Daily Endeavor Blog

In an interview with New Work City, Kaomi Goetz at WNYC makes the case this morning that “co-working” offers community to solo workers. I’d like to take the case even further. Coworking can be a literal life preserver, not just for entrepreneurs or freelance contractors, but also anyone actively conducting a job search.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00’s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

Last week there were a few particularly intense and nourishing days moving between events — Mark Hurst’s Good Experience Live (GEL) Thur/Fri, then LaidOffCamp NY’s Friday night panel and full event on Saturday where I had a great time MC’g both, followed by an Endeavor Prep Bootcamp we ran on Sunday. It was 4 days of people investing in what’s next.

At GEL, Scott Heiferman kicked off with an upbeat talk about how he sees people increasingly turning their backs on desperate marketing, and instead turning toward each other, much like we did before industrialization creeped in to most corners of life last century. Scott captured the idea in a poignant phrase:

Instead of DIY, it’s increasingly DIO

Instead of do-it-yourself, it’s increasingly do-it-ourselves. His idea is right on. In my experience when people want to do anything that’s hard or truly new, it never happens alone. Instead of the lore of the lone genius in the tower, there’s always a circle, a team, a network, a community of supporters and promoters that are co-creating along the way.

This idea became the theme for me throughout the weekend, underscored especially by the hundreds who showed up for LaidOffCamp. Attendees with expertise to share led 30 sessions throughout Saturday. It was DIO in action. Not only did a small group of us self-organize to produce the event, a much larger group came to breathe life into it. I’m glad Chris Hutchins was able to make it too, to see what he’s spawned.

For a piece of the events, here’s Chris Russell’s (JobRadio.FM, Secrets of the Job Hunt) podcast of a session I moderated with Deb Berman, Dr Doug Hirshorn, and Matt Wallaert:

Some people crave routine, others feel suffocated by it. Different periods in life demand different routines. I can remember the feeling in college when I finally nailed the routine that allowed me to get everything done I wanted to and at the same time enjoy life. Once in stride, it feels great. Foraging however during a transition to a new schedule can be frustrating. I’m still in one of those transition periods now.

Christine Huang over at PSFK pointed me to Daily Routines, an archeological dig of how artists and others construct their days. While these are anecdotal for but one period of life for some of these folks, they’re an interesting read nonetheless. At the time, Toni Morrison preferred early mornings for prime thinking time because she wasn’t on Mom duty yet. Franz Kafka was all about the night.

A few to check out:

• Thomas Friedman

• George W. Bush

• Joseph Campbell

• Charles Darwin

• Toni Morrison

• Franz Kafka

• John Grisham

• Ernest Hemingway

If you’re been through a layoff, looking for a job, and looking to connect with other past employees, head over to Socialtext. They’re making their wiki service available for free as an impromptu alumni network for companies that have had deep cuts (e.g. 5%). It’s only hours old and already PeopleSoft, DivX and Yahoo have started to self-organize.

World 2, come in. World 2, this is World 1, do you read me?

Jessica Hagy has the talent to distill. Like a lot of it.

She unfurled a beauty yesterday that nails the main correlate to a sense of entitlement: disappointment. High expectations are good. Expectations of guarantees are more than risky; they’re guaranteed to come up short.

We’ve all known a few people who, when they finish school, say “Ok world, I’ve slogged it out, now drop off all the riches right into my lap and be off with you.” Armchair critics will respond with “too self-involved” or some other quick explanation.

Sure there are always one or two overly entitled people who need a Reality Check, but the vast majority of people are following perfectly healthy self-interest based on what they know. What looks like entitlement in many cases, may in fact be individuals trying to follow their own path the best they understand it.

Straddling two worlds

Graduates are in one of the few life positions (the other is probably before/after having kids), where they’ve mastered one world and are on the precipice of a new, highly different one — one they know very little about. How could they? They haven’t lived in yet.

When transitioning from one world to the next it’s easy to overestimate how valued your experience will be. You have great experience, it’s valuable. Rather, the calibration is difficult, especially given all the cues going on. After all, you’ve just accomplished every academic task set in front of you for 20 years, you’re at the top. That’s a huge achievement and milestone, and everyone around is saying so (and they’re right).

It’s also easy to underestimate the enormous volume of others (millions) who headed off into World Two each year before this one. They too are looking for spots, but they haven’t been on campus for a year or more, so they’re not on the radar.

It’s not your fault. It’s the nature of the transition, or more specifically, the nature of living apart. The mis-estimations are due a complete lack of mixing between the two worlds. For example, I truly don’t know what it’s like to be a parent because I haven’t been one yet.

When combined, these two — mis-calibrating how some hiring managers may view you and underestimating the large number of others vying for similar spots — can look a lot like entitlement. But I don’t think they are. They’re natural perceptions that can arise in anyone when heading from one world to the next.

This brings us back to Jessica’s graph. She’s right. When there’s real sense of entitlement, disappointment reigns. Yet even when there’s not entitlement at play, but instead people honestly trying to negotiate the very large college to career transition, there’s still often a big set up for disappointment.

Let’s change that.