By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
In 1990, I ran the New York Marathon on a sunny day in November with the temperature at 78 degrees. It was my first marathon and, I suspect, it will be my last one.
My friend, Frank, with whom I trained for more than a year, and I lined up toward the back of the pack of more than 20,000 runners on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge.
Our goal was to finish and, on a day as warm as that, we were confident that we could finish but not sure we could accomplish our goal of under six hours.
As the cannon to start the race was fired, we really couldn’t move at all because so many people were ahead of us. As a matter of fact, we couldn’t move for ten minutes and at that point, we were barely walking.
Eventually, we started to jog and established a pace for ourselves that allowed us both to finish. I had heat exhaustion and missed a wedding I was to attend that night.
Along the way, we saw many people who, as soon as they could jog started to sprint wildly and, we could see, had not trained to run the 26 miles 385 yards of this marathon let alone run it on such a warm day. Sprinting when they should have been walking, they wasted an enormous amount of energy unnecessarily.
Job hunting is rarely a sprint. Especially, for mid and senior-level professionals, it is more like a marathon. Too often, people hear the cannon go off and the race begins and they thrash around wildly, wasting energy like the people did in my marathon and then struggle for way too long.
They are ill-prepared, have failed to train adequately and, as a result, are forced to settle for a job that is “less than” what they could have achieved had they taken some time to prepare for a longer race.
It is not enough to have “a positive attitude” … although a positive attitude is good to have. After five or six times when you aren’t called back for second interviews, being positive in the face of conflicting information (lots of rejections) is deluding oneself. You need help!
Be honest with yourself. Do you need help?
A job search coach can make a world of difference by correcting your mistakes and focusing you on productive things to do. When I launched JobSearch.Community, I saw how many people were acting like amateurs in their search but thinking they were pros.
After all, as I pointed out in “Job Hunting and The 10,000 Hour Rule,” how many hours of experience do you have writing resumes?
Networking?
Promoting yourself on LinkedIn?
Interviewing?
The list is enormous of skills needed to find a job AND they are different than the skills needed to do a job.
As a friend learned recently when he was suddenly laid off without notice, he knew how to execute his job but didn’t know how to create a job search campaign other than answer ads online.
Does that sound familiar?
Can you use encouragement?
Join me at www.JobSearch.Community for great advice and personal attention that will help you avoid making costly rookie mistakes.
© The Big Game Hunter, Inc. Asheville, NC 2016, 2025
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS job search coaching and career advice globally because he makes job search
and succeeding in your career easier.
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