Successorize!
Notes from the job search
Hello from this side of unemployment!
I have been really flexing my cover letter and resume muscles, and spending oodles of time on LinkedIn, the social media site most resembling an endless office cubicle desert baking under the hot fluorescent lightbulb sun.
It is hard to think about creating art in this moment, both personally and nationally (I am also going through divorce, woof!). But I have been creating, even if it’s unhelpful AI-generated career inspo memes. Behold!
Do you remember Successories? (Which, oh dang, I just learned they still exist and are almost as old as me!) I remember that they would have their own stores in malls, and it was one of those full of stuff that was utterly worthless, but made a great disappointing gift for your soul-crushed employees.
Until this moment, I thought that they had gone bankrupt in 2004 or something (I refuse to see if Sharper Image still exists). But now their meaningless posters (no offense!) have to compete with endless AI-generated memes inspiring people to achieve the American Dream, and, barring that, inspiring them to absent-mindedly hit the share button.
I always wonder if anyone has ever read one of these weird comics and actually changed the way they saw the world. And even if that does happen, I then wonder whether any of those people have noticed a marked improvement in their lives. Like do they see one of these memes and go, “Wow! I had it all wrong! I thought working with B2B clients was all about consistent customer support, but now I know that I need to recalibrate my integrity!” or whatever.
Maybe this is too tangential, but I think about how bullies operate, and how they tease people based on their appearance/behavior/belongings. When I was being bullied, I remember thinking, “God, if I had just not worn my Kenny G hat to school, all the kids wouldn’t be calling me G-String now.1” And while I wish my parents had not let me wear my Kenny G hat to school, if I had not, the bullies would have found another thing to focus their teasing on. There was endless ammunition and I was never going to be a cool.
I say that to say this: these memes, surely not worth this much thought, might trick you into working on your handshake or your cover letter font or tweak your morals and identity, and really we are hundreds or thousands of people applying for jobs where only a single person will be picked from among us. And that person is probably going to be an internal hire, and your chances of finding work sooner are most impacted by who your parents are and where/when you were born. Sure, take your Kenny G hat off in your profile picture, but no tweak is ever going to be enough. The people who have the power can do whatever they want and you just gotta do your best and try to get your worth from somewhere else (like from inside? No, that can’t be right…).
So what is enough? I’ll let you know!
Anyway, here are some more successory memes I have made for you to boost your margins going into Q3 of LIFE. Please feel free to share with your profesh network, but I encourage you to save them as a poorly cropped screenshot so you can further degrade the quality of the jpeg thereby making them look even more authentic.
Actual story.