or daily) goal that’s significantly more tangible than Find A New Job. Your unemployment anxiety spirals are unproductive. As you go through the task lists for each Step, you’ll develop an ongoing list of tangible goals. Your assignment might be something like ‘Call three family friends and set a date for coffee’ or ‘Refine that skills section on my CV’ or ‘Spell-check and publish my online portfolio’ or ‘Complete the full application for X position’.

Once you have completed your goal, step away from the computer. Stop. You’re not doing yourself any favours by ‘working’ (AKA browsing job descriptions) from morning to night. You did enough. You’re done. If you’re following my plan and you’re consistently assigning yourself 45-minute chunks of homework based on the task lists, you’re making progress. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in a letter to his daughter, ‘Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.’

You’ll be a healthier person, and a less desperate candidate, because of it.

3. Find a hobby and/or learn a new professional skill.

I hereby ban you from spending your extra time browsing through job descriptions. Use all those extra hours to become a more employable person. We’ll dig into what I mean in Step 2. What if you’re already super-employable and have more skills than a Swiss army knife? First of all, the economy is changing so quickly that this feels extremely unlikely. But if that’s really what you’re working with, then I want you to get a hobby. I can’t begin to tell you how lame you’re going to feel if, when the interview finally does come, you don’t have an answer for the So What Have You Been Up To Recently question. (What have I been up to? I’ve been sitting at home, waiting for you to schedule this interview, that’s what!! is not a good conversation starter.)

4. Stop trying to latch your star onto somebody else’s.

A lot of us let our careers just … happen to us.

It goes like this: You get offered your first job. Your boss tells you that they always wished they’d done a rotation in X department, and that’s what they recommend you do, if you think you’d be interested in it. You always kind of liked it when your teachers would tell you what to do next, so why not listen to this person? You do the rotation. Your next boss tells you she thinks you’re just perfect for her role, since she’s about to get promoted. You figure it’s a move in the right direction. You take the job. Your mum says you should go get an MBA, and then your dad says you should really consider taking that management position. You do those things, too. And so on.

The easiest route through life is to follow good advice. It’s not necessarily laziness so much as an optimistic hope that we’ll some day come across a Real Grown-Up who actually knows What The Hell Is Going On. And so we catch ourselves saying to the world again and again, ‘Here are my skills. What do you think I should do with them?’

The job search exacerbates this habit, so I need you to repeat this mantra to yourself again and again: I am the only one who can make a decision about what to do next.

Many times over the course of your life, it’s possible that you are going to be the only person you’ve ever known who’s encountered this particular career decision. No one else will know what to do. You will have to make a decision by yourself, and no amount of brain-picking or advice-asking is ever going to feel like enough. The next kind soul to buy you a coffee will not be able to tell you what to do with your life. These people will, however, be able to provide answers to specific questions. More on that once we get into networking.

5. Just f*cking ship it.

If you aren’t familiar with the phrase, ‘ship it’ is software development lingo for, basically, pushing the button that publishes the most recent version of your website or app or feature live. The phrase has become an industry joke of sorts. The equivalent of saying, ‘Do you feel ready? I don’t. Anyway, here goes nothing.’

Every industry has their own version of this advice. Someone told me once that you’re never actually finished recording an album — you just run out of time or money. During the process of writing this book, someone else told me a manuscript is only done when the editor gently pries it out of your hands. I’ve heard entrepreneur friends say that, if you’re not a little bit embarrassed on the day that you launch your company, you probably waited too long. Done is better than perfect.

I was once talking a friend through an application she was sending out for a job she really wanted. She’s a designer. Her portfolio — which is always the hardest part — was stunning. Her website looked slick. The cover letter was solid. She was ready to rock, and then she told me she wanted to redo her website and look over her portfolio again before she submitted anything. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Please just send it in. Now. Or tomorrow. Give yourself a deadline. Because how silly are you going to feel if you wait another three weeks, get everything ready and totally perfect, go to apply and — oh wait, they’ve already taken the job posting down because someone else got there faster than you?’

Just f*cking ship it. This is the mantra I want you to repeat to yourself if your instinct is to want to wait until tomorrow when you’re a little bit more prepared. I understand that you don’t want to just half-arse it, fail, and realise you could have done more. That’s a commendable behaviour in a lot of ways. And maybe it will work out perfectly to really take your time, put in all the hard work you can possibly think of, and reap the fruits of your labour six to eight months from now. But most of the time? Opportunities have sell-by dates, even for the most talented among us. When you say you ‘need more time’, your potential future employer is most likely hearing, ‘I’m not ready. Ask somebody else.’

You’re never all-the-way ready. You have to take action anyway. In order to get hired, you need to send the email. You need to make the appointment. You need to hit submit on that application. Set your goals, hit your deadlines, and let’s go do the thing. You deserve to take your shot just as much as anybody else does. Go and f*cking ship it.

6. Stop listening to advice from people whose careers you do not want.

A few years back, I read something on Instagram that hit me like a ton of bricks: ‘Average talent works really hard to fit in. Exceptional talent works really, really hard to stand out.’ The second half of this sentence isn’t what hit me. It’s the first part — about talented people who are out there trying their absolute best with the primary goal of blending into the crowd.

Many of us grew up learning that hating your job, stressing about your job, and thinking your job is boring are all normal feelings. And because ‘everybody’ thinks like that, we all go along with it. When I was going through my Worst Year Ever in San Francisco, I got a lot of well-intentioned bad advice that stemmed from this train of thought. Friends and family told me to live for the weekend, pointed out to me that jobs aren’t always that fun, tried to recommend TV shows for me to get hooked on. I got told, frequently, to just shut down my brain in order to get through the day. I kept thinking, I’m so unhappy I can’t see straight. Surely this is not how this is all supposed to go down from now until forever. I’m not buying it.

As it turns out, I was right. I was not crazy for being unhappy or unfulfilled, and neither are you. Deciding in my gut that I didn’t buy into the ‘hating your job is normal’ game was the first step towards building a better, stronger, dare I say delightful career path for myself.

I really want the same for you. I have built a life in which I roll deep in a passionate community of friends and peers who utterly adore their work. A lot of media articles would have you believe that these people are all entrepreneurs and artists, but they’re not. The majority of them have full-time jobs, and I watch them get dorky-excited about all the projects they’re working on. I want you to start picturing the possibility that you could be one of these people too. They exist.

In order to give this job search thing your best shot, you need to pay close attention to how the people around you talk about their jobs. Gravitate towards those who get excited — and, with grace, commit to giving yourself some space from the people who don’t get it. You are allowed to stray from the crowd, at least for a little while, until you get hired.

7. Stop thinking ‘I’m not working’ is the same thing as ‘Nobody wants me’.

If you’re unemployed or deeply underemployed, I want you to hear me loud and clear: you are going to get a job. It is extremely unlikely that you are the one truly unemployable person on this earth. I know you’re worried, I know you’re panicking about money, I know you’re exhausted, I know you feel like a failure. Please believe me when I tell you that your panic will not get you hired any faster.

I know how hard it can be to get going when you don’t have a lot on the calendar. Which is why, to really snap you out of it and show you the possibilities, I want to tell you about how Antoine, a startup executive who is now based in London, approached one of his most difficult job searches early on in his career:

I wasn’t working, so I used that time to really level up. I cross-referenced job descriptions from the jobs I wanted, and if they referenced anything I wasn’t familiar with, I would spend a day understanding the basics. Even for the ones I did know, I would use the time to practise that skill. I wanted to accumulate knowledge. I found people in my industry to follow online. I found one person who had a list of recommended books and I read every single one.

Even though I really had fun doing it, there came a point when I realised I couldn’t spend more than two to three hours a day job hunting, even with learning stuff. I knew that, for the job I wanted, this process could take a few months. I thought, ‘Okay, what do I like doing? I like surfing.’ So I found an eco-hostel on the coast in Mexico — I was living in Mexico City at the time — and I job searched from the palapa on the beach in the morning and surfed in the afternoons. I think that not obsessing about the outcome really helped me to move faster. I ultimately did the interview for the job I have now from that hostel. Time went by quickly because I was enjoying myself. It’s good to take a step back, do what you love, and enjoy the downtime for what it is.

Whether or not you can make it to the beach, cut yourself some slack and go do something fun. Create a schedule for yourself, stick to the plan, and say this out loud every day if you need to: I am setting myself up for success. I am putting in the work. This new job thing is going to work itself out very soon.

Okay, I think we’re ready. You know the rules. Let’s begin.