Earlier today I received an email from CEO and Founder of executive job search site TheLadders.com, Marc Cenedella. While each piece of spam mail I receive from Marc is special to me in its own way, this one was particularly awesome because it featured a video of him in a cab, being authentic at a woman who appears to have been forced into the cab after losing a bet. Here’s the first part of the letter and the video, exactly as I received them, so you can experience a few seconds of my afternoon and marvel for a minute at my exotic, unemployed executive world:
I’m taking my career advice to a new format, folks. I’ve been writing this newsletter to you for the past eight years, and now we’ve decided to take it to the streets!
So I hopped in the back of a New York City taxi and dispensed career advice to professionals like you across the boulevards of southern Manhattan. We’ve filmed the results and I’m pleased to share with you… “CareerCab”!
Here’s the first episode, in which Megan needs help with her elevator pitch:
Like you, my first thought after seeing this was, Rapid cutaways set to spunky rock and roll just always works, but try to fight past being entertained long enough to take in the real wisdom going on here. Megan initially claims to be looking for “a position in healthcare consulting,” and “also looking to work for an academic health center in finance, on the finance side,” but notice how quickly Marc calls her out of such pompous bullshit. By reminding her that they’re in “Career Cab” and then at a backyard barbecue (true business men are adept at disorienting their subjects), Marc instantly disarms Megan, extracting the truth like a valuable incisor. Turns out, she actually wants to work “in finance in healthcare.”
Holy shit.
Check the before and after photos of that transformation, and see if you can notice any similarity whatsoever. Not possible. But hang on, Megan, ’cause clearing those cobwebs was just the beginning. Now Marc’s about to blow your mind. “Why?” he asks. Why do you want to do what you want to do? Did you see that one coming, Megan? Hell no you didn’t, not all tangled in your fancy memorized phrases like “a position in healthcare consulting.”
Clearly rattled now by just how at ease she’s been put, Megan feels around for an explanation, sending words out in “Career Cab” like a bat throws out sonar. “It’s an industry where you help people on Monday,” she says. That’s the stuff. “You don’t, it’s not an intangible–like you go to work and, no matter what, you come home at the end of the day, and you’ve helped a bunch of people. But, so I want to help the doctors be able to do their job better, and I feel like, in finance–operations gets a little hairy, so I think finance is a little, would be a little more hands off, but still facilitate, you know, them being able to care for patients.” While Megan’s soul is slowly being teased right out of her verbal britches, Marc offers increasingly brusque, “Uh huh”s before descending into more urgent “Yeah”s.
Megan’s problems thoroughly diagnosed and solved, Marc stands in awe at her transformation. “Whatever that was you just said,” he tells her, “it was beautiful and it was, like, authentic, and it was really you, and like, nobody else on the planet can say that, because, like, you really believe, like, that’s actually you, and it shines through.”
Now Marc turns the wisdom hose back on me, his unemployed ex-CEO leader, and returns to his letter:
“Somehow, we’ve all tricked ourselves into believing that sounding incomprehensible makes us sound smart. And that’s just simply not true.”
No it’s not, Marc. I hired many people in my time, and anyone who came in spewing shit about motivation and skills never moved me as much as those who told me they mostly liked to sniff glue and watch reruns of “Three’s Company” because they were really passionate about those things. My only critique of Megan is that I’m still not sure she was being completely honest about her passion. Few people are born with a dream to help doctors. If she’d said she wanted the job for the money, so she could go home at night and dream of riding a unicorn to the end of the rainbow where she could hold a leprechaun at gunpoint until he gave her gold, then we’d know Megan was finally being honest with us.
Marc tells me, “When you speak clearly and passionately about what you love, people want to help you more.” Or you are pepper sprayed and arrested. It’s a fine line.
Marc closes (as he often does) with a challenge for me:
So take your story — the story that only you have — and share it with people. It’s the best (and easiest) way to get ahead! I’ll be rooting for you every step of the way,
Marc Cenedella
Marc Cenedella, CEO & Founder
So here goes: I want to revolutionize e-commerce, build the world’s best pedaling bicycle suspension system, and ride a unicorn to the end of a rainbow where I can make a leprechaun give me some gold.
Who’s with me?