Jack of all trades, master of as many as I can be
Part of the hustle is learning as you go. And every day I'm hustling.
I’m trying to channel my inner Swiss Army knife. Without cutting myself, of course.
My sister and I were talking about the late Betty White, and somehow, because we’ve been having weird, circuitous conversations since we were in the womb more than 50 years ago, we wound up in a long discussion of the business wisdom to be gleaned from a relatively and possibly offensive side character in one of her movies.
Like I said, we’re weird.
In 2009’s “The Proposal,” Betty plays the feisty grandma of a publishing assistant (Ryan Reynolds) who’s been forced to marry his mean Canadian boss (Sandra Bullock) so she can get a Green Card, in exchange for publishing his manuscript. It’s a pretty funny movie, Betty’s funny in it and it’s cute as professional blackmail can be (ahem). But the meat of the conversation was about Ramone (Oscar Nunez), the hardworking town waiter/stripper/store clerk/marriage officiant.
Ramone, is admittedly, something of a Latinx racial caricature, an “other” in an other-wise all-White town. But what struck us the most is that this man, who appears to be an immigrant, saw a vacuum in a town and filled it. All of the vacuums. And he filled them well, and successfully. He was serious about it, too. This was not a lark. This was a business. Y’all need a waiter? Here’s your menu. Don’t have a stripper for your bachelorette party? I’m a stripper. I’ll even show up tomorrow morning and do your wedding. It was not only giving me a little “Immigrants, we get the job done,” but also a lot of “If you are leaving money on the table, slide it over here.”
“Ramone,” my sister recalled, “wasn’t maybe the best stripper ever in the world, but he was the stripper they had. And he was good enough that they kept giving him money. Good for him.”
In the year since I’ve become a full-time freelance journalist, I have had to be flexible in deciding what my new writing business would offer. There are some things that were an immediate fit, like writing newspaper stories, because that’s what I’ve always done. I know I’m good at that. I wrote a profile that became the forward for a friend’s book, and some bios for independent music artists, which was close to the kind of arts and Features writing I excel at, but, unlike with a newspaper story, was ultimately approved by the subject, who was paying me. It was a pivot, and one I did well. I am the best at what I am good at, and good at some other things too, while getting better all the time at those things.
Part of stretching my legs and building this business is taking chances and spreading out. There are lots of stories of now-famous actors who, when they were newbies, fudged, say, their ability to ride a motorcycle or speak Russian before an audition, and then scrambled like hell to learn how to, if not master those skills, to do them competently enough that they got their foot in the door. And then they shone.
There are other skills that are a little more of a stretch for me, like some more technical stories, and some I realized were not my jam. There was a potential job I bowed out of, mid-interview process, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the language of even the sample story and thought “Not only do I not know if I can write this way, I’m sure I don’t want to.” And that’s OK.
Part of this business thing is figuring out what I want to do now, and what I might want to do in the future. I left my longtime newspaper job in Florida, in part, because the job I initially had been hired to do 18 years earlier no longer existed, and the one that remained wasn’t one that made me happy. So I’ve now set out to configure that on my own. Some things will be an easy fit, and some will be less familiar. I might not be as immediately sharp at some skills and some, like the various parts of the Swiss Army knife in the above illustration, might not get used as much.
But I’m going to keep them sharp.