In which I demonstrate the power of career capital in action with two profiles of people who leveraged the craftsman mindset to construct careers they love.
Alex Berger is thirty-one: He’s a successful television writer and he loves his work. Mike Jackson is twenty-nine: He’s a cleantech venture capitalist and he also loves his work. This chapter is dedicated to telling their stories, as they both highlight the somewhat messy reality of using the craftsman mindset to generate fantastic livelihoods. Alex and Mike both focused on getting good—not finding their passion—and then used the career capital this generated to acquire the traits that made their careers compelling.
Let’s assume for the moment that you want to be hired as a television writer on a network series. Your first step is to get past someone like Jamie.
Jamie, who is in his late twenties, was recently involved in the writer-staffing process for a network show. He agreed to provide me a glimpse into his world so long as I kept him and his show anonymous. Here’s what I learned: TV writing is not an easy gig to land. According to Jamie, the process unfolds as follows. First, the producers put out a call to talent agencies to send over sample scripts from their writers. For his particular show, Jamie received around a hundred packages, each containing a sample script, which Jamie read, reviewed, and graded. Only around the best twenty or so from this pile will be passed on to the producers for additional consideration. Keep in mind that the producers have already hired their favored veteran writers, so there are precious few spots left to be filled from this open call.
To provide a sense of the competitiveness of this process, Jamie sent me a copy of his script evaluations. Out of the hundred or so writers who submitted scripts, all but fourteen sent a script that had already been produced and aired on television. Of the fourteen who had not yet broken into the industry, the highest score any received from Jamie was a 6.5 out of 10. Most of this group, however, fared much worse. “It was flat, without any interesting storytelling, engaging act-outs, or smart dialogue,” he wrote about one such script (score: 4 out of 10). “I only read about a quarter of this script but it’s clearly pretty subpar,” he said about another.
In other words, getting on the inside in the world of television writing is daunting. But at the same time, I can understand why so many thousands aspire to this goal: It’s a fantastic job. For one thing, there’s the money. As a new writer, your salary starts modest. The Writer’s Guild of America guarantees that you make at least $2,500 a week, which, given a standard twenty-six week season, is decent for half a year of work. Depending on the success of the series, you’ll then progress after a year or two to become a story editor, where, as a longtime TV writer explained in a Salon.com article on the topic, “you’re still making shit” (though, as another writer admitted, “shit” at this point qualifies as over $10,000 an episode).1 Things start to get interesting when you make it to the next level: producer. Once there, “you’re in the money.” Top writers can pull in seven-figure paychecks. In the Salon.com article referenced above, the term “kabillionaire” was used by multiple people to describe the salaries of producers on long-running shows.
Of course, you can also make lots of money in other jobs. A fast riser at Goldman Sachs can hit the seven-figure mark (including bonuses) by his or her midthirties, and a partner at a prestigious law firm can get somewhere similar a few years later. But the difference between Wall Street and Hollywood in the style of work is staggering. Imagine: no e-mail, no late-night contract negotiations, no need to master intricate bond markets or legal precedents. As a writer your whole focus is on one thing: telling good stories. The work can be intense, as you’re often under deadline to deliver the next script, but it only lasts half a year, and it’s immensely creative, and you can wear shorts, and the catered food, as was emphasized to me several times, is fantastic. (“Writers are crazy about their food,” one source explained.) To recast the job in the terms I introduced in the last chapter, television writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.
By the time I met him, Alex Berger had managed to break into this elite world. He had recently sold a pilot to USA Network. To sell a pilot is to sell an idea: You sit down in a room with three or four executives from the network and spend five minutes pitching your vision. At a cable network like USA, these executives will hear around fifteen to twenty such pitches a week. They then retreat to a staff meeting and choose three or four to actually buy. Alex’s idea was one of the four they bought that week.
Alex has a few more hurdles to leap before his show makes it on the air at USA, but selling a pilot, by itself, is seen as impressive in the industry—a mark that you know what you’re doing. As if to emphasize this impressiveness, one of the executives at USA, who liked Alex’s work, helped staff him on an already running show, the hit spy drama Covert Affairs, so that he’d have something to do while waiting for the pilot decisions to be made. Not that Alex needed the boost to his reputation: He had already written and aired episodes for three different shows leading up to this point. His latest gig was on the stop-motion comedy Glenn Martin, DDS, which he had cocreated with Michael Eisner and had run for two seasons. In other words, there’s no doubt that Alex is an established writer in an industry that allows few through its gates.
The question is, how did he do it?
What makes television a hard industry to crack is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market. There’s only one type of career capital here, the quality of your writing, and there are thousands of hopefuls trying to gain enough of this capital to impress a very small group of buyers.
In this respect, however, Alex had an advantage. At Dartmouth College he had been a debater, and a damn good one at that: In 2002 his two-man team arrived at the National Debate Tournament with the country’s highest rank; Alex then went on to win the Best Speaker prize at the tournament. In debate, as in television writing, there’s no mystery about what separates good from bad: The scoring system is specific and known. To become the country’s best debater, therefore, Alex had to master the art of continual improvement. Hearing the story of how he then went on to succeed in Hollywood convinced me that it was exactly this skill that fueled his fast rise.
When Alex made the decision to move to Hollywood, his logic, in typical debater fashion, was airtight: “I figured I could always apply to law school,” he recalled thinking, “but realistically this would be my only chance to try out writing.” Alex admits that when he first moved west he wasn’t even sure what his goals were: “I had a number of things I wanted to do, but didn’t know what they meant. I thought I wanted to be a network executive, for example, but had no idea what that involved. I thought I might be a TV writer, but didn’t know what that meant either.” This was not a classic case of the young man building the courage to follow his unmistakable passion.
When Alex first arrived in LA, he took a job as website editor for the National Lampoon. Once there, he discovered that the Lampoon was also interested in television production. Drawing from the adage “write what you know,” Alex pitched them Master Debaters, a show that required comedians to debate humorous topics in front of a panel of judges. He was given a modest amount of money to film a pilot, which he did, in a Border’s bookstore in Westwood. But making television shows is a tough game, and the National Lampoon’s tentative effort didn’t go anywhere.
What I like about Alex’s story is what he does next: He quit his job at the National Lampoon and took a position as an assistant to a development executive at NBC. It’s here that I see Alex’s debater instincts stir back to life. The National Lampoon was too far to the periphery of the industry to teach him what it takes to succeed. By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.
It didn’t take long for Alex to discover what allows some writers to succeed in catching the attention of a network while so many others fail: They write good scripts—a task that’s more difficult than many imagine. Spurred by this insight, Alex turned his attention to writing. Lots of writing. During the eight months he spent as an assistant he dedicated his nights to working on a trio of different writing projects. First, before Alex left the National Lampoon, they had optioned his Master Debaters idea to VH1—while an assistant Alex was still polishing the script for the VH1 version of the pilot. (In the end, like most pilots, nothing ever came of the VH1 option.) At the same time, he was working on a pilot for an unrelated show along with a producer he had met at the Lampoon. And on his own, he was writing a screenplay about his life growing up in Washington, D.C. “I might finish writing at two or three A.M., then have to leave at eight the next morning to get back to my job at NBC on time,” Alex recalls. It was a busy period.
After eight months as an assistant, Alex heard about a job opening for a script assistant on Commander in Chief, a West Wing copycat helmed by Geena Davis. He jumped at the chance to observe professional TV writers up close, even though it was still a low-level position. On the side, he also added to his portfolio a spec script-in-progress for the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, aggressively seeking feedback on his early drafts. “I thought I needed more samples to get work,” he recalls.
While working as a script assistant for Commander in Chief, Alex started to pitch episode ideas to the room: One of the privileges of being a script assistant is that you can always get a (quick) consideration of your pitch. Not long before the show was canceled, he finally caught the attention of the room with an episode idea about lost missiles from a plane crash in Pakistan and the political fallout of a gay commitment ceremony. Working with Cynthia Cohen, one of the staff writers on the show, he produced a draft of the episode.
“For those with free TiVo space, I recommend giving the ‘thumbs up’ to a groundbreaking episode of Commander in Chief, this Thursday at ten,” Alex wrote in an e-mail to friends around this time. “Why groundbreaking, you ask? Because, within the first ten minutes, for the first time in the history of network television, the words ‘Alex’ and ‘Berger’ will appear—in succession, mind you—just underneath the words ‘written by.’ ”
With his first produced television script now in hand, things began to move quickly for Alex. After Commander in Chief was canceled, he took another low-level job, this time working with the producer Jonathan Lisco in the run-up for his new show, K-Ville, a post-Katrina New Orleans drama being developed for Fox. Given his writing credit, however, and a collection of increasingly polished spec scripts, this job became an informal tryout for Alex: He was given the chance to impress Lisco—which he did. When a spot opened on the writing staff for K-Ville, it was given to Alex: his first official position as a staff writer. He went on to write and air two episodes before the show was canceled.
After K-Ville, a mutual friend set up a meeting between Alex and Michael Eisner, who, fresh from leaving Disney, was looking to create a television comedy as his first project as an independent producer. Alex got the meeting because he was a former staff writer for a network show, but it was his Curb Your Enthusiasm script that convinced Eisner to ask him to write a pilot for his new idea. Eisner liked the pilot draft, and Alex went on to help him cocreate the show, Glenn Martin, DDS, which aired for two seasons as a flagship program for Nickelodeon’s “Nick at Night” block.
It was as Glenn Martin was winding down that Alex sold his pilot to USA and was staffed on one of their hit shows, Covert Affairs—the setting where I first introduced him to you.
To understand Alex Berger’s various breaks, you need to understand the career capital that enabled them. For example, it was certainly a big deal for Michael Eisner to ask Alex to help him create a show, but think about what this break required: At the time, Alex had been a staff writer for a network show and had a quality-comedy spec script—polished over many rounds of aggressive feedback—in his portfolio. That’s an important collection of capital.
If you rewind the clock more and ask how Alex got a staff spot on K-Ville, you once again discover a capital transaction: He had already written and aired an episode of another network drama, Commander in Chief. Another important collection of capital.
Rewind the clock further and ask how Alex, as a lowly script assistant, got a script aired on Commander in Chief, and you encounter the writing skill he had developed over the previous years spent obsessively honing his craft—a period where he was often working on three or four scripts at a time, always seeking feedback for how he could make them better. The Alex Berger who first arrived in LA, fresh out of college, did not have this writing-skill capital. By the time he was working for Commander in Chief, however, he was ready for his first major transaction.
In this telling, the story of Alex’s fast rise is not one of passion triumphing over setbacks: It’s much less dramatic. Alex, the former debate champion, coolly assessed what career capital was valuable in this market. He then set out with the intensity once reserved for debate prep to acquire this capital as fast as possible. What this story lacks in pizazz, it makes up in repeatability: There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good.
Mike Jackson is a director at the Westly Group, a cleantech venture capital firm on Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road. To say that Mike has a desirable job is an understatement. “I have a friend who recently had dinner with the dean in charge of a top-tier business school,” he told me. “And at this dinner, the dean said that everyone in their graduating class right now wants to be a cleantech VC.” Mike has experienced this firsthand: He receives dozens of e-mails from business school students asking him about his path. He used to try to answer them, but now, due to time constraints, he mostly ignores them. “Everyone wants my job,” he explained.
The fact that people covet his position isn’t surprising. Clean energy is hot. It’s a way to help the world while at the same time, as Mike admitted, “you make a lot of money.” In his position, Mike has traveled the world, met senators, and spent time with the mayors of both Sacramento and Los Angeles. During one of our conversations, he mentioned that David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, had been “hanging around the office.”
What interests me about Mike is that, like Alex Berger, he didn’t arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities. Unlike Alex, however, Mike started gathering capital before he knew what he wanted to do with it. In fact, he had never given a moment’s thought to cleantech venture capital until a couple weeks before his first interview.
Mike majored in biology and earth systems at Stanford. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Mike elected to stay for a fifth year to earn a master’s. The professor who supervised his master’s was trying to decide whether or not to launch a major research project studying the natural-gas sector in India, so he arranged Mike’s thesis to act as an exploration of the project’s viability. In the fall of 2005, after Mike finished his graduate degree, his supervisor decided he liked what he saw and launched the major research project. Not surprisingly, he asked Mike to help him lead it—at this point, Mike had just spent a year getting up to speed on its details.
Mike, who is competitive by nature, tackled the project with intensity, driven by the belief that the better he did now, the better his options would be later. “During this time, I traveled to India ten times and to China four to five times, in addition to quite a bit of travel in Europe,” he recalls. “I met with the heads of major utilities, and I learned how the global energy market really works.” When the project concluded in the fall of 2007, Mike and his professor held a major international conference to release and discuss the results. Academics and government officials from around the world attended.
With the project complete, Mike had to decide what to do next. Of the many valuable skills he picked up from the project, one in particular was a “deep understanding” of how the international carbon market works. As part of this expertise, he learned that the United States had an obscure exchange, known as the renewable energy credits market. “Almost no one understood these things; it was a really fractured market with huge information asymmetry,” he recalls. Being one of the few people who actually knew how this market worked, Mike decided to start a business. He called it Village Green. The idea was simple: You give money to Mike, he does complicated transactions that only he and a few other energy regulation wonks really understand, and then he offers you certification that you’ve purchased enough carbon offsets for your business to be deemed carbon neutral.
Mike ran this business for two years along with a friend from Stanford and a rotating series of other partners. They were headquartered in a rental house not far from where he lived in San Francisco. The company never struggled to pay its expenses, but it also never became a thriving concern. So when the economy went sour in 2009, Mike and his partner decided to shutter it instead of hunkering down and trying to ride out the recession.
“We decided to get real jobs,” is how Mike describes what happened next. Here’s how the process unfolded: A stand-up comedian friend of Mike’s had a girlfriend who was interviewing at a venture capital firm. She decided not to take the job, but recommended that they talk to Mike. “She thought I would be a good fit for venture capital, given my experience with my company,” he said. Mike knew that he was not a good match for this technology-focused fund. “I have no idea how to find the next Facebook,” he told me, “but I could tell you if a solar energy firm was probably going to make money.” He figured, however, that since he had never been through a real job interview before, the experience would provide good practice.
“The interview was pretty low-key, because we both realized early on I wasn’t going to get this job, but we hit it off on a personal level” he recalls. At some point in the discussion, the venture capitalist had an idea. “You know, you would be a good match for this cleantech fund that’s starting up,” he said. “Why don’t I introduce you to my friend over there?”
In the summer of 2009, Mike started a trial period as an intern at the Westly Group. In October they gave him a full-time position as an analyst, and soon after, he was promoted to associate. Two years later he became a director. “When people ask me how I got my job,” he now jokes, “I tell them to make friends with a comedian.”
Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.
One could argue that luck also played an important role in Mike’s story. He was, for example, lucky to find a personal connection to a venture capitalist and then to hit it off when they met in person. But these types of small breaks are common. What mattered most in Mike’s story is that once he stumbled through the door, his career capital went to work getting him a fantastic job offer.
If you spend time around Mike, you quickly realize how serious he is about doing what he does well. It’s true that he now loves his work, but he’s still quick to turn the conversation back to how he approaches it. As you’ll learn more about in the next chapter, Mike literally tracks every hour of his day, down to quarter-hour increments, on a spreadsheet. He wants to ensure that his attention is focused on the activities that matter. “It’s so easy to just come in and spend your whole day on e-mail,” he warned. On the sample spreadsheet he sent me, he allots himself only ninety minutes per day for e-mail. The day before we last spoke he had only spent forty-five. This is a man who is serious about doing what he does really well.
In the end, Mike’s focus on capabilities over callings obviously paid off. He has a fantastic job, but it was one that required a fantastic store of career capital to be offered in exchange.