Start Now

Because That Meaningful Job Is Out There, Just Waiting For You

Reynold Levy

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780795353420
• eBook ISBN: 9780795352782
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

From the New York Times bestselling author, "a compelling guide to determine what you wish to do in life, and the best ways to build a meaningful career" ( Ken Auletta, bestselling author). Newcomers to the workplace. The recently fired. Those desiring to advance with their current employer, and those eager to move on. And many who have found what they do for a living deadening, disappointing, and tedious. For these reasons and others one in five Americans change jobs every year. Drawing on his extensive career in the non-profit, commercial, and public service realms, Reynold Levy will help you think about your future creatively and prepare for it resourcefully. How to network naturally and adeptly. How to interview effectively. How to perform well in your current job. He will offer you a recipe for moving up in an appealing organization or moving out gracefully to a better position elsewhere. Start Now offers concrete, actionable, practical advice: Taking fullest advantage of school, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Learning how to succeed at work without being imprisoned there. Asking others for help compellingly. "This book is about work—finding work you love, getting it, doing it well, leaving it—but it is also a book about how to live. Part memoir, part social analysis, part practical guide, it is a terrific read: wise and fun, deep and light, full of stories about people and problems, and the sheer good pleasure of a job that gives back to the world. Never moralizing, just right, Start Now is a book for us all." —Jennifer Homans, New York Times bestselling author

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Start Now

Because the Worst Time to Look for a Meaningful Job Is When You Need One

Introduction

Write what you know about. Write when something makes a strong claim on you.

That’s the universal advice offered to authors.

Be useful.

That’s the siren call of service to others. It ricochets in the minds of millions of Americans of all ages, myself included.

Start Now is the result of these convictions.

It is addressed to all who wish to enjoy not only a productive livelihood, but a life that assists those in need. From family and friends to the vulnerable and the ill. From your fellow employees in the workplace to neighbors and members of your broader community. From public and nonprofit institutions that cry out for strengthening to noble causes of all kinds in search of committed activists.

A fair question about a book of advice is, “Why pay attention to the author?”

More than fifty years after my first job, and still very active, I have been fortunate to be engaged at the highest levels of many nonprofit and private enterprises. The board members and supporters of the nonprofits I have professionally led or helped govern as a trustee are themselves important figures in commercial firms, of every variety, in charitable organizations, foundations, and government. I have advised and mentored hundreds of people on their career paths as they have confronted diverse challenges and opportunities. I have been part of the search, as an employer and as a consultant, for hundreds of job candidates at all stages of their working lives and on every rung of the professional ladder.

To all of these interactions, I have brought my own life experience. It has been filled with meaningful work and fulfilling voluntary activities.

I have helped a broad coalition of service and advocacy groups protect the poor from draconian state and city budget cuts when I served as the executive director of the task force on the New York City fiscal crisis. I have been the chief executive of the nation’s oldest, largest, and most comprehensive community center, the 92nd Street Y. I was the architect and first president of the AT&T Foundation, then the nation’s most formidable corporate philanthropic enterprise. Later, I assumed more expansive roles in public and government relations for this Fortune 10 firm, both in the United States and around the world.

From there, I was appointed president of the International Rescue Committee, an essential and influential provider of resettlement and relief services to refugees located in more than thirty poor and war-torn countries.

I then became president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, America’s first and the largest and most prominent enterprise of its kind, anywhere. Its award-winning physical transformation and the raising of over $1.5 billion to finance it, together with Lincoln Center’s singular cultural programs, were highlights of my tenure.

After thirteen years in that capacity, most recently I was invited to become the president of the Robin Hood Foundation.

While holding these posts, I also was retained as a consultant, author, professor, and public speaker and as the lead outside director of First Republic Bank. In addition, I have been actively involved in charitable and philanthropic enterprises of all kinds, as a trustee of many nonprofits and foundations, as a volunteer, and as a donor.

These diverse incarnations have left me in a position to help many people find meaningful work and to assist them in leading productive and fulfilling lives. What I learned, the experiences I enjoyed, the relationships I established, and the situations I encountered all have informed the counseling it has been my privilege to provide.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.

And I do appreciate your being round.

Help me get my feet back on the ground.

Won’t you please, please help me?1

For the better part of my adulthood, I have answered the call for help so memorably expressed by the Beatles. I have willingly responded to everything from plaintive requests to insistent pleas for guidance. “I feel stuck. What should I do now? Can you help me identify and then compete for highly desirable jobs?” Those are the questions most often put to me in a variety of forms.

By high school and college students already anticipating their first full-time job. By newcomers to the workplace. By white-collar employees in transition to entirely new fields of endeavor. By prosperous midcareer adults who wish to move from professional success to social consequence. By those afflicted with burnout, boredom, stress, even midlife crisis. By careers shortened due to the physical punishment they inflict: professional dancers, athletes of all stripes, and construction workers are conspicuous among the victims. By the casualties of totally unexpected layoffs.

These are just some of the circumstances that usher friends, acquaintances, colleagues, former students, trustees, and donors to my open door.

Because I have fostered professional development across multiple sectors—arts and culture, business and government, for-profit and not-for-profit—many of those helped think of me as their career coach. In Start Now, I will convey the best advice I’ve offered to help people land not just any job, but a post that fits like a bespoke suit. Your talents, values, occupational trajectory, and, most important, desire to lead a life that matters deserve no less.

After all, in 2017, 21 percent of all American workers—more than one in five—changed jobs, while companies spent over $200 billion to find employees to fill open positions and tens of billions of dollars more to train them.2 Odds are that in the next five years, you, your parents, children, close friends, and colleagues will all be looking for new employment.

This desire to move up quickly or to leave a current position for a better one is said to be especially strong among millennials. Burdened by unprecedented student debt, subject to peer and parental pressures to succeed, and surrounded by a start-up culture, university graduates are understandably not fond of deferred gratification. The business environment that surrounds them rivets attention on quarterly results. The information environment places a premium on frequent, often instantaneous communication of news and opinion. Social media, including Facebook and LinkedIn, prominently displays what peers are accomplishing as they move to more demanding, prestigious, and well-compensated assignments.

The calls to me requesting help are not at all surprising, given how much turbulence there is in the employment marketplace. Shifts to new jobs, by choice or necessity, remain a fact of life for millions of Americans every year.

I know of only a few ways you can favorably influence others and help guide their professional and personal lives. You can teach, formally in school settings and on the job as boss, mentor, or colleague. You can be part of a team whose members learn from one another on their way to realizing a common objective, or to falling short of doing so. You can offer consulting services, responding to the expressed needs of clients. And you can commit to writing what you have learned over a lifetime of experience, hopefully for the benefit of others. I have been blessed to serve in all of these roles. Start Now is my final way of offering a contribution to those looking for more meaningful, soul-satisfying, or lucrative work.

While it can guide you to securing an entry-level position in government, a commercial firm, or a nonprofit, Start Now doesn’t stop there.

It offers recommendations on advancing a career with your current employer, while keeping alert to external market opportunities.

Look to Start Now for advice on how best to move up from junior accountant to chief financial officer, from special events manager to a position in city hall, from fact checker and freelance writer to assistant editor, from public relations staffer to managing director for external affairs, and from a member in good standing of a sales team to senior vice president for sales and marketing.

Such journeys inside one employer or in traveling from one to another can be expedited, elongated, or stymied. Much depends on how you combine ambition with diplomacy and skill acquisition with a results orientation. Successfully moving up or moving out to ascend elsewhere requires a judicious blend of applied intelligence and the capacity to attract colleagues who enjoy working at your side.

My own shifts within and between organizations and the changes in subject matter that they addressed are not unique to me. They are the product of discipline and workplace habits that you can adopt or modify to suit your own needs. They are also the result of caring mentors and supervisors, gifted women and men from whom I have learned much and who believed in me. And there is always the element of serendipity, discovering a promising possibility by recognizing that you are in the right place at the right time.

Drawing on my career and advice to others, I will help you to think about your future creatively and to prepare for it resourcefully. How to network naturally and adeptly. How to interview effectively. I will offer you a recipe for moving up in an appealing organization or moving out gracefully to a better position elsewhere. Such transitions can be part of a natural process. They needn’t become tension-filled episodes in life. Many a crisis at work is avoidable. The professional voyage you undertake can be enlightening and fun rather than nerve-racking. As much as possible, you need to take control, to be in command of your own career development.

The guidance I present is relevant no matter what the stage of your professional journey. It will offer you actionable ideas for purposefully occupying the last quarter of your life. Even if you are truly at career’s end, when beaches, books, and golf courses beckon, what follows will help your children and grandchildren prepare themselves for a life of personal and vocational commitment.

The driving force of this book and of a successful life is captured in the title—Start Now. Why? Because the best time to find a meaningful job is when you don’t need one. Otherwise, you run the risk of being unable to quickly recover from being dismissed, demoted, or marginalized at your current post. With nothing concrete in mind for the future, confusion and disarray can dominate your life. Your self-confidence can shatter. The sense of security and stability you possessed is suddenly gone. Your social standing is threatened. And the pathways to new and rewarding work are beclouded. I know. All of this has happened to me.

How to avoid such circumstances and what to do if they should ever arise are amon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Also by Reynold Levy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Start Now: Because the Worst Time to Look for a Meaningful Job Is When You Need One
• 2 Start Now: Because the Best Time to Look for a New Job Is When You Are Securely Settled in Another One
• 3 It’s Never Too Early (Or Too Late)
• 4 Persuading the Target Employer
• 5 The Interview
• 6 The Competition for Talent
• 7 Performance: Excelling at Work
• 8 Ready, Set
• 9 The Quest for Meaning
• 10 Beyond Self
• 11 Not Done Yet: Lives Unfinished
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index