The Writers Coin

Would you ever turn down a promotion? Even if it meant more money, more responsibility, and more opportunities to grow?

Until recently—I didn’t understand why anyone would pass up a promotion. Why would you turn down a move that’s essentially saying, “OK, great job. You’ve done all you can here. We want you to move up to this higher position because we think you’re capable of it and ready for it”?

How do you rationalize a move like this?

Welcome to the Big Leagues, Hayseed

Until a few days ago, I equated a promotion with getting called up to the Major Leagues. No player would ever turn that promotion down—it’s the whole reason players work hard and prepare as hard as they do. The whole point is to eventually get called up the Bigs.

When other bloggers would write about these hypothetical (or sometimes real) scenarios where they would turn down a promotion, I would always argue back that it didn’t make any sense. How could you stay at your job after turning down a promotion? Wouldn’t that tell everyone you work with (and management) that you have no aspirations beyond your current job?

The whole idea is to see how far up the chain you’re going to make it.

Right?

That’s what I thought until I saw my baseball analogy in a different light.

Baseball Analogy, Part Deux

I think it happened while I was watching a Cubs game earlier this week and Lou Piniella waddled out to the mound to berate Neal Cotts. I had one of those moments: my eyes opened wide and I sat up straight.

What if getting promoted wasn’t like getting called up to the bigs? What if it was more like being being told, “Hey, congrats! You’re being promoted to the manager of the team. You start next week.”

I play baseball in a city league here in Chicago and I’ve been playing since I was seven years old. And I love playing baseball, but managing is something I’m not keen on at all. Playing is one thing—managing all the players and their expectations, playing time, and so on is a totally different ball game.

One that I have no interest in playing. That’s one promotion I have no problem saying “No thank you” to.

Balk

And I thought back to all the arguing I’d done about this and I realized how wrong I was. Now I understood why someone wouldn’t want to take a promotion—why take a job doing something that isn’t what you want to do?

I’ve heard of people in the advertising business that go through this: they’re copywriters or art directors and they love what they do. But they’re also really good at it, and eventually they become so good at it that they get promoted to Creative Director. Now they’re doing more managing and less ad creating, which seems like a similar jump from playing ball to managing a team—it’s not the same thing.

It’s not even close.

Mea Culpa

To all the bloggers I’ve argued with about this, I apologize. I now see the folly of my ways. And I’m curious to hear if anyone else out there feels this way. Would you want your boss’s job or not? Where do you draw the line between career advancement and doing what you love?

Photo by kevindooley

This post was included in the Carnival of Pecuniary Delights
This post was included in the Money Hacks Carnival

We’ve all been there: you’re sitting at work getting your work done and you get that little pop-up window on the bottom-right of your screen that lets you know someone has sent you an email. You’re tempted to ignore it for now—it’ll interrupt your productivity. But what if it’s something that needs your attention right away?

So you check it out and it’s from a coworker/boss asking you to do something for them.Fair enough. So you type up what they want and shoot it off—then you get back to work.

Then, five minutes later, you get a reply with some slight tweaks to what you’ve done.

That’s weird. Did they not like how you completed the project or do they want you to tweak what you’ve done? It’s tough to tell from the email, but most of us know where this kind of exchange is going: a barrage of back and forth that just clogs up your time and slows productivity to a crawl. Eventually, one of you will have to stand up and walk over to the other person—and the problem will probably be resolved in less than a minute.

Why does this happen so often?

E-Mail is Too Easy

In order to prevent this kind of time-suck email exchange from happening, it’s crucial to change the way we all think of email and how we use it.

The problem with email is that it’s so easy, convenient, and gets easily misinterpreted. Before email, when you had call someone up to discuss something, you would think about it a little bit to make sure you weren’t mumbling on the phone. Plus, it’s easier to clarify things on the phone than it is via email—tone of voice and the back-and-forth nature of a phone call lends itself to better communication.

But now everyone just emails as often as it takes until the project gets done. Or until a face-to-face meeting is needed to get it done. But by the time that happens, a lot of time has been wasted.

What can we do to keep this kind of thing from happening?

Pretend You’re on a Deserted Island

Here’s an idea that might sound quirky enough to make it into an episode of The Office. But hear me out, I think it just might be crazy enough to work.

Next time you’re about to shoot off an email, pretend you’re on a deserted island (just cut out the frantic part where you’re begging for food and water) and think about what you’re trying to say.

Write out your email and then edit it as if your life depended on it. Pretend this is your one shot to get your message across. You’re about to roll it up, seal it in a bottle, and throw it into the ocean.

No second chances.

If and when someone comes across it, you better hope that it’s clear—otherwise you’re dead meat.

So be as clear and specific as you can, re-read it a couple times, and pre-empt any doubts or questions the other person might have. And if it’s something super tricky, take a screen shot, paste it into Paint, and draw a crude arrow or circle around what you’re trying to point out. That’ll help when the rescue party comes looking for you.

In other words, make it stupid proof.

Sure, it takes a little more up-front time, but the advantages are enormous:

1. Less back and forth
2. It makes you look a lot smarter and eloquent
3. Less time wasted
4. It’ll improve your communication skills

If the other person still doesn’t get it, maybe they’re the ones that deserve to be stranded on a desert island.

This post was included in the Just Write Carnival.

It’s very rare that I get to write a post that applies to both of my interests: money and writing. I’ve managed to get it done before when I wrote about how money legitimizing everything and when I analyzed how much writing pays. But this is another one of those posts where I get to satisfy both my financial readers and my writerly readers (if there are any out there—speak up if you are!).

So I’ve been complaining for a while about how writing for this blog has absorbed all the time that I could be using on writing fiction. I haven’t done much about it, but the other day it hit me that I’ve been blogging for over a year (since October of 2007) and I’ve consistently published around one post per day. So I can do it—I can write every day for long periods of time. Being a writer is within my reach—I even proved it to myself when I participated in NaNoWriMo.

In the early days of this blog I even published three posts in a day, although the quality of those early posts was dubious, at best.

And that’s when it hit me: what if I would’ve dedicated all that time to writing fiction instead of blogging about money? What would I have to show for it? Would I be on the bestseller lists yet?

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

It’s easy to look back and say I should’ve done things differently. But I’m pretty happy with the time I’ve put into this site and what I have to show for all the work I’ve done. It has allowed me to practice my writing, it has gotten me into a writing routine, and it even got me my current job. So it’s not like I regret having blogged for all this time.

But I’m still curious what I might have to show if I would’ve been writing stories or a novel.

So I took 10 random blog posts and took a word count—an average post is around 550 words. My old posts were much shorter and my current ones are longer, so this seems like a fair number to pick out.

Since October of 2007 I’ve published 525 posts and around 11 posts for other sites. That’s a total of 536 posts.

536 posts x 550 words = 294,800 words

That is a lot of words. It’s not Infinite Jest length or anything, but it’s a lot. A typical novel has around 100,000 words, so even if I cut this by half I’d still have enough raw material that I could call a novel. I might even have enough for two novels!

That’s pretty amazing. To think I could’ve written a novel+ in under two years is great news. That means I can do it. It means it’s possible. One of my biggest issues when it comes to writing is saying I don’t have enough time, but writing 500 words a day is pretty easy—I’ve proven I can do it. Now I just need to keep doing it with my fiction.

Granted, writing about one concept or idea or theme for that long is tiring and hard—but still. I’m taking the 294,000 words as a major victory.

To the Money Readers

I haven’t forgotten about you guys. You’ve probably already figured out the PF connection here—eliminating debt or saving money works the same way. Focusing on small amounts can work as long as you do it regularly over the long term. Granted, some PF writers like Ramit would have you focus on the big stuff, not the small details. And as much as I agree with Ramit on most stuff, I have to disagree here because, well, it would’ve fit into the context of my post. You start small and then you move up—that’s my take.

Saving a dollar here and there doesn’t feel like a lot of progress, but once you start doing that over long periods of time—that’s when it starts to pay off. Just ask Tricia—she just paid off over $37,000 of credit-card debt. Anything’s possible.

The Power of Gradual

It may not be sexy and it may take a long time, but by focusing on small bits of progress over a long period of time, anything’s possible. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some fiction I have to go write.

Photo by Zevotron

The above chart tracks the performance of a few things: my waning interest in watching Lost, everyone’s stock portfolio, and finally—the performance of the S&P 500 over the past five years.

Now that the panic/fear/delirium has kind of passed and all the talking heads are starting to mention “a bottom” rather than panicking and looking for stories where there are none, we can all pretty much agree on one thing: this is a great time to buy more stocks. Whether it’s for your Roth IRA, for your 401(k) (you can increase your contributions now), or your brokerage account.

But which stocks should you buy?

Clearly, you don’t need me for that—there are people out there that will run stock screeners showing you exactly what you should buy. They’ll look at P/E ratios and past earnings, how great a CEO has been at turning a company around in the past, etc. If you read the Wall Street Journal or you watch MSNBC, then you’ll have no problem getting some advice on what to buy.

Me? Well, I’m just not that into numbers. I know some of them are important—I definitely don’t want to buy a company that isn’t making any money.

But I’d rather take a look at the shopping universe and use what I know to pick potential stocks. Notice I used the word “potential” because I’m not going to go out there and buy a stock because I “know” something about it. I’ve mentioned all this before in my review on Peter Lynch’s One Up on Wall Street.

I do enjoy looking at all the stocks that are out there through this “invest in what you know” lens, though. It’s much more entertaining and fun when you’re reading an annual report on a company like Perry Ellis (PERY) when it just so happens to be one of the only places that makes clothes that fit you.

Or reading earnings reports from videogame companies—that’s what my post on videogame investing was all about.

My Bank of America Story

The last individual stock I ever bought (I’m mostly invested in index funds, which are a great investment, just not as fun) was Bank of America (BAC), and that was before they crumbled. Let me explain my thinking: I’ve been a customer since I was in college and for the most part I’m happy with their service. But a bank is a bank, right?

The thing is, they bought my old bank and they’ve been buying banks left and right. I know because I get all this stuff in the mail telling me about all their acquisitions. And when I heard that they were buying Countrywide, essentially turning themselves into one of the biggest mortgage players in the country—I figured it was a no-brainer.

Plus the dividend was so juicy at the time that it pushed me over the edge. I bought Bank of America.

And then it collapsed, so I bought a little bit more.

And it fell even further.

Now, for the most part I’m not a nervous guy. I’m a long-term investor so I knew this was part of the game, but for a minute there I got very nervous. What if Bank of America fails? What if it goes to zero? I figured that as long as it didn’t fail I would be OK.

So far, so good (knock on wood). That’s the beautiful thing about being a long-term investor: you don’t have to get results right away—it makes these little bumps in the road easier to absorb.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear what other people out there are buying or looking to buy now that the market is beaten down so much from a couple years ago. Anyone else want to share?