What was your first full-time job?
I had a lot of part-time jobs.
Paper boy. Leaf raker. Babysitter. Pill counter at my cousin’s pharmacy. I nailed those jobs! I mastered the art of flinging rubber-banded papers onto porches, raking leaves into giant piles, and playing with the kids down the street while eating all their Cheese Strings.
But my first full-time job?
Well, I was hired as Assistant Brand Manager for Covergirl and Max Factor inside the consumer packaged goods supergiant Procter & Gamble.
Or P&G as everyone called it.
It was my first job after graduating from university.
And I completely failed at it.
I took a bus and two trains to the office on my first day. I remember being twenty-two years old and walking from the subway station while staring at the opulent white P&G monolith puncturing the cloudscape, perfectly poised at the top of a long hill, shadowing down onto the busy highway and beyond.
I was a newly minted graduate filled with fear, excitement, and nervous energy, but I also had some swagger. P&G had put me and thousands of other applicants through a Math and English test, long online application, big group dinner with recruiters, first-round panel interview, and then an American Idol–like field trip to the big city. No, I didn’t cry happy tears into the mirror with my mom while tying a plaid bandanna around my head, but the company did pay for a first-class train ticket, wine and dine me, and then place me onstage in front of a panel of judges for a grilling interview.
So why the swagger?
Because when I was hired, the recruiters told me, “We visited a dozen campuses, did a ton of interviews, brought a group of people to our head office, and we hired… you. You’re the only full-time graduate we hired this year who hasn’t worked here as a summer intern before.”
Why me? I wondered. I was sort of average. At school many students had been far above me on the dean’s list and graduated with honors. Not me. I had never hit any academic home runs. I was the guy treading water in class.
But P&G saw it differently. “See, we’re looking for well-rounded students, not just superbrains. Our hiring process is so thorough, we weed out everyone. Well, almost everyone.”
I did some quick math and realized that P&G had dropped well over six figures just getting me in the door. And I’d seen salary pages my school released showing how much money my fellow grads and I were getting paid. Marketing graduates received salaries from $24,000 to $51,000.
And my starting salary was $51,000. That meant I was the highest-paid marketing graduate in my year! I was at the top of the entire salary range.
And that didn’t include the signing bonus, four weeks vacation, and more benefits than I could ever use.
Benefits? What benefits?
Crazy benefits.
I’m talking about two ergonomists in white smocks visiting my desk to make sure all my heating and cooling vents were properly aimed, my desk and keyboard were in the correct position, and the tilted footrest beneath my cheap dress shoes was inclined at some proper ergonomic angle. I was shown a button I could press on my phone that dialed a P&G department in Costa Rica so that I could change the temperature at my desk anytime I wanted. Braces? Counseling? Shoe insoles? All covered! I was even given a couple thousand dollars a year to spend on massages with the three full-time massage therapists working right inside the office every single day. “Please,” they were saying, “let’s rub out that knotty, knotty back of yours between meetings whenever we can.”
I walked into the P&G lobby on my first day feeling like I was Charlie Bucket holding the golden ticket.
I met my boss Stacey in the lobby. She was half an hour late and apologized as we took the elevator up to my new desk. We walked out of the elevator into a cubicle-walled jigsaw puzzle that felt like one of those boxes they make white mice run through to find the cheese. Men with furrowed brows wearing crisp dress shirts and holding stacks of paper from the photocopier actually ran past me. Glass walls on all sides of the floor flashed a picture-perfect postcard view of luscious green valleys, mighty downtown skyscrapers, and the shimmering blue lake beyond.
I was shown my desk, which was outfitted with a laptop locked to a docking station. Stacey saw me staring at the lock. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we shackle the computer to the desk, not your ankles. Espionage and headhunters are big in this industry. Competitors have gone through our dumpsters. We take confidentiality seriously.”
She handed me a box of business cards that, to emphasize the point, simply had my name, the name of the company, and the general phone number.
No job title, no email address, no direct phone line, nothing.
I felt like an assassin.
“We don’t put your job title or contact information on your business cards because headhunters map our org charts. And if your direct contact information appeared on the cards, you’d be getting calls all day. Everybody knows working at P&G is the ticket to any marketing job in the world. Our receptionists are trained to weed out headhunters and competitors, so you won’t be bothered while you’re working.”
The joke I’d heard about becoming a “Proctoid” was starting to make sense. When I told older friends I was working at Procter & Gamble, they described Procter employees as these beautiful, hypersuccessful androids who smiled with perfect teeth, were always nice in meetings, worked out at the gym, ate super-healthy, spoke and wrote the same way, and even wore the same kinds of clothes.
Proctoids.
Next up on my first day was “Breakfast with the President.” I sat with the president of the company and all the people returning to full-time roles from their summer internships. As we went around the table sharing our backgrounds, I realized I was the only total newbie.
Then it was time for the president to speak to us. He was a polished, good-looking guy in his late forties with a thick, wavy black mane.
“You’ll notice everyone in this room is a fresh graduate from a top business school,” he began. “That’s all we hire. We have a hundred percent promote-from-within policy. We don’t hire people with two years of experience, five years of experience, or ten years of experience. We only hire people with zero years of experience.
“We want you to be successful here. In fact, we need you to be successful. If you fail, it means there’s an air bubble in our promotion system. So here’s the way it works. Half of you will be promoted to the next level in two to three years. Half of those folks will go to the level after that. Half of those will go to the level after that. And so on. Twenty years ago, I started in the same seat you’re in now.”
The guy was impressive. We all wanted to be like him.
It was clear we were young, fresh, and moldable.
It was clear this was a real Charlie Bucket opportunity.
What wasn’t clear was that I was about to fall on my face.
Once I finished all the introductory meetings and email-writing workshops, I finally started to get my bearings.
Although it didn’t say it on my business card, my job title was Assistant Brand Manager for Covergirl and Max Factor makeup. I was responsible for the entire Max Factor brand, which was fairly small, and the gigantic Eyes and Lips category of Covergirl.
Eyes and Lips!
It sounds like I was a third-rate butcher in a rough part of town.
So what does an Assistant Brand Manager do? Well, I was the boss of the brand. I got to decide where to advertise, how much to advertise, what every product should cost, when to introduce a new product, and when to take one away.
How was I supposed to do that?
By pulling data from a ton of different sources, dropping it into gigantic Excel spreadsheets, and then creating graphs and charts that ended up as bullet points in famous internal P&G documents known as one-page recos.
Maybe I wanted to recommend ditching all our print ads in favor of more online ads. I’d spend two weeks finding all the historical sales data mapped against all print and online ad campaigns and make statistical extrapolations to prove that every dollar in online ads resulted in three dollars in sales versus every dollar in print resulting in two dollars in sales. I’d then drop all my findings into a one-page reco and spend another two weeks presenting it in meetings until I got all the big bosses to sign off on it.
To get all that done, I stayed at work until 10:00 p.m. And I did reconnaissance, just like an assassin. With my coworker Ben, we visited the pharmacy next door, secretly wrote down the prices of all the products on the shelves, then came back and typed them into Excel spreadsheets.
“You have to do this for every single retailer across the country,” Ben said.
“How long will that take?”
“Maybe two weeks,” he said, “if you do it every night. You may have to drive a long way or call people in different cities. You also have to pull all the costs and historical costs for every single item from this archaic data system, which is really confusing and often doesn’t include all the data you need.”
I thought marketing would be a PowerPoint job.
Graphics, pictures, ideas.
But it was an Excel job.
Collecting data, writing formulas, crunching numbers.
Not long into my tenure, my eyes got crossed staring at the screen all day. I could never pull the data properly. I sucked at finding errors in five-hundred-row spreadsheets, and the requests in my inbox piled up at triple the speed I was able to answer them, which left me in a constant state of anxiety and helplessness.
My negative self-talk amped up. It was all about me. Every sentence started with “I suck,” “I’m not able,” or “I can’t.” We don’t notice how naturally such self-stabbing moments come when we’re starting to fall.
It wasn’t long before things got even worse.
I went to a meeting with Tony, my boss’s boss, where he quizzed me about some elements of the upcoming Covergirl Outlast lipstick launch I was fuzzy on.
I got a scolding from Stacey after the meeting.
“I expect you to know all your numbers!” she warned.
“But there are fifteen hundred items and I have no idea what he’s going to ask. It’s too much to memorize.”
She shot me an angry look. I started working evenings and weekends. I felt I was the problem. Clearly I wasn’t working hard enough. This is the equivalent of thrashing your arms and legs to go faster in the pool.
When I went to work on weekends, I was surprised to find the office parking lot full of sports cars while we crunched Excel spreadsheets upstairs trying to figure out where to advertise the new deodorant or whether we should discontinue one-ply toilet paper in favor of three-ply toilet paper.
It felt like a problem of time.
It felt like a problem of me.
For those who have felt it before, you know there is a deep, pit-of-the-stomach sensation when you go to work feeling like you simply aren’t good at your job. That’s the part we often miss when we see people who aren’t pulling their weight. We miss the fact that they don’t like it either.
Nobody wakes up wanting to be terrible at their job.
It feels awful when you’re bad and you know it.
It’s different from feeling like you’re new and learning. It’s different from feeling like you aren’t being treated fairly or the system is out to get you.
What I’m talking about is walking into your workplace on a Monday morning feeling like a failure. Feeling like the exact thing you’re supposed to do is something you desperately want to be able to do and would put anything into doing it well, but it just feels like you’ll never get there.
We fill our minds with inspirational messages encouraging us to “Just do it!” or “Follow your heart!” so when we can’t do something or we recognize we aren’t good at something, we feel stuck. If we quit, that’s a problem (“Just do it! Don’t give up!”), and if we stick with it, that’s also a problem (“Follow your heart! Do what you love!”).
As a result the self-help industry can actually be pretty toxic and offer a surprising amount of contradictory advice. Contradictions don’t do us much good when we’re suffering from a Han Solo frozen-in-carbonite feeling.
Arms up, mouth open, eyebrows pained.
Unable to move at all.
I started grinding my teeth, tossing and turning at night, and waking up with a feeling of dread in my stomach.
I was starting to mentally cast a play called Death of a Cubicle Worker. I put myself in the lead role in the center of the stage, staring at the audience with my saucer-like eyes as the red velvet curtain rolled up.
And then a spotlight started shining.
On my eyes.
On my face.
On my failure.