I had no idea.

20 years ago I came out of university and moved into a job. I spent the next ten years as an employee. Earned my wage. Spent my wage. Simple.

About ten years ago I got myself out of that world and set myself up in my own little business. As a self-employed management consultant, there have been financial ups and downs but by and large I reckon we’ve come out on top. And certainly the benefits of working for myself have outweighed being ‘tied to The Man’.

In the last couple of years I’ve tweaked the direction of my business to include a greater proportion of what I love to do most: writing. I do corporate writing mostly, or at least what you might call ‘commercial’ writing, and while it doesn’t pay as well as a lot of consulting work, it is comfortable enough.

As I’ve written more and more, I’ve also started spreading my creative wings, writing and pitching feature articles, profiles, opinion pieces and the like. In doing so I’ve entered the world of what we can broadly call the ‘creatives’ and discovered that … I had no idea.

A large part of the joy of living the lucky life in a lucky country in lucky times is the ability to consume a never-ending diet of creative fare. Living at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, we can stimulate our senses with writing, music, cinema, visual art, dance, theatre … the list is endless. We can do this at any level we choose, from the mass produced to the obscure and experimental. So plentiful is this creative banquet that much of the time we dine on it without realising what we are doing.

What tends to be overlooked by the majority – and certainly was by me – is that this feast is created for us by largely by people who do because they love it. People who work from role to role, book to book, gig to gig, feeding themselves on the relatively meagre scraps passed to them along the creative food chain. Some, of course, get some luck (for that’s what it is, mostly) and become megastars. For most, though, a creative career means sacrificing any chance of living the sort of life economists tell us we deserve.

There is, of course, little new about this. Even in ancient times the people who created the most real value for their society weren’t the ones who made the money. And my guess is that most of those who create art wouldn’t really be interested in a corporate CEO’s megabucks. All they want is enough money to let them keep creating without worrying about where the rent is going to come from.

Will anything change as we move from ‘old media’ to ‘new media’? The early signs aren’t encouraging. It would be nice to think that Rupert Murdoch’s intention to charge for online news, because new media “has not made content free”, reflects an intention to recompense his creators more generously. But I doubt it. His goal is to get his old world back, even if it needs to be dressed up in new world clothes.

But the world of new media does offer some hope, albeit fuzzy in form at present. The ability to publish and distribute independently and at low cost is a glimmer for the creatives, if not for the big old media players who used to represent them.

What might the media world look like in the end? I have no idea. But I hope to be part of it and hope that my fellow creatives and I can be fairly rewarded for our efforts.

Over forty years is a long time to work on a single task. Yet that has been the lot of the four editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The massive 3,952 page double volume will be released this month, the culmination of the editors’ entire careers. In our world of fast, it is a timely reminder that, sometimes, good things need time.

This new thesaurus has been pulled together almost entirely by hand. Words from past and present editions of the full dictionary were studiously transcribed onto slips of paper, then sorted, stacked and re-sorted into categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, and finally put into historical context. Nearly a million words were sorted this way into quarter of a million categories. And, as I said, it took over 40 years.

It sounds like the ultimate labour of love (or ‘druery’ (circa 1255) or ‘paramour’ (c. 1350) or ‘passion’ (c. 1588)).

The thesaurus has stumbled over numerous funding obstructions along its journey. It has been kept going by grants and gritty determination, neither of which, luckily for the project, would have been expecting financial recompense. Then, almost ready in 1980, it was delayed for what ended up being a further 29 years when it was decided it wasn’t yet complete.

I wonder whether such a project – open-ended and financially flimsy – would have a chance of getting up today?

There is an episode of the brilliant American police drama, The Wire, in which one of the younger detectives complains at having to spend hours watching a public telephone, in wait for one of their targets. He is chastised by one of the old hands with words along the lines of “what did you think you would be doing when you signed up to be a detective?”

This conversation nicely captured the division between a modern culture of instant gratification and its older counterpart of ‘good things come to those who wait’.

In the fast-paced 21st century, universities are no longer expected to do long term research but instead have to sell instant, industry-ready solutions if they want to remain funded. It’s a time when the instant drama of reality television – unscripted, unrehearsed and undirected – is the favoured child of TV execs. And it’s a time when long term problems with long term solutions (climate change, for instance) are allowed to fester while instant problems offering instant solutions (the GFC, for instance) are provided with the best economic medicine money can buy.

In short, if it can’t be rushed, it won’t be ratified.

On that evidence, the idea of the Oxford thesaurus getting a start in 2009 would seem fanciful, though it would be nice to think I’m wrong.

I love living in a fast-paced world where a bottomless cup of instant information resides inside my iPhone, and where I can sprinkle my own words all over the globe in seconds. But it doesn’t follow that because ‘quick is good’ that ‘quick is the only way’. We need to reserve a place in our lives to snudge (c.1633) up to those good things that take time.

(Image greeblie)

Not two, three, four or five. My latest razor now has five blades – plus one on the back for trimming any recalcitrant hair. Our toilet paper is now three layers thick, has a space-age texture and is quite possibly made from Kevlar. Our toothpaste makes so many promises that our dentist can safely retire. And this is just the bathroom.

The western world is just about feature saturated. In the fight for our precious dollars, marketing departments need a never-ending supply of new, you-beaut features up their sleeves. Run out of ideas and they’ll be shown the door before they can say “now with added…”. No product line is immune: on everything from the dishwasher powder to the dishwasher itself, new features pop up like pimples on a teenager.

The age of technology has exacerbated this situation. When everything contains a microprocessor, the implementation of a new feature becomes a programming challenge, not a mechanical one. In the 21st century, adding a feature requires little more than an idea and a few lines of computer code.

In the world of software, so called ‘feature creep’ would be better called ‘feature sprint’. We – or at least those of us who are into these things – have become conditioned to expect an upgraded, more feature-rich version of all our software every few months.

The marketers love it. Every few months they get a whole new chance to refresh their brands, to buy advertising and, most importantly, to run launch events.

But it has made them lazy.

When having the best product boils down to having the longest list of bullet points, marketers no longer need to get into the mind of their markets. They stop looking to creatively solve their customers’ problems. They stop thinking outside the shiny shrink-wrapped box.

We, as consumers, don’t help the situation because we’ve always been easily seduced by bells, whistles and, more recently, ringtones. Design expert Donald Norman pointed out years ago that when we use products, we like them to be simple, but when we buy them we opt for all the extras we can get.

There are, however, early signs of change. Maybe, just maybe, the summit of this generation’s mountain of features is coming into view. Leading the climb, remarkably, are the predominant computer operating systems from Apple and Windows.

In the last month, Apple has broken a long software tradition by releasing a major upgrade that is not burdened with new features. The ‘Leopard’ version of the OS X environment has been taken to a health farm and come out, as ‘Snow Leopard’, leaner, fitter and, most notably, with no external makeover save a short-back-and-sides.

Later this year, Microsoft will release an upgrade of its operating system, Windows 7, with a similar emphasis. The current system, Vista, has been derided – and largely scorned – for its bloated size, prodigious appetite and fragile ego. Its replacement promises to be slimmer and much easier to get along with. Again, the emphasis is on utility over flamboyance.

2009 has been the breakthrough year for one of the most feature-less software applications in the park: Twitter. The announcement this week of a new, features-lite version of Facebook points to an interesting new battle for less rather than more. It is certainly another sign that there is still a place for vanilla in a chocolate-ripple-with-honeycomb-chunks world.

Next thing you know I’ll be trying to find single-blade Gillette safety razors again.

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To judge from the gender balance in the audience, there aren’t a lot of blokes lining up to see The September Issue, the new documentary feature that gives us a peek inside the walls of Vogue magazine in New York. Which is a pity, because the film has a lot to offer anyone – male or female – with an interest in creativity or innovation.

If we are to believe what we are fed by the media, all conflict and disagreement – especially between those on the ’same side’ – is bad. Daily newspapers magnify any difference in opinion between two politicians of the same party. The sports pages hone in on the smallest sign of disagreement between a coach and a player. And of course the tabloid press couches every tiff between celebrity partners as a sign of impending separation.

So things should not be good at American Vogue. As portrayed in the documentary, editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington rarely agree. Grace organises spellbinding shoots, only to have Anna curtly discard her work without discussion. There are moments of silence between the two in which we can almost feel the temperature dropping.

Yet something works at Vogue. Anna and Grace have both worked together at the magazine for over 20 years. And the magazine retains a circulation of over a million copies a month despite increasing competition from other magazines, the rise of online and the recession.

Why? Because despite the media intimation, there is nothing wrong with conflicting opinion. In fact the opposite is generally true. Getting the best result, whether in creative pursuits, business decisions or politics, requires a level of disagreement. That’s how creativity works.

It isn’t always easy. Most of us can remember the sinking feeling after a teacher points out a mistake. When I workshop my writing, it is hard – sometimes very hard – to cordially accept the suggestions of others. There are times in The September Issue when Grace looks ready to throw it all in.

But deep down we understand that as long as criticism is not personal, it is probably valuable.

Conflict does go too far occasionally, of course: just ask Noel and Liam Gallagher of perpetually disbanding band Oasis. But this is rare – far more rare than the gossip mags would have us believe. Certainly the faint threat of this happening shouldn’t cause us to shy away from seeking – or giving – our opinion.

The September Issue allows us the luxury of watching a powerful creative partnership from a safe distance. Watch it, and enjoy the tension.

I was listening to a talkback radio discussion last night about what constitutes achievement and success in work and life. While not a particularly original topic for evening radio, I was struck by the tone of the calls. During quite a lengthy discussion, not a single caller suggested that success is about climbing the corporate ladder or making money.

The emphasis was on the simple idea that success is about being happy.

Has something changed? Sure, ‘happiness’ and ‘balance’ have been part of the work-life discussion for many years. But, perhaps until recently, they have been given more lip service than committed embrace. We’ve trotted out the old line about no one going to their death bed saying “I wish I had worked more”, then rushed off back to our 50 hour a week jobs.

‘Downshifting’ is the idea of leaving a demanding career for something less onerous, even if it costs you money by way of reduced earnings. The concept has been around since the mid-1990s, but it has largely been seen as sitting in the same cabinet as organic food and renewable energy: a good idea, but still a bit radical. Something ‘other people’ do.

In the last few years, however, I’ve learnt of at least half a dozen of my ‘normal’ friends who have downshifted. Some from big jobs, some not so big. But in every case looking to work less and spend more time at home, with family or simply doing stuff they enjoy doing.

This is not to say that changing jobs and reducing working hours are the secrets to happiness. Nor even that we are any closer to understanding what happiness is.

What is changing, I perceive, is the willingness to pursue happiness or satisfaction, simplicity or balance, or whatever it is that an individual is looking for in their work and life. There seems to be increased acceptance of the notion that it’s okay to take a career risk if the end result will be greater contentment for yourself and your family. And that maybe, for much of the population, money doesn’t buy happiness.

Hanging around for the gold watch is becoming less hip. Instead, work-life balance and flexibility are fast becoming catch-cries for the twenty first century. Working from home is now both environmentally friendly and socially acceptable. Loyally working a sixty hour week for a corporation who will let you go tomorrow if it needs to buttress the share price is starting to be recognised for the con that it is.

Where is this change coming from? A number of factors are at play. Ceaseless cost cutting and the resultant increased expectations on employees is one. Everyone has an overload threshold and more and more people are being pushed over theirs. Increased overall affluence (even if it was an illusion) is perhaps another factor. Or maybe I just have a skewed perspective. What do you think?

My mother taught me that it is rude to interrupt. It is something that my wife and I, like most parents, try to instil into our daughters. With all that happens in the modern household it is hard enough to find time to have a conversation of more than 30 seconds without those precious sentences being spliced by a question about lost underwear.

Yet as we teach our children to wait their turn, they increasingly bear witness to a band of beings who have no compunction about interrupting whenever and wherever. Telemarketers, hawkers, hucksters, canvassers, chuggers – call them what you will. People who ring, knock or accost us on street corners in the hope of selling us something or raising money. This human spam is everywhere and, like its email equivalent, becoming ever more endemic.

As the financial crisis bites, this situation only worsens as businesses and charities alike become increasingly desperate to prise a few of our remaining dollars from our hands.

Each human spammer, of course, thinks that they are the only one. Each of them only wants a ‘few moments of our time’. Most of them are young, many of them are groovy, a lot of them are students who just need the money. Almost all of them know very little about the organisation they are representing other than what’s in the script.

The strategy of these serial interrupters is always the same. They approach enthusiastically, with a smile that says ‘why wouldn’t you want to talk to a friendly person like me?’. They, usually, cut to the point fairly quickly. Deep down they know their prey wants to move on, so they make it as easy as possible for us to take the bait.

They never, ever, want you to think. Thought is the human spammer’s kryptonite:  the unwritten expectation is that if you have to think about it, you won’t act. Which is probably right. So they have no brochures, website addresses or phone numbers. They have a million reasons why you should sign up right now. And they assure us that a get-out clause exists somewhere deep within the wall-to-wall carpet of small print on the forms they proffer.

I, for one, have had enough of this. I already donate to charities and already have electricity. I don’t need any more. So I’ve signed up to the Australian government’s Do Not Call register; that has helped to abate the flow of telephone interruptions. I’ve now put a sign on the front door of our house advising canvassers to try elsewhere; I’m hoping the canvassers know who they are. And in future I will be ignoring all street-bound human spam by making no eye contact and fending them off.

It is annoying that it has had to get to this. But being interrupted is annoying too. Perhaps, if we all start doing as I am doing, they will eventually go away.

Like Senator Steve Fielding, I am a lapsed engineer. Like Steve, I have attempted to understand the science of climate change. Unlike Steve, I eventually understood that the task is beyond ordinary mortals. In fact it is even beyond the intellect of a single engineer. I realised that we should be leaving it to the experts with the broadest possible exposure to the issue.

For a while late last year, I spent many hours trying to draw my own conclusions about climate change. I grazed on books, chewed through reports and fed on the ever-expanding harvest of internet articles. I even snacked on the rants of blog commenters with names like “treeman” and “thingadonta” and “havequestions”. I was careful to keep my diet balanced, ensuring that I was consuming equally from the tables of both the believers and the sceptics.

But it was all to no avail. I felt like I was trying to do brain surgery without having done the training. In the end the same arguments and counter-arguments tied me up like a rope from which I could not escape. I had to conclude that the intricacy of the science and the sheer volume of material were beyond me.

It was comforting to have Nobel laureate Peter Doherty’s reassurance that climate change “is an enormously complex area and it’s difficult for people outside the area to understand the science” when he spoke at the recent University of Melbourne Festival of Ideas. Doherty includes himself as one of those challenged by this complexity.

I can sympathise when Steve Fielding says that he would “be letting down the Australian people if I didn’t properly research the issues”. But he is misguided in thinking that he’ll be able to do so. Steve needs to stick to his job, which is contributing to policy, and leave the scientific debate to the scientists.

The rest of this article is available on NewMatilda.com. Click here to read it.

A review of ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’ by Alain de Botton; ISBN 9780241143537

Ever had that sinking feeling of seeing something that you invented in your mind becoming a huge commercial success … for someone else? As a writer, that’s the same feeling I had when I read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. In many ways this is a book I wish I’d written.

Most of us spend a healthy slice of our lives working. We spend additional time thinking about work, but these thoughts are generally focused on the job at hand. We think through an upcoming meeting, worry about a deadline or scheme about our next job change.

Much less often do we think about the wider connection of our work to our community. Rarely, if ever, do we think about the extent to which others’ work impacts on, and is essential to, our way of life.

As is so often the case, it takes someone like modern philosopher Alain de Botton, who as far as I can tell has never had a ‘normal’ job, to expose us to the real goings on under the coat of our existence. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he turns that coat – this time a fluorescent orange safety model – inside out and gives it a damn good shake.

de Botton’s trademark method is to immerse himself in his area of study and to entertainingly share with us his deep insights along the way. In this book we follow a tuna from its capture on a fishing vessel in the Maldives to an eight-year-old’s dinner plate in Bristol in under three days. We spend time immersed in the invention of a new biscuit. We sit in the broom-cupboard of a career counsellor and spy on a counselling session. And we tramp over field and dale following electricity pylons from go to whoa in the grey English countryside.

de Botton’s definition of work is deliberately broad. Apart from accountants and manufacturing managers he also visits an obsessive artist, a number of misguided entrepreneurs and a group of earnest, white-coated rocket scientists launching a Japanese satellite from French Guiana.

A central theme is what de Botton perceives as an increasing disconnection.

“We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.” and later “How ignorant we are … surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp.”

A similar disconnection occurs within our work, where the increasing specialisation of work leads to greater and greater separation of those doing the job from the goods they ‘produce’.

“It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.”

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work does have some flaws. There are times when de Botton drifts a fair way from his theme with occasionally disingenuous observations of ‘ordinary’ workers. And the structure is a bit ad hoc at times, with no real effort to bring it all together in the end. On the whole, though, I found the book an engrossing and thought provoking look at both work and modern life as a whole. An accompanying collection of stark black and white photos by Richard Baker beautifully reinforces de Botton’s messages. You won’t look at your work in the quite the same way again.

We recommend BookDepository.co.uk who provide free shipping worldwide. To buy from Amazon.com, click here. Australian buyers might like to check booko.com.au for comparative online pricing. The book is widely available in bookstores.

It can be frustrating. You know you’re the right person for the job. You know that if you could speak directly to your potential new boss, she would understand that. Yet there are all these ‘middle men’ in the way: the recruiters. And these people, usually either recruitment consultants or in-house human resources people, are often so hurried and distracted that they don’t seem to see your strengths. What to do?

Dealing with these middle men (and women, of course) is a reality of job search. And you’ll find that doing so can be particularly challenging in times of economic downturn. The current global financial crisis sees many more people applying for fewer and fewer jobs. This puts pressure on everyone.

Recruiters are busy people. They spread their time between trying to understand their clients’ fuzzy and sometimes unrealistic requirements; writing ads and job descriptions; sifting through hundreds of applications; organising and holding interviews; and managing candidates to the point of a final job offer and then further, once they are in the job. They usually have a number of assignments on the go at once, all at different stages. And they often don’t get paid until the whole process is complete – which can take months.

Technology helps a little but make no mistake: this is a people game. The bulk of the work, and stress, comes from dealing with people and all their weird and wacky ways.

As a job seeker, it follows that the best way to get past these middle men and in front of the employer is to make their life as easy as possible. Here are five things you can do:

Only apply for jobs for which you are qualified. Few things frustrate a recruiter more than having to sort through the CVs of hundreds of first-year-out accounting graduates to fill a senior financial controller position. You are applying for a job – not entering a lottery. So don’t waste your time and theirs with lucky dip applications.

Have a clear and easy-to-read resume. Include only relevant information in a concise and well-written style. Use bullet points where you can and use simple formatting – like bold headings – to make your employment and work history stand out.

Customise your cover letter and resume for the job. Never apply with a form letter and ‘off the shelf’ resume. Customise both to show you have understood the job’s requirements and that you think you can meet them.

Be courteous in following up. Whether by phone or email, never be pushy in your following up. A bit of patience and understanding is much more likely to have you remembered for the right reasons. It might even help keep you front-of-mind for the next job if you miss out on this one.

After your interview, keep in touch. If you’re lucky enough to get an interview with the employer, call your recruiter and let them know how it went. It allows them to be on the front foot when they call their client. They like that! Similarly, take the initiative to keep in touch after you start the job.

No matter how bad things get, there are always plenty of jobs being advertised. If you keep searching you will find the right one eventually. Seeing the recruiter as a partner in that search, rather than as an adversary or as an inconvenient hurdle, will make the process much more fruitful for everyone.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au

It is the first question we ask when we meet someone new. And it is the last question we want to be asked when we are out of work: “What do you do?”. It is a strange quirk of our society that we define ourselves first and foremost by the work we do. Being unemployed can leave us feeling out-of-place and uncomfortable, and can even lead to avoidance of social gatherings and, therefore, networking opportunities.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people who find being out of a job a real social challenge. This is particularly the case amongst those who are in their 40s or 50s and have only had one or two jobs. People in this group have often defined themselves both by their career and by the company they used to work for; leaving a long-term job can be a double-whammy and a real blow to the confidence.

But there are ways to deal with this awkward situation, and even to turn it to your advantage. Here are five ideas:

Get creative

A good way to lighten the situation is to be creative in the way that you describe your situation. There are the old favourites like ‘between jobs’ and ‘extended break’. But perhaps you can come up with a fresher approach. ‘Mr. Mum’ (where relevant), ‘my own boss’, ‘dealing with a mid-life crisis’ or ‘studying poverty’.

Be honest

If you are honest about your situation you might be surprised where the conversation goes. Many of us have a perception that we are the only person to have been made redundant, when in fact most people will lose their job at some point in their career. So explaining that you are an out-of-work accountant might prompt a frank – and useful -  sharing of experiences.

Focus on your skills

Remember that conversations like this are, in fact, networking opportunities. You never know how the person you are talking to might be able to help you. So rather than simply saying that you are an unemployed engineer, see if you can drop some of your skills and experience into the conversation. ‘Project management’, ‘advanced computer skills’, ‘mechanical wizard’. This makes it easier for the person you are talking to recognise how you might fit into an opportunity they are aware of.

Be open to new ideas

A trick to effective job search is to open your mind to a broader range of opportunities. We can easily get stuck on finding another job very similar to the one we have left, but this is very limiting. So steer the conversation to what other people do, how their industry works, what other sorts of people they work with. Any of these things could prompt a possibility in your mind.

Talk about other stuff

If you’ve really had enough job talk, then simply steer the conversation in another direction. “I’m not working at the moment, but I did go to the football on Saturday. Do you follow football?”. “I’m unemployed, so I’m going to lots of movies. Have you seen the latest Star Trek?”. Or get your new acquaintance to talk about themselves – most people like doing that.

When you’re job hunting, any opportunity to tell others about your situation is a chance to gain some information or to make a useful connection. Networking like this  leads many people into new jobs. So whatever you do, don’t avoid social situations. Rather, keep experimenting until you find a comfortable way of describing your situation.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au